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Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel
I knew these travel delays were aging me

Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson and Henry Harteveldt.

But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised. 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 #199:

Since The Last Episode
- Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
- Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the Southern Illinois University Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What did matter is that Carbondale was right in the center of the solar eclipse’s path across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.
- Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon — I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if there was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls — all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.
- Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match — the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.
- We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.
- Bridge Music — Another Girl (instrumental) by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas
Following Up
- Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the last episode:
  - “I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it. As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago – exclusively for hotels though.”
  - Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours — never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!
- One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger — industry lingo for “irregular operations” — you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American — our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading — no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push very hard, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.
- And another travel tip that seems to need retiring — “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind — only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else — like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.
- And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.
- 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 — Nube – Djiz Rmx by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: SylviaO
Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel
- Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction — “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me — “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven’t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.
- But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass — just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.
- Which got me wondering — where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in episode #189 in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…
  - Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.
  - Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver’s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there’s a reason why they’re doing this. They’re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff — prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that’s where we’re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.
  - Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?
  - Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don’t even know if they’re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.
  - Mark: It’s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It’s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.
  - Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they’re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They’re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same — one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I’m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we’ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn’t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there’s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren’t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.
  - Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?
  - Sheldon: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know if I can say that.
  - Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that’s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You’re right. I mean, there’s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with — with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.
  - Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That’s all they’re paying for and they’re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.
  - Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.
  - Sheldon: It’s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you’re entitled to, imply that you don’t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.
  - Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear — and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started), Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we’ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I’ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.
  - Sheldon: Exactly. I’ve never been impressed with their business model. They’ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges, it’s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don’t see the future of it being very bright.
  - Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?
  - Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It’s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you’re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you’re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I’m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It’s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they’re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.
  - Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That’s great stuff.
- Our second guest is Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…
  - Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don’t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I’ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What’s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?
  - Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it’s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it’s scooting all over the place. So let’s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it’s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It’s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They’ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don’t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there’s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that’s boarding. But let’s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it’s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver’s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it’s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we’re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn’t comfortable using biometrics.
  - Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.
  - Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it’s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it’s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don’t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.
  - Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it? Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”
  - Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.
  - Mark: Yes, absolutely.
  - Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here’s where I have been” and so on.
  - Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to — how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?
  - Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it’s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they’re willing to share their personal biometric data — fingerprints, iris scans, etc. — with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they’re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It’s faster, it’s less stressful. It’s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we’re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It’s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.
  - Mark: That’s an interesting distribution.
  - Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here — if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They’re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I’ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”
  - Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that’s why I’ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”
  - Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they’re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there’s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it’s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.
  - Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you’ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it’s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.
  - Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.
- Thanks to Dr. Sheldon Jacobson and Henry Harteveldt for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.
Closing
- Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
- OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199
- I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.
- As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure — I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always 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 Sheldon and Henry’s websites. 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.
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- Direct link to the show
April 11, 2024
Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide
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.
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November 7, 2023
Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!
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.
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- Direct link to the show
September 29, 2023
Podcast #195 — Checking Out 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.
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- 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.
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August 24, 2023
Podcast #189 — Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best
There Are Rules About Why We Travel

Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners adding to our list of travel tips, and conversations with Dr. Sheldon Jacobson about why one of those tips — always catch the first flight out — isn’t always right, and Patricia Schultz about her new book, Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World. 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 #189:

Since The Last Episode
- Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
- Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN. Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago — too crowded, too many tourists. But now that we are tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.
- It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip — Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg. But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing — 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.
- Bridge Music — Like Music (cdk Mix) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler
Following Up
- Yup, we have mail … and comments.
- Let’s start with two comments on the TravelCommons Facebook page. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for episode #187 with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…
  - “We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there’s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I’m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”
  - Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.
- Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode
  - “Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”
  - Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I’m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag — like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip — and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!
- Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment
  - “Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”
  - Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport — most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type — rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size — flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.
- On Twitter, Kendra Kroll offered up a travel tip
  - “Know names of cities in local vernacular. I’ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn’t realize Firenze = Florence!”
  - Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my Know Your Geography tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia — the country, not the state.
- And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine — a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut –
  - “What I really don’t get are people who don’t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint. If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”
  - Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.
- And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.
- I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video — skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment — no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s not great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and 70 GB of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I bitch-tweeted about this, aloSIM, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that — 10 GB of data for $5/week. I tweeted that back. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works today, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.
- 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 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 — Somewhere by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim
When Not To Take the First Flight Out
- Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published the last episode, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d just published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”
- Which led to this conversation with Dr. Sheldon Jacobson, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he wrote about how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”
  - Sheldon: When you’re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there’s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It’s going to be cleaned, it’s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it’s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that’s a great strategy. But what if you’re not in a hub airport and that’s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn’t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that’s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That’s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.
  - Mark: Actually, what you’ve said, I’ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it’s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?
  - Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You’re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let’s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they’re not full hubs, but they’re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.
  - Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I’ve joked in the past feels like they’re running milk runs across the country. So there’s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?
  - Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they’re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That’s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don’t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren’t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that’s an important component because when you’re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you’re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn’t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.
  - Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they’re operating in?
  - Sheldon: Now the situation we’re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they’re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven’t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn’t work that way. Once you’ve been off for 6 months, it’s as if you’ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I’m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they’re in flight, it’s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline’s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.
  - Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That’s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?
  - Sheldon: Well, we’ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there’s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I’ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they’re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they’re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year’s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can’t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I’ve used because I’ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there’s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I’ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available
  - Mark: That’s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.
  - Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I’ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they’re competing.
  - Mark: That’s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.
  - Sheldon: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you.
- Bridge Music — Hear Us Now (poptastic mix) by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747
Why We Travel
- Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through — to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, Patricia Schultz, about her new book, I jumped at it.
  - Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World. That topic — why we travel — has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What’s your take on why we travel?
  - Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we’re privileged and it’s an honor and it’s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it’s, for me, it’s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That’s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you’ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I’m more tolerant. I know I’m more respectful in general. I know that I’m more curious and that’s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this — getting going.
  - Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?
  - Patricia: I’m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.
  - Mark: It’s never that simple though. Right?
  - Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I’m sorry to say, they’re colorful and they’re energetic and they’re vibrant and there’s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that’s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that’s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout 1,000 Places is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It’s not a big book. It’s a hardcover book. It’s not oversized and it’s not all that many pages; it’s somewhere over 100 pages. But there’s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that’s kind of Period, Amen!
  - Mark: And it’s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide’s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?
  - Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you’re checking off countries or you’re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn’t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that’s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don’t mean five-star deluxe and I don’t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that’s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that’s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.
  - Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.
  - Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
Closing
- Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
- OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189
- A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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September 22, 2022
Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?
I’m Happy To See You Too!

The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I’ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I’m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. 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 #187:

Since The Last Episode
- Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
- Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.
- Way back when I was doing heavy international travel — Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight — what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel — people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer — Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size — big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”
- But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more — not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime — robberies, shootings, carjackings — and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago. Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.
- Bridge Music — Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow
Following Up
- A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. According to the TSA, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.” Back in episode #183 in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along your passport or your Global Entry card.
- In the last episode, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate — on planes, buses, trains,…. That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a press release reiterating their recommendation that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations — but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal — which is probably the only real option they have.
- And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable rules are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.
- OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because even I’m bored with it, but then I ran across an article in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”. OK, that’s it. I’m really not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.
- But I will talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. Back in September 2021, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA website, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half — April to mid-May — the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space was nice.
- I get a lot of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, just published in the journal Marketing Science which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, is titled Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were — “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the actual paper. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later — nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket — one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket — is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don’t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea. Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research — I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.
- Bridge Music – Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone
Moving to a Non-Hub Airport
- One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville — it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.
- Nashville was a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s — well, a mini-hub, actually — when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume. Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport — the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs — ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD — with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.
- The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” — much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward — if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities — Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco — then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting — or maybe slouching toward retirement — and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think — what’s my objective? — flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?
- Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club — which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.
- My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying a lot for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges — which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans. If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level — say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum — then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.
- Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk — their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners — which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in episode #167 in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy — fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card — including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.
- Bridge Music — Bored on Your Backside by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445
What Makes a Great Taproom?
- With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time — Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking — why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?
- First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that’s been my beer diary for over 11 years now. I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is — a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”
- Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.
- But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a diverse beer menu — a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops — that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in the fall of 2019, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.
- Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert — I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar — getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.
- But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking — about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me — “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.
- I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is — it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in episode #174 when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck & Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.
- But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.
My Yeah, I’d like to go back there Taproom List
- Chicago
  - Goose Island Taproom, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it’s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late ’80’s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout
  - Revolution Brewing Brewery & Taproom, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food
  - Maplewood Brewery & Distillery, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway
  - Metropolitan Brewing, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River
  - Dovetail Brewery, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood’s “Malt Row”
  - Off Color Brewing, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done
  - Solemn Oath Brewery, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a faaar west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.
  - A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour video
    
    Marz Community Brewing, 3630 S Iron St
    
    Whiner Beer, 1400 W 46th St
- Elsewhere in the US
  - Oxbow Blending & Bottling, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of Duckfat serving up fries on the patio
  - Allagash Brewing Company, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination
  - Other Half Brewing Domino Park, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River
  - Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is way off the typical tourist track
  - The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town
  - Drífa Brewing Company, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior
  - Bearded Iris Brewing, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio
  - Various Artists Brewing, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill
  - Fait la Force Brewing, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar
  - Bad Idea Brewing Company, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia’s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer
  - Rowley Farmhouse Ales, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger
  - Lagunitas Brewing Company, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they’ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel
  - Pueblo Vida Brewing Company, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients
  - Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It’s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina
- Outside the US
  - London Beer Factory – Barrel Project, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile
  - Brasserie Cantillon, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door
  - Mikkeller Baghaven, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island
  - Fábrica Maravillas, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid’s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs
  - Deck & Donohue, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street
  - Labietis Brewpub, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what’s on tap
Closing
- Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
- OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187
- I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
- As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though — the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!
- 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. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”
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- 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
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May 26, 2022
Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival
Switching from Face Covering to Shawl

We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it’s going land now that it’s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app Flighty for a spin, and wonder why CLEAR keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of Daytona Beach International Airport. 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 #186:

Since The Last Episode
- Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
- Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures — 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in episode #147 and then wrote it up in more detail in the Lowbrow Santa Fe blog post — which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.
- Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and Tent Rocks National Monument which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the El Farolito bed & breakfast — there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it — our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants.
- But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds — except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita — so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”
- Bridge Music — Bogi Beat Budapest by KarmaHacker (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074
Following Up
- OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito — full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction — no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.
- Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to Flighty, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps — improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free FlightAware app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of “where’s my plane” — always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline — pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification — “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line. So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.
- I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of CLEAR, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in episode #179 when I received the first raft of offers — from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information — especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR 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 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 — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity
Mask Mandate Scramble
- We talked in the last episode about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month — from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.
- The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of Daytona Beach Int’l Airport — which you’ll hear in the next segment — we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut — I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened — the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.
- Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In episode #165, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.
- And so when the federal judge struck down the mask mandate on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a fait accompli, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed.
- Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown — would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate — at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is — or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle — probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.
- Bridge Music — Awel by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785
Small Airport Survival
- American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo down-gauged flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. Up-gauging and down-gauging — changing the size of the plane on the route — happens all the time. What made this change news was that American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.
- Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for Daytona Beach International Airport
  - Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in episode #176, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?
  - Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county
  - Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?
  - Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you’re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints. So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed — something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can’t take these things through the checkpoint.
  - Mark: And rightfully so…
  - Joanne: TSA will confiscate…. Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don’t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It’s simple on our part. It really is. It’s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we’re smaller.
  - Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?
  - Joanne: Not difficult at all. They’re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.
  - Mark: Well, that’s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let’s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we’ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?
  - Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we’ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing — typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven’t done that yet. We’ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it’s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it’s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we’ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don’t have the crew; they don’t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.
  - Mark: Joanne, how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?
  - Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part’s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup… What we’re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can’t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they’re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let’s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it’s, it’s more of a pledge. It’s not like they’re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It’s like a pledge.
  - Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.
  - Joanne: That’s exactly what it is. It’s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that’s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There’s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we’re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.
  - Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It’s been a great conversation; I’ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for Daytona Beach International Airport. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.
  - Joanne: You’re welcome, Mark. Thank you.
Closing
- Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
- OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186
- I hope you all enjoyed the show 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.
- 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.
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April 21, 2022
Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide
Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance

No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There’s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats — Uber’s latest financials and how deeply last year’s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors. I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with highlights from this year’s traveler’s gift guide. 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 #181:

Since The Last Episode
- Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
- Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after the last episode. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth — and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains — the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about — which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 — what do you do next?
- And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.
- Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel — to the point that episodes #8 and #9 were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.
- But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week — a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia.
- A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out — do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend…. Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.
- Bridge Music — Countryside Summer Joyride by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus
Following Up
- This time last year, in the November 2020 episode, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status — stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG — weird ‘cause I don’t have any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now — 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.
- We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in episode #154 in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” — “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices — a pretty common topic. The Times of London asks “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in an editorial “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides. If you read the highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA – a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me — their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”
- Back in episode #170 last December, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the CommonPass app, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the AOKPass from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel. But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test. Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.
- 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 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 — Jester of the Golden Apocalypse by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750
Travel Potpourri for $600
- Regular listeners know that, every now and again, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”.
- I recently read some stats about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport — daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 — 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down — especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.
- Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store — stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage. The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price — €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data — meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 — 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks.
- In many past episodes, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel — traveling to work with clients who live there — makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.
- The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap — of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English — no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”). And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.
- Bridge Music — South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile
2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide
- Last week, I posted this year’s traveler’s gift guide. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If last year’s gift guide was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, this year’s guide is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages.
- I’m not going to run through the whole list — you can hit the website for that — but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the last episode that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry Zendure and Anker power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)
- Number 2 and a perennial favorite – Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the Bose 700’s. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does ear buds, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the AirPod Pros.
- Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s AirTag. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.
- Back in the July episode, episode #177, I said my USB-C to HDMI cable was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.
- And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My Square Jellyfish phone tripod is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.
- So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.
Closing
- Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
- OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181
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November 13, 2021