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  • Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy

    Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy

    Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach
    Future of Travel Planning

    Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. 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 #194:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel – 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while United’s CEO said  “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.
    • And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that — with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon. 
    • But driving does make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit — collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat — so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.
    • Bridge Music — Sunset Boulevard by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm

    Following Up

    • Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said
      • “You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.
      • “Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.
      • “Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”
      • Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular — great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor — and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections — another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.
    • Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.
      • I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.
      • Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still paused — we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland’s or the UK’s system rather than trying to build their own.
    • One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being a bit of a knuckle dragger about it. It’s a stuttering progress — tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; a long weekend in Croatia last fall, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” — the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap — double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems – one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless — as long as my phone battery holds out.
    • Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a blog post comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were fine, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”
      • First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.
      • “Listeners can expect to hear Peacock’s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.
      • “One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he’s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you’re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.
      • “Overall, if you’re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”
      • Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.
      • Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.
      • “The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt’s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”
      • Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.
      • And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”
      • That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.
    • 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 like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Memories (infiniti loop) by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: TheDice

    Best Laid Travel Plans…

    • The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” — which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape — full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.
    • Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again — all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we did get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.
    • As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the Hotel Pincoffs on the left bank — highly recommended — and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called Hermit, skipping the tonic as I talked about in episode #192, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.  I liked it a lot, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.
    • Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has new facial biometric kiosks. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.
    • We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line. 
    • We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough — but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.
    • But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state — Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm today? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We’re sorry about the stressful day you’ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we’re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.
    • Bridge Music —Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead & Robert Seikawitch by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license

    Roaming Entropy

    • Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes – biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.
    • But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine — going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind — a taproom, a church — but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.
    • I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across a couple of articles that put a proper name to this — flâneuring, from flâneur, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means “a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,” someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some NYU researchers whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.
    • “Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development — which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in episode #166, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment — or something worse — that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.
    • But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far — in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels — and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer. 
    • The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave. 

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194
    • I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.
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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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  • Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia

    Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia

    Gotta Stay Hydrated

    Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could’ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with Backroads. 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 #180:

    Since The Last Episode

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a cycling tour through Puglia, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong — but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful. 
    • We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules — mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules — and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to Tortas Frontera, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules — you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.
    • The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.
    • As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.
    • Bridge Music — Perfect Stranger by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice

    Following Up

    • Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said
      • “Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”
    • Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you. 
    • Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)
      • “Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”
    • I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope — that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.
    • Back in the August episode,  asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.
    • I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone — without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone.
    • I’ve talked in past episodes about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years — ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA — and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection — until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.
    • Also back in the August episode when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon — some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different — but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed — no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.
    • Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.  I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights — the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC from the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC to the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.
    • Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.  About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.
    • 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 — Paint the Sky by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged

    Tracking COVID Travel Requirements

    • If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief — just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.  
    • Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day — a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.  Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend — only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”  Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the many Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.
    • All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements — by country, by state, even by city —  Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of departure); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.  It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.
    • The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.
    • But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too
    • Bridge Music — Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim

     Cycling Through Puglia

    • This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia. 
    • We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and Backroads. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.
    • There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours — the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising — show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.
    • We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.
    • But the touring was great — riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages. 
    • And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic. 
    • We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.
    • It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north — to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for — and got — on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180
    • 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.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
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  • Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers

    Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers

    Locking Down The Christmas Tree

    No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your pandemic travelers. We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go over to the Subscribe section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.
    • Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.
    • One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it — except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips — I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation — for the worse, saying “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” — I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings — Mexico, Costa Rica — as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe United Airlines’ testing program that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects — or really wants — an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.
    • Bridge Music — Static by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469

    Following Up

    • First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure — the audio file, the RSS feed, the website — I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.
    • And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.
    • I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We’ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes — first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI’s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal — especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. 
    • At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet another hotel data breach. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records — 10 million log files going back to 2013 — in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket — storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic — it’s not if your personal data will get breached, it’s when. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big — book the front of the plane — business class if not first. 
    • The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have lower COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. “There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,” Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.
    • And just to show how deeply all of this — the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along — text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — Another Way by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938

    Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler

    • Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.
    • Check out this year’s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website or here at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/
    • Bridge Music — Slinky Blues by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm

    End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers

    • Back in September, in episode #167, we talked with Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, American Express’ CFO said that their card customers weren’t cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel.  The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.  So the hoarding makes sense — if you can.
    • One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while Amex just announced a 10x grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card.
    • Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers. American opened the bidding last month, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights  towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from United announcing their deal. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP — don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% and offering double points for flights taken in Q1 — January, February, March — next year. Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer — knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures — stays, nights, points — boom, mike drop.
    • It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe 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.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Music, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe.
    • Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons Facebook page, and Twitter and Instagram feeds.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
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    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage

    Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage

    This Won’t Help Your Flier Sat Score

    In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of JD Power’s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz’s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew — Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland — and then back down to Charlottesville.
    • I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights — into DC Reagan and Nashville — and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention – first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me – and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.
    • Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.
    • In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber — no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week.
    • Bridge Music — Awel by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785

    Following Up

    • That’s the sound of my new Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.
    • I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer — Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the Brookland neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, Right Proper Brewing. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen — first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called Scooter Map that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat — I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow.
    • For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the Victorinox Werks 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In episode #121, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the TravelPro Maxlite 5. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in episode #137 — it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.
    • Three years ago, back in episode #125, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.
    • 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

    Keeping Fliers Happy

    • A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline – “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…
    • Interview with Michael Taylor, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power
    • Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here’s the link to the study summary on the JD Power website.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and Spotify The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe.
    • Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons Facebook page, and Twitter and Instagram feeds.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites.
    • And if you check out the TravelCommons Instagram page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
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    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus

    Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus

    This guy looks familiar…

    It’s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month’s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods’ fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring — 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 — over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism — don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.
    • Have done a chunk of travel — there’s a unit of measure for you — since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day — Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport – State College, PA — before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight — flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night — but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.
    • The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early — around 8:30am — and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice.
    • I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage — going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span — took a moment for it to register that it was empty — then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.
    • The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling — just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off — gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”.
    • The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.
    • 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

    • I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them — not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI — but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.
    • On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card — at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card — we’ve had it for over 5 years — and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail — as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” — get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling — a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex — because single points of failure when traveling are bad — I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve talked about before, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.
    • Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so — packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula — I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack — and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and — oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask — and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back — too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style — that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big — holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella — and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet — but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.
    • And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our 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 Interruptus

    • A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment
    • OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.
    • Act 1 – My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine — until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon — in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver — my first mistake.
    • Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” — what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) — was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver — understandable — but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” — which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO — pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.
    • The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours — mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking – he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on — and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank — shorter walk and no waiting — and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.
    • My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding – just half the A group — 1-30 — because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.
    • 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
    • Act 2 – A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track — not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it — a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times — 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights.
    • Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United — any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day — until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight — which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK.
    • Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car — maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving — backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station — it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.
    • Bridge Music — Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
    • Act 3 – Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber — which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles — or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch – we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.
    • Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French and English — everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.
    • Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber – 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time — a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button — and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and Spotify
    • 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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    • Direct link to the show

  • Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More

    Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More

    Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner

    I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago’s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways — an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people — natives, I’d guess — in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day.
    • Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July — our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.
    • Both trips — out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies — there, and there, and there — and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace.
    • Bridge Music — Paint the Sky by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged

    Following Up

    • In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines — Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing Transatlantic budget flights. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers — United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus — the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper.
    • Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back — a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier — not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it — still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier — I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better not  to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.
    • This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console — no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over — “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons — P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need another type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse — the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.
    • Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers — besides where to find gear buttons — is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money — additional driver fees can run $10/day — and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.
    • TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours — Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts — fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the TravelCommons Facebook page since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line.
    • In episode #120, back in March 2016, I asked the question — Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot — a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides — rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.
    • And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or Instagram at travelcommons — or post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Perfect Stranger by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice

    Dining Single

    • Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward – escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.
    • For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.
    • Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up — placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.
    • Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my 2,100-mile circle tour through the South, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.
    • Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.
    • Bridge Music — Foolish Game by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22

    From The Travel Story Archives — Airlines Need To Tell Us More

    • Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me — the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.
    • So here’s one from episode #15, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and Spotify
    • 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
    • Bridge music from dig.ccmixter.org
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex

    Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex

    Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes

    Flying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave Chicago its coldest day since January 1985 took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by “Kondo-ing” my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings — 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise — from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day — January 20, 1985 — when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July — to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant
    • I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United — no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.
    • Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds — the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.
    • And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and FlightAware apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge — the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free — and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday — after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too
    • Bridge Music — Emily and the Djembe by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. Ft: Emily via Briareus

    Following Up

    • As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a full 1,800-word post on the website — which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The Reader’s Digest condensed version (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this — Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post — more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.
    • When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t — as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.
    • Right at about a year ago, I broke down and bought a new Victorinox suitcase. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.
    • Over a year ago, way back in episode #136 in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues — and my children — not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s happening even faster in Sweden, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month –
      • “Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”
      • Cash is king in Laos — but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young
    • Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care — it was a nice clean car — a Lexus hybrid — and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good — until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in — “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.
    • We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back — we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? — and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in episode #130 (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.
    • On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and… Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare — which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.
    • Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump — jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.
    • And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — Dreaming by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

    Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex

    • Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.
    • Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.
    • Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile — like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around — it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.
    • One thought that almost made it out of the notebook — Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room — like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair — but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction — maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed — and I don’t think it’s me.
    • A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait — no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.
    • Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let’s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and now on Spotify
    • 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
    • Bridge music from dig.ccmixter.org
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe

    Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe

    I won’t pass for an emotional support reindeer

    Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and not worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here’s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn’t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.
    • Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.
    • The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles — the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.
    • Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.
    • I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office — open; the Delta Baggage Services office — open; to the United Baggage Services office — closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.
    • Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.
      After I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.
    • Bridge Music — God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22

    Following Up

    • Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:
      • “When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It’s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”
      • Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.
      • “And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone – I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I’ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I’ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”
      • Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.
    • Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment
      • “It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”
      • Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices…
    • I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.
    • I mentioned in an earlier episode that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s — the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.
    • I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.
    • With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually” on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas…
    • And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)

    Holiday Travel Tips

    • I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists — pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can — because not much has changed regarding air travel — it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% — as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants – “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas — maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.
    • Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone — the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t — by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.
      Bringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.
    • A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:
    • Travel on the Actual Holiday – Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.
    • Take Mass Transit to the Airport – Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals — think ORD, LAX, LGA — can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access — some of that $8 billion if for that — but most airports do — ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,…. If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.
    • And my last “almost made it” tip, Bring Cash — way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 — old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s — about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight — maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up — which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code — bring cash so you can dash.
    • Bridge music — What Child is This (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris

    Notes on Santa Fe

    • As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.
    • I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey — things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.
    • It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe — maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check — but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 — the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque — I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.
      Visiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow — doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.
    • Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people – let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.
    • Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town — across the plaza and down Canyon Rd — throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.
    • On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples — older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb — nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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