TC Theme Rebuild

Tag: travel tips

  • Things I’m Recommending Right Now…

    Things I’m Recommending Right Now…

    Paging Thru My Travel Journals

    In the last podcast episode, I mentioned that I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently. So rather than limiting them to a 2-barstool radius in my favorite Nashville taprooms, here are (in no particular order) the things I’ve been recommending lately…

    Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms

    • Nashville
      • Vinyl Tap Talk to any Nashvillian who’s lived here for more than five years and it won’t take long ’til they start complaining about all the changes — especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago’s Wicker Park, and Madrid’s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who “urban pioneered” East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they’ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend’s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.
      • Barrique Brewing This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There’s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It’s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans’ new stadium and Oracle’s new corporate headquarters. Don’t sleep on this place ’cause it’ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.
      • Tailor Owner Vivek Surti calls his food “First Generation American Cuisine,” built on his “experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent”. Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends — Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti’s explanations of what’s in front of you. I’ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.
    • Louisville
      • 610 Magnolia Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call “comfortable fine dining” — a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.
      • Angel’s Envy You can’t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational… and great whiskey too!
    • Chattanooga
      • Calliope Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it’s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).
      • Elsie’s Daughter And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.
      • Niedlov’s Cafe & Bakery Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.
    • Memphis
      • Gus’s Fried Chicken While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there’s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through Tom Lee Park along the bank of the Mississippi River.
      • Wiseacre Brewing – Downtown I haven’t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn’t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the National Civil Rights Museum, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There’s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.

    Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)

    As I talked about in episode #199, I’ve always been a bit “ehh” about Mexico. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — and am not a big fan. It just feels like LA or Houston with a better selection of tequila. But Oaxaca is different. We were there for a week at the start of March. For me, it’s a good fit — interesting food, lots of culture, a mezcal scene to dig into, and no beach. And it’s not overrun with tourists.

    • Areas – We stayed in the Jalatlaco neighborhood and then moved further west into the main part of town, north of the Zócalo. Both neighborhoods were cool. We could walk to a number of bars and restaurants, and never felt unsafe.
    • Restaurants – Best high-end restaurant – Casa Oaxaca; best street food – Pasillo de Humo. This city is about food. There are a lot of great restaurants.
    • Mezcal – The state of Oaxaca (of which Oaxaca City is the capital) makes 80-90% of the mezcal in Mexico, so you should tuck into it. A typical bar’s mezcal menu can be overwhelming, so invest in a bit of education. The bartender at Sobrio by Mezcal Speakeasy patiently walked us through a vertical tasting; same type of agave, three different distillation techniques. La Mezcaloteca was a reservation-only hour-long educational tasting. And unlike in the US, none of the Oaxaca mezcals I drank were smoky.

    Book

    The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism by Matthew Longo is one of the best books I’ve read this year so far.

    My first and last trips to Hungary bookend Longo’s story. My first visit was in the spring of 1989. It was before the main events of The Picnic, but I could feel the tension of change building. My last visit was the autumn of 2019, around the time of the 30th anniversary activities of Pan European Picnic and the fall of the Communist regime. By then, the public’s mood had pivoted — from excitement and fear of political change to disappointment and cynicism as to what that change had actually delivered. With this background, I looked forward to reading The Picnic.

    And it didn’t disappoint. The book is, at its core, a range of oral histories — from the then-Hungarian Prime Minister trying to reform the country without sparking a re-run of the 1956 Soviet invasion, to the Hungarian dissidents who organized the picnic, to a number of East German families who breached the Austrian-Hungarian border during and immediately after the picnic. These stories make the book a compelling read. It moves quickly; pulling the reader into the building risk and the subsequent let-down felt by all the participants.

    I give Longo a lot of credit for not getting in the way of these folks telling their stories; letting their own words stand without surrounding them with his own commentary. As a professor of politics at Leiden University, Longo has a definite point of view — and he does the right thing by keeping it to the Prologue and the Epilogue; less than 20 pages.

    Highly recommended if you’re interested in modern European history.

  • Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes; Hertz’s EV Retreat

    Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes; Hertz’s EV Retreat

    fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull
    Booking.com’s Customer Service Center?

    I walked by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre after a weekend of wrestling with Booking.com and TravelNest‘s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental. The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” pretty much summed up my experience — lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz’s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa’s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November — the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment — helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line — the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA — we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.
    • After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel — our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the tour guide, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best — which for me is Red’s 615 Kitchen in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been that meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the next time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.
    • Bridge Music — Funkist – cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru

    Following Up

    • Well… the lead topic for the last episode was “Renting a Tesla”; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet — 20,000 of them. Paging through hertzcarsales.com, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode — the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition — the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them — which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic way down.
    • Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety — I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an OK neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet — it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.
    • Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before — a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats — kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight — ORD to ALO to SUX — ‘Alo to Sucks — were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids — GRR — for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno — FAT– would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight — Singapore — SIN — to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century — the 21st century — Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered — GWU, SGV, GAY — so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch — Winter SUX, Work SUX.  And probably the most apropos  — “it SUX to lose your luggage.”
    • With all the betting around the Super Bowl — the Vegas lines, every party selling squares — I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays — sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) — not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant — using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app — which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had a moment of hotness back in September after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful — less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Jolanta Blues by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer

    London Vacation Rental Woes

    • Listeners who follow me on Twitter/X know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas — ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.
    • I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb — when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people living in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.
    • There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run — a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London. 
    • Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host — “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t need sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower — well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.
    • Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information — property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.
    • Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh — Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner — “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.  
    • From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but — hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.
    • So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email — it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him — crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.
    • The end of our first week — we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast — I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, — maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread — but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this — we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.
    • You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest – “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.  So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.
    • So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, used) them a lot for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to you, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure. 
    • Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth — don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. 
    • You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.
    • And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips

    One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips

    Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He's in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.
    Santa Prepared for the Lines

    Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles — and that’s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommons’ top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…

    1. Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics to add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and at least an hour after arrival to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.
    2. Use Multiple Navigation Apps — If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I use both Waze and Google Maps because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give me different directions. Waze seems quicker to reroute around accidents and traffic jams, but that quickness can make it a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I use Waze as my primary guidance app, but periodically sanity-check it against Google Maps.
    3. Do Your Research Before You Leave — You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or the TSA website so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?
    4. Fly Non-Stop — I know this is in every list, but that’s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.
    5. Skip the Tight Connection — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like Chicago or Denver or Detroit (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 45-minute connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.
    6. Catch the Early Flight — Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get to their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.
    7. Carry On your Luggage — As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener says, “There are two kinds of luggage — carry-on and lost.” Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re in boarding group 5 or later, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.
    8. Simplify your Coffee Order — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.
    9. Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled — If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  Instead, swerve the crowd and choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.
    10. Bring a Battery Pack — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to route around a long delay. Check out the 2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes for episode #197 for the battery packs that I use.

    But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.

  • Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide

    Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide

    road warrior renting a Tesla from a Hertz rental car lot.
    Swipe left or right to start this thing?

    It’s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU’s ETIAS system and the US’s Real ID. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel — a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.
    • The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip — my first was down to Miami in May 2021.  Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue and American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.  If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.  I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 — it was my first time on this plane — but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.
    • After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I haven’t lost while working virtually — being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.
    • Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature

    Following Up

    • It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again — from last month’s May 2025 to a less definite/more nebulous “mid-2025” — which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025. 
    • The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date — for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 — which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t that much better — at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because — who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again. 
    • Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage — starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines — so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. Last April, returning from the Netherlands, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here — I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports — which could shorten the security lines — but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y PDF documents on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883

    Renting a Tesla

    • After 2, 3? episodes of nattering on about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip — giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge — a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit — and ground through all the email links — which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot. 
    • Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about barren Hertz lots; renters queueing up for cars to appear. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims — trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.
    • After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn’t seem very concerned.
    • Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in — looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do — plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an hour to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this — an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.
    • Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car — there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn’t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars.
    • On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind — definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.
    • Bridge Music — i knew by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs

    2023 Traveler’s Gift Guide

    • Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The 2020 gift guide was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list — comfortable masks — has also dropped off.
    • What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is Battery Packs.  We’ve talked a lot about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a Zendure SuperMini power bank in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two. 
    • Noise Canceling Headphones are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else — until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the Bose 700’s. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of Apple AirPod Pros on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.
    • Apple AirTags earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.
    • For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the TravelPro line; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots — maybe way too many — options out there for you to choose from.
    • Here’s a new list entrant — a Travel Power Strip. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use — and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics — PCs, mobile phones, tablets — hotels, B&B’s, resorts would put outlets that work on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips this year, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip — you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end — the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to — on top of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. Anker has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in episode #159 in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a circular power strip called the Power Bagel. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the Super Bagel. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies
    • So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!
    • Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. 
    • You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.
    • And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!

    Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!

    robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer
    What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?

    In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of All About Beer, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey and do a quick update about the EU’s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that — jetport — it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called Orlando Jetport. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s Jet Airliner on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a big stuffed moose there, which is probably more on-brand.
    • More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. I posted a picture on Twitter. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We’re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can’t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane — nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on — a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee — I’m not sure how patient I’d be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.
    • On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.
    • Bridge Music — Hula Hoop Party by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory

    Following Up

    • I would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of Jet Airliner just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.
    • Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote
      •  Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use PlugShare. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.
      • Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.
    • JD Power released their 2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in episode #156, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the 2019 survey. Back then, Michael predicted:
      • Michael: Everybody’s phasing in and out of construction. They’ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we’re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.
    • Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable — Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.
    • The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.
    • More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel — on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.
    • In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying May 2025. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new US Real ID deadline is also May 2025 — until they change it again.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Fistful of Dub (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim

    Beer Tourism and Travel

    • Scrolling through the Episodes section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of All About Beer, host of the Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…
      • Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I’m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ Dark Lord Day. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.
      • John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.
      • Mark: I’ve been to Munster Indiana and there’s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they shut the brew pub down during COVID and now there’s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the Maine Beer Trail. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at Asheville Ale Trail as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that’s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?
      • John: I think it depends on the location. Where there’s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There’s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There’s strength in numbers and hopefully they’re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary’s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there’s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it’s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they’re delivering good quality beer. But what’s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it’s not just what’s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that’s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You’re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I’m traveling for beer, it’s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I’ll keep going back to Dovetail; I’ve spent more time there than I’ll actually admit, and it’s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that’s a fun thing. You’re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.
      • Mark: God only knows I’ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I’ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.
      • John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There’s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn’t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that’s another cool way that folks who aren’t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.
      • Mark: What’s the best way to find out what’s going on in a location? How do you think about where you’re gonna go?
      • John: I like not having firm plans when I’m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism — we’re talking about beer trails — is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you’re just having a pint at each. It’s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that’s a lot. But if you’re having a good time, I think it’s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we’re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we’re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we’re comfortable, and we’re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that — just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I’ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It’s about being in the place. It’s about experiencing flavor. And if you’re rushing through it, it’s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it’s grown over the last couple of decades — it’s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it’s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace — but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.
      • Mark: I think there’s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you’re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I’ve called a travel bubble…
      • John: That’s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you’re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you’re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it’ll taste better from that place because you’re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It’s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they’re drinking mai tais, and it’s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn’t taste as good.” And it’s because you’ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I’m always just trying to experience not just what’s in my glass, but what’s around me as well.
      • Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It’s something we’ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It’s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, John Hall, editor of All About Beer. Both your podcast and your website — check it out. Thank you very much.
      • John: Mark, thank you.
    • And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.
    • Bridge Music — Misunderstood by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry

    How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?

    • If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question — how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…
      • John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I’m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I’m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”  So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I’m traveling to a city for work, I’m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What’s exciting you these days?” There’s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,  but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it’s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They’re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right… Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It’s either gonna be a great pint or it’s not…
    • So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a bit easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.
    • Back in episode #174, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his This Week in Craft Beer podcast
      • Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?
      • Rob: It’s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I’m just going to Google. First of all, I’ll plot a Google map for the city. I’ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I’ll go to Untappd and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it’s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it’s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh…;  3.8, it’s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I’m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I’m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.
    • Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too. When people ask me for recommendations for a city — Budapest was the most recent ask — I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when I’m in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to episode #194’s discussion of flâneuring, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.
    • But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to Two Tides Brewing, a microbrewery in a 100-year-old house with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… multiple times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an ambitious list for us.
    • Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I would’ve taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you — my friends and listeners — since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of  “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the episode #187 show notes. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning. 
    • The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up ChatGPT and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t — a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways —  flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe  a “walk and gulp.”

    My Chicago Taproom Circuits

    • Here are the two Chicago taproom circuits I built for Rob Cheshire in the summer of 2022
    • Logan Square/Palmer Circuit — a kinda triangular circuit through 3-4 taprooms in Chicago’s “Hipster Ground Zero” neighborhood with some good food options along the way.
      • Take the Blue Line toward O’Hare to the California St stop. Walk east on Adams to Monroe and then north a half-block. It’s a $2.50 fare; like the Tube, you can tap on with a contactless credit card. It’s way cheaper than an Uber and lets you bypass a load of traffic. Follow Google Maps walking directions; you’re basically walking south on California (or one of the less-crowded neighborhood streets running parallel) down to Armitage and then west to…
      • Solemn Oath Still Life — This is kinda cheating. This is the Chicago outpost of one of my favorite suburban breweries. They have a good range of styles. They recently started up a second label, Hidden Hand, that goes deep into hazies. When you’re done, walk out the door, turn right on Armitage (going back east), cross the street at some point, and end up at
      • Middle Brow Beer — The vibe here is a bit of a crunchy granola with Democratic Socialist/Labour Momentum sprinkles (or hundreds-and-thousands if you will), but they do some interesting wild beers fermented from yeast cultured from their garden. Good for one, maybe two beers.
      • Food -if you’re getting peckish, there are some good options on Armitage on the way to the next stop.
        • Middle Brow – While you’re there, their bread and pizzas are great.
        • 90 Miles Cuban Cafe – Very good Cuban food
        • Redhot Ranch – Chicago street food; I get either a polish or a burger Chicago style
        • When you’re done, continue walking east to Western, turn right (south), pass Margie’s Candies and find the entrance to
      • Life On Marz – Another cheat, the north side outpost of the south side Marz Brewing. It’s a small place, but they do a nice selection of styles. When you’re done, head left out the door and then over to the diagonal street, Milwaukee, not the north-south street (Western). The intersection is a bit tricky. Head northwest up Milwaukee to…
      • Pilot Project Brewing – This is a brewing incubator, so there’s usually some interesting stuff on offer. The last time I was in, they were serving Indian-inspired beers from Azadi Brewing. Brewer’s Kitchen also does good stuff. Not everything works, but I’ve had a surprisingly good hit rate. Take a left out the door, cross the street (watch out for the bicyclists; this is the most Amsterdam-ish street in Chicago) and head up a block to…
      • Navigator Taproom – This is a pour-your-own, priced-by-the-ounce beer bar with a good selection of Chicago (they seem to have a lot from Pipeworks) and Midwest beers. Check out their beer menu on Untappd to see if there’s anything that interests you. Continue up Milwaukee to the last stop
      • Revolution Brewing Brewpub – This is the original Rev Brew joint; it opened before the brewery taproom a couple of miles north. If you’re IPA’d out and the temperatures aren’t in the 90’s, go for their Deep Woods offerings — the variations on their Deth’s Tar imperial stout (Josh Deth owns Rev Brew) or their Straight Jacket barleywine. If it’s too hot (or you’re too baked for those double-digit abv’s), their Hero IPA series is good; lots of variants based on different hop combos.
      • And that’s it. If you want to head straight back, you’re a couple of blocks from the California Blue Line L stop. Get on the Forest Park Blue Line to Monroe stop in the Loop. If you’re still walking straight, you can keep walking up Milwaukee through the neighborhood. It’s an interesting neighborhood. The Blue Line runs parallel to Milwaukee. The next stop is the Logan Square stop, about a 15-20 minute walk. Or you can always just call an Uber.
    • Maplewood-Based Circuit — this is less concentrated/less obvious, so I’ll put in a few branches so you can choose your own adventure
      • Maplewood — Part of its charm (a little corner tavern at the end of a neighborhood street) makes it inconvenient to get there via public transportation. So to start here, it’s probably best to Uber up.
      • Option – A bit of a walking circuit from Maplewood
        • Ravinia Brewing — Very optional. Not a bad place; I’ve had a couple of good beers sitting out on their patio after a bike ride. I wouldn’t go out of my way to go there, but it’s two blocks from Maplewood
        • Metropolitan Brewing — This is ~10 min walk north from Maplewood through a little neighborhood. It’s one of the original Chicago microbreweries, though a lager specialist which I know is not exactly on point for you. However, their patio looks down on the north branch of the Chicago River. So, if it’s a nice day, this is worth a stop for the view — and maybe a crisp palate cleanser.
        • The Beer Temple — One of our favorite beer bars. It’s what in Chicago is termed a “slashie” — a bar and a liquor store. They always have a good beer selection and they’re a verified venue on Untappd, so you can check out the menu to see if it’s worth the 7-min walk from Metropolitan.
        • Food
          • Kuma’s Corner is about a 5-min walk west on Belmont from Beer Temple. Kuma’s is a great burger place with a solid beer menu (an Untappd verified venue) and a heavy metal soundtrack.
          • Honey Butter Fried Chicken – Convenient if you’re walking up to the Rev Brew Taproom
        • Revolution Brewing Taproom — If you didn’t hit their brewpub on the Logan Square circuit, the brewery taproom is a 12-15-min walk from Beer Temple or Kuma’s.
      • Option – Uber up to the Ravenswood neighborhood’s Malt Row
        • Begyle Brewing — First brewery on Malt Row. Nice IPAs and a good barrel-aged imperial stout
        • Dovetail Brewing — The guys on the Steal This Beer podcast obsess over this brewery. Cool space; German lager-and-spontaneous ferm-focused. Walk down (south) Ravenswood Ave to the Irving Park Brown Line. Take it to two stops to the Paulina exit, walk south on Paulina St one block to…
        • Bitter Pops — Another great slashie and also an Untappd verified venue if you want to check out the tap list. Also a good place to buy a cold 4-pack to take back to your hotel room. Or cross Lincoln Ave and walk down a half block to…
        • The Green Lady — Old-time Chicago bar vibe with a great tap list.
        • Get back on the Brown Line and head down to the Loop, to the Quincy Stop which is ~1 block from the JW Marriott
      • Option – Uber up to Half Acre Beer
        • Half Acre Beer – Another original Chicago microbrewery. Augie Carton on Steal This Beer is a big fan of their Daisy Cutter pale ale, but I like their range of IPAs.
        • Spiteful Brewing – Next door to Half Acre. Good place; wouldn’t make a special trip for it, but is worth the block walk if you’re at Half Acre.
        • Probably best just to Uber back down to the JW from here.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms — Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. 
    • You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.
    • And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland’s Tulip Festival

    Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland’s Tulip Festival

    Field of orange tulips during Holland's Tulip Festival
    Just Another Tulip Field

    In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics — TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz’s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU’s impending ETIAS system. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #195:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive — Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery — at least according to TSA checkpoint passenger volumes. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.  So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. Southwest’s CEO said “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.
    • I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss — and pretty much on an equal weighting — is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican — but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, Mei Lai Wah, for char siu bao, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites — hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a knuckle-dragging cash carrier. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.
    • Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis

    Following Up

    • Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…
      •  “Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam – amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring – my pet term is “walk and gawk.”
      • Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” — I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!
    • TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.
    • I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour — a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK — and LGA and EWR — caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely not be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe. 
    • So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask — put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send — which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got — “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it — one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees — fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option — a direct flight — and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.
    • I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not that much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging — do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app — and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but without a mark-up — unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge — which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.
    • I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS — the European Travel Information and Authorization System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in episode #192, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t — by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous “sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong — incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every EU website page about ETIAS (phrases like “The ETIAS authorization is not a visa”) — just makes me shake my head.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. 
    • And a quick program note – at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion — the podcast talking about the podcast — about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.
    • Bridge Music —  Natchoongi (New Hope Remix) by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)

    Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival

    • As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival — the tulip parade, the tulip gardens — and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness — Van Dobben, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their beef croquettes which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food —  a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best  appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers — a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists — a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at Vinkeles, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great — highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever — the Dutch ancestor to gin — and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.
    • We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.
    • Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds. 
    • But we didn’t really need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy — lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain — means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil — middle-aged men in lycra — kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the Tulip Barn, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people — families, couples — wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white — it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip bulbs, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.
    • Later that night — much later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage — which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials — tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans — the float sponsors seemed very local — nearby car and farm equipment dealerships — local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size — big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location — at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more. 
    • I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic — whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.
    • And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the YouTube channel. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.
    • OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics — how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total — whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy — I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day — same thing. Huh. Same thing every day that week. Now this behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps — Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict — yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons — because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative — I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs — yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of episode #194. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole — why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas

    Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas

    Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville
    Trapped in Nash-Vegas

    Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene — the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago — waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.  But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I really miss about Chicago — direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in episode #187, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to not living in an airport hub city — for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.
    • When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.
    • The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.
    • Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where — you guessed it — it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me — “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s their money on the line.
    • Bridge Music — Ianiscus by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant

    Following Up

    • Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees. 
    • In the last episode, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a — how do I say this politely? — false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a Guardian article where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) — misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was — with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a Reddit post about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their web pages and press releases with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms & conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.
    • In episode #191, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”  Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up — before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; last week, they added 2 weeks; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo right now!
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix) by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake

    Still Overthinking Travel Planning

    • Last summer, back in episode #188, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you — that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection and, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile — so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points — they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it — maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows — leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday — 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc — is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile — a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on The Points Guy, Bankrate, and Frequent Miler websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it. 
    • Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a NY Times article that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa a lot — I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport — and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… Amsterdam caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in episode #106; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments — and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.
    • Bridge Music —Blue Like Venus by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob

    Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas

    • As I mentioned at the start of episode #188,  in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio — and the rest of our worldly belongings — from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I  wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that — moving from the 3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.
    • When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” — the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.
    • But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville is Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called Vinyl Tap — a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.
    • And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal – at a microbrewery, Tennessee Brew Works, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At Bluebird Cafe, very famous place, a bit more structure — on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in — to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.
    • Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about a show put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here — not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music — session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.
    • Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway — because how can you say you’ve been here and not do that — but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.
    • And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the YouTube channel. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World

    Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World

    Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass
    Can’t get to the artisanal garnish

    With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book Imbibing for Introverts; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”  Back in episode #159, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas — although I’ll say that given episode #159 was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in episode #171, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility — paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements…. 
    • But now two years later, with COVID cases down and travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.
    • But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening, searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending — $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer — for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”
    • Bridge Music — Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050

    Following Up

    • Back in August, episode #188 was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a complete train wreck with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays — to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost 16,000 flights between Christmas and New Year’s — to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in one morning. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra — “technical debt is a bitch.”  Southwest has estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million from their debacle. Just sayin’– even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.
    • But looking back at those summer tips, pack so you can carry on and if you can’t, then spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in episode #190 about how adding Apple AirTags to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, AirTags have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker. 
    • But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in episode #164 with Brett Holzhauer, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.
    • The second tip I’d add is — take pictures of your checked luggage, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.
    • In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland — the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.  And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS — the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented — in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s ETIAS is cheaper – €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now — from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the latest push, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 — still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.
    • And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode

    Travel Planning — Book Direct or through a Third-Party?

    • Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a Washington Post column by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.
    • When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there’s a problem — a delay, a cancellation — I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party — most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them — and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me — “You need to call your agent.”  Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” — basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers — airlines, trains, or even rental cars — and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.
    • Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains — Marriott, Hilton — again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who can see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them — it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.  So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site — Airbnb, Booking.com — to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site — can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor — can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct — because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company. 
    • Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com — the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before The White Lotus put it on the map), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous sorta place. Our friends said “We’re not leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a real airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us — in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.  So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken — just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend a lot on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.
    • Bridge Music — Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris & Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish

    Gin Conquers the World

    • Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer — “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of Craft Spirits Magazine about his new book Imbibing for Introverts for episode #190, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:
      • Mark: Let me ask you this… Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you’ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?
      • Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.  Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.
      • Mark: I’ll tell you, for me it’s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain…. I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I’d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that’s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.
      • Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it’s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that’s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it’s an experience now.
      • Mark: Yes, it’s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.
      • Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I’ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn’t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.
    • Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink — bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier — they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.
    • Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story — since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits — similar to the Everclear of my college days, but I’m sure a bit classier — run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it — right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.
    • It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of — pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture — more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.
    • And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the YouTube channel. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show