Here are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #98:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• It was 7 years ago this month that I recorded the first TravelCommons podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest Washington DC on May 15, 2005. If I were just a little bit better at right-to-left planning I would’ve had this be episode 100.
• I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, staying in Chevy Chase this time, a couple of stops further up the Red Line, because the Wardman Park was sold out. But getting off at the Woodley Park Metro stop to walk over to Adams Morgan reminded me of how long I’ve been doing this. Long time listeners will remember when this was a weekly and then a biweekly podcast.  In that first year, I did 39 episodes. Quite a difference to this year when I’m working to get them out bimonthly
• Not for lack of travel, though – or maybe because of it.  I got some personal travel in – a long weekend in Brussels to drink some beer – OK, a lot of beer – with my son, and then a week in Puerto Rico with my wife, daughter, and some friends.  And business travel to Phoenix, Florida, New York, DC (which I mentioned), San Francisco, and a couple trips to Dallas.  So less international travel than before the last episode; instead flying domestically during the huge smear of Spring Break family vacations that the month of March has become.
• Other than jam-full planes, though, I don’t remember being too annoyed with the families. Except perhaps in Ft Myers, FL where Spring Break families plus full body scanners plus no status line made for a long wait.
• I don’t know if the parents are more vigilant or I’m more self-absorbed, but, other than Ft Myers, it felt less painful than past Spring Breaks. Perhaps the spate of airlines booting off families with unruly kids has led to some throwback parenting – a quick nip of brandy at the gate before pre-boarding. Just a nip, though, ‘cause it couldn’t be more than a 3 oz bottle to make it past security.
• Bridge Music – Another Girl by duckett

Following Up

• Speaking of throwbacks, on one of my flights down to Dallas, I had what could only be called a throwback security experience in the TSA PreCheck line. I walked up to the status-only line in ORD Terminal 3. There’s usually someone at the entry point looking at boarding passes, checking for status. But this time, she had a desk and a barcode reader like the TSA use at the ID check. She scanned my boarding pass and waved me over to the left. I walked past a PreCheck sign, but it really didn’t register – for morning flights, I don’t get my first cup of coffee until I’m on the other side of security.  The line moved quickly. As I started to run my drill – take off the shoes, drop the jacket from my shoulders, pull out the laptop and iPad – the TSA person told me – and every other person in the PreCheck line – to stop. Put your bags through the Xray, leave your shoes and jacket on, walk through the metal detector and move along.  It was too easy.  I felt like I was back in 1999/2000 – the turn of the century; a nostalgia moment.

TSA-Safe Hot Sauce © Mark Peacock

• Walking through Old San Juan, I walked through one of those gourmet condiment shops – the kind that sells hot sauces and mustard and the like. This one was called “Spicy Caribbee”. What caught my eye, though, was the package of three bottles in a one-quart plastic bag.  The shelf tag had a picture of a plane and said “Onboard friendly. Meets TSA 3 oz size limit”. Just brilliant. I can’t tell you how many times I pass up buying things like that because I’m doing carry-on.  As we were doing in Puerto Rico. But my wife bought the 3-pack as a gift for her brother. The TSA guy at San Juan airport gave it a second look as it came out of the X-ray machine, but let it pass. If you didn’t see the picture on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll post it in the show notes.
• Apple has been launching a new data service with each iPhone release – FaceTime video calling with iOS 4; iMessage, a replacement for SMS in iOS 5. They work pretty well in the US, but they really don’t add that much value here – I have an unlimited family texting plan and am usually not gone long enough to have a burning need for video calling. When I’m overseas – in Europe or Asia – that’s when I really need these products to work – shifting calls and texts from expensive roaming to less expensive data – hotel or office WiFi, or even AT&T’s reasonably priced buckets of international data. But I’m not finding it that reliable – Beiing, Vienna, London,…  I dunno. These Apple data services just don’t feel completely baked in the middle.
• Trolling through the Apple support sites, the consensus seems to be that FaceTime requires 100-150 kbps of network bandwidth up and down to work. For most hotel WiFi that I’ve seen – and measured using Speedtest.net – getting the 100-150 kbps download speed shouldn’t be a big problem, but getting that on the upload site – could be a bit dicey. Most broadband is designed to be asymmetrical – it assumes that you’ll be downloading a lot more than you’ll upload. But video chat services like FaceTime and Skype don’t fit that assumption – you’re sending as much as you’re receiving.
• With this in mind, I paid extra for the high bandwidth WiFi at the Brussels Marriott when I was there in March with my son. I figured we’d be FaceTiming or Skype-ing back to my wife and daughter in the US, so I ponied up the extra 4 euro for the 1 Mbps service. But it Skype was still lagging and stuttering when we’d use it in the evening. Firing up Speedtest, I quickly saw why – we were only getting 256 kbps – the basic service, not the upgrade I’d paid for. Calling down to the front desk, I got the typical runaround – oh, we’re sorry we don’t know anything about the Internet service. Here’s the number of the vendor help desk….  I’ve been down this 3-hr rat hole before. I skipped it, went out for another beer, and skipped the meaningless upgrade the next day.
• One of the things I did like about the Brussels Marriott’s WiFi service was that my payment covered three simultaneous connections — in my case, my iPad, my iPhone, and my son’s iPhone. It was, from my experience, a rare acknowledgement to today’s reality – that just about every traveler has a bunch of devices that all need Internet access to completely do their jobs.  The Best Western in Brussels wanted 10 euro a day for each device.
• And with everyone posting experiences and photos on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, TripAdvisor,… you could say that multi-device network access is more important to vacationing families than business travelers.  In the US, this isn’t a problem for me because I travel with a Verizon 4G mobile hotspot. Plug it in (because the battery life is just this side of miserable) and 5 devices are on-line. And, more often than not, at much faster speeds than hotel WiFi, free or not.
• Traveling internationally, the Verizon hotspot is a nice paperweight. Some folks I know carry their own mini wireless access point to extend their room’s wired Ethernet.  Apple’s AirPort has been a popular one.  Rather than carry an extra piece of equipment, I use my MacBook Air for the same purpose. Most Windows 7 PCs will do it to.  It takes a couple of steps – enabling Internet sharing and the like – as is well-documented on the web.  You are, however, back to being dependent on the hotel’s bandwidth.
• When I was in China, where I used this trick, I could see the hotel network speed crash at around 6:30 every morning. I don’t know if it was all the guests waking up and checking e-mail or the hotel was sending their overnight financials back to the home office, but Skype calls home would pixelate, lag, and then just give up. Luckily, I never really got onto local Beijing time and was up at 4:30, 5:00 every morning. Sometimes it good to have a bit of jet lag.
• If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
• Bridge music – The Long Goodbye by John Pazden

Airport Train Robbery

• I have to be honest with you. I have been putting off writing this segment for over a month. I’ve written blog posts on the web site about free hotel breakfasts and how American Airlines is suddenly increasing their customer outreach, posted more stuff on the TravelCommons Facebook page… Just procrastinating because I really don’t want to write this segment, but I know I need to.
• Let’s start out with stipulating something – I was stupid. Now that’s not the hard thing to write.  I own up to do doing stupid things on a regularly scheduled basis.  The procrastination comes from how deeply embarrassed I am by my stupid act. Here I am – supposedly an experienced world traveler, seen/done most things many times over, gives advice to others – making the rookie-est of rookie mistakes.  The shame and anger and more shame that burbled up every time I started thinking about writing this made me push it away
• Early Sunday morning in Brussels.  My son and I finish our coffee in the Starbucks in the train station, unplug our variety of mobile devices, and head down the stairs to catch the train to the airport for our flight back to Chicago. We’d been in Belgium for 3 days eating and drinking beer.  Mostly drinking beer.  The train is a little late, but that’s OK because this is an earlier train than we’d intended to take. We’ll get to the airport in plenty of time.
• My son and I each have a rolling suitcase and a backpack – no need to check luggage for a 3-day beer drinking expedition.  I put his suitcase on the rack overhead.  The car got crowded as the train made more stops.  I put my backpack in the rack also. I was reading the Sports section of the USAToday on my iPad, catching up on the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, trying to figure out how badly my bracket had been blown up by some of the upsets.
• The train pulls into the airport station. I reach up to pull our bags out of the rack. I see my son’s suitcase. I don’t see my backpack.  Instant shot of panic. I look down – was I mistaken, did I not put it up there? I look around – did someone pull it down by mistake?  I walk over the seats to scan the people queued in the aisle – can I catch the thief?  I try to ask the train conductors. I run off the train, scanning passengers as they stream off the platform.
• No luck. My backpack is gone. And so is my Nikon camera, my Jawbone Jambox speaker, my Bose headphones, my United Airlines drink coupons, my Moleskine travel journal with notes from vacations over the last 6 years, and our passports.
• So let’s recap the key elements of my stupidity in some sort of time order… putting our passports in the backpack instead of my coat pocket; putting the more easily grabbed piece of luggage in the overhead rack; having my nose stuck in my iPad instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  All things I knew then and have diligently avoided before.
• I eventually go upstairs to the United ticket desk and confirm what I already knew – we can’t get back into the US without passports, so we weren’t going home today. The ticket agent was as helpful as she could be – pointed me to the police station in the airport so I could file a report and rebooked us without any hassle even though we were on rewards tickets.
• We walked down the terminal to the police station. We only waited a couple of minutes.  The officer was a great guy.  Took my statement, quickly created the report – it was a painless 15 minutes. “We get 10-12 of these a day,” he said. Guess I’m not alone in my stupidity.
• While he was typing up the report, I called the embassy and got through to a live person. Not quite sure where this live person was, but she put me through to the on-call duty officer who, again, was very helpful.  Police report – good that I was getting it; it would be necessary for the replacement passport.  He would have our names on the embassy admissions list for tomorrow morning, and told me where we could get passport pictures taken on a Sunday afternoon.
• I hit Booking.com site on my iPhone and booked the Best Western right by the train station and not far from the US Embassy.  With all that done, there was nothing left to do at the airport.  We headed back down to the train station and went back to Brussels.
• Monday morning we packed again, hoping that we’d be able to get our passports in time to catch the 11am flight to Chicago or the 11:30 to DC. We got to the embassy 20 minutes before it opened and were the first in line by 3 minutes. A pleasant security guard had us queue a couple hundred yards away from the door until opening time. People in line were either replacing stolen passports (again, not alone in my stupidity) or applying for visas. We walked to the security gatehouse at 8am. Good thing the duty officer had put our names on the “admit” list. They screened us one family at a time – everything X-rayed, but no full body scanners.  Backpacks, briefcases, luggage all stayed outside as did all electronics – no mobile phones, iPads, laptops. Luckily, I had printed everything out at the hotel.  They seemed to call the numbers quickly, though the folks for visas seemed to move through quicker. We watched the clock. We had to leave no later than 10:30 to have a shot at the 11:30 flight.
• Our number was called. We went into a small room – my son and I on one side of bullet proof glass, the consular officer on the other.  He was a good guy. He asked us what happened; walked through our replacement application – he was nicely probing, checking that our facts aligned. He gently jammed me (rightfully so) about taking better care of the replacement passports and told us he’d have us out shortly. I looked at the clock – we had a shot to make the flight to DC.
• We went back to the main room and waited. And waited. And waited.  Watching the clock, I saw our chance to get home slowly dissolve. We waited an hour for our replacement passports. We walked in at 8am and walked out at 11am. Not bad turnaround time, but not good enough to get us home that day.
• It could’ve been much worse. Everyone I dealt with was very pleasant and helpful. My son and I took advantage of our extra time to sample just a few more Belgian beers. I had a very nice cassoulet for lunch on Monday that took a bit of the sting out of not making the DC flight.
• But added up, my rookie mistake – paying more attention to the USAToday than my backpack — cost me about $2,000 in stolen goods, 2 days additional room and board, and expedited passport fees.  As my dad always said, in life, there are no cheap lessons.
• Bridge music – Slinky Blues by Admiral Bob

Restaurants Want Your Smartphone

• Earlier this month, I spent a Sunday afternoon walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association’s annual show in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is huge.  There’s everything from a shrimp purveyor from the Mississippi Gulf Coast handing out samples to a commercial pot and pan seller with one of the Top Chef contestants looking lonely in their booth.
• I went with a vague idea of checking out new breakfast food trends, perhaps for a follow-up to my blog post about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  But as I started wandering (and sampling) around, I found myself in the technology corner of the show. It felt a little like the nerd ghetto, stuffed in the most remote corner of the smallest show floor.
• The most obvious trend was iPad menu – replacing the simple, cheap printed menu that can be tossed, dropped, and used as a coaster with a $400 piece of computer hardware. This trend had an accompanying trend – a slew of vendors selling all shapes of metal to lock down these now very expensive menus.
• What was more interesting to me were the offerings that replaced pagers, punch cards, bar tabs, and credit cards with smartphones.
• The pager one has always seemed a no-brainer to me – replacing those light-up, vibrating pagers that tell you your table is ready with a text message.  Systems with 15 pagers can run $1-2,000 and replacements for the pagers that walk off run around $100 apiece. Replace that with text messages sent from a low-end smartphone at the hostess station – the cost savings are obvious. The offerings I saw weren’t quite so DIY – they combined waiting lists, wait time tracking, and text messaging into a single iPad app (of course).
• TabbedOut is an interesting app, basically extending the restaurant or bar’s order and cash register system to your smartphone. Download the app, load it with your credit cards and you pay your bar tab from your phone – with the de rigour integration to Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.
• LevelUp is another smartphone payment app. It’s kinda like the Starbucks app – link the app to a card – the Starbucks app links to one or more of your Starbucks cards; LevelUp to a credit card – when you’re ready to pay, the app generates a bar code or QR code for the cashier to scan and you’re good to go. I use Starbucks app all the time to buy a coffee after I work out – don’t have to carry cash or a Starbucks card. LevelUp looks to be as convenient, but they don’t have the coverage yet – I’ve only seen them at a couple of food trucks.
• This push, moving pagers, bar tabs, credit cards – the assortment of physical bits and pieces that restaurants handle – into the virtual realm makes sense as more people carry smartphones.  It assumes, though, that everyone can grab enough bandwidth for these transactions to happen. Which may explain another trend I saw on the floor – lots of booths peddling low maintenance ways for restaurants to offer WiFi to their customers

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #98
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• Bridge music from the ccMixter
• 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 our 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

Tweeting Apologies © Mark Peacock

American Airlines has been a bit more forward over the past month in letting me know they care about me.  A phone conversation, replies to my Tweets – I haven’t had this level of attention from AA in the prior 27 years and 2.4 million miles that I’ve flown them.  However, I’m not sure this new effort is having its intended effect.

The reason for the change is obvious.  American is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and trying to fend off an end-around acquisition by US Airways.  In the midst of all this turmoil, they need to secure their most important assets, including their high-volume customers.

A few weeks back, a guy called saying he was from American’s executive office. He wanted to talk to me about my recent flight experiences. “How are we treating you?” he asked.  Poor guy.  A week earlier, I was on an AA flight returning from spring break in Puerto Rico.  Checking in at the kiosk, I found that AA had moved my family and me from row 14 to row 31, the last row on the plane, where we spent 3 hours enjoying the pleasant smell of the lavatories.

“Did anyone offer to help you with re-seating?” he asked. No, I checked in at the self-service kiosk and could see that the flight was full.  And I didn’t feel like queuing for 30 minutes so that one of the three gate agents could tell me there’s nothing they can do.  The guy was quiet for a moment. “Sorry about that,” he said and offered me some 500-mile upgrades to make up for it.

I’d actually forgotten about that flight experience until the guy called.  It wasn’t out of the ordinary, and isn’t unique to American.  It happens all the time when equipment is swapped in these days of packed airplanes — though perhaps a bit more often with American given the age of their MD-80s.  But instead of making me think “How nice of American to ask”, the discussion reminded me of just how lousy that flight home was, and how it ended a great vacation on a down note.

I applaud AA’s willingness to reach out, but I’m not sure that “Sorry about that” is the most effective theme for a customer retention campaign.

Any Way for Breakfast © Mark Peacock

Recent surveys by TripAdvisor and Hotels.com report that the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. If they both didn’t misplace a decimal point, then they surveyed the wrong travelers.  Experienced travelers know that the most important amenity is the free hotel breakfast.

Now I’m not denying that the growth of mobile devices — smartphones, tablets, laptops — has made network access vital. And with everyone posting experiences and photos on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, TripAdvisor,… network access is important to every guest — business travelers and vacationing families. But frequent travelers have learned that free hotel WiFi is a tease — reasonably fast at 1pm when no one is in the hotel; an exercise in frustration at 9pm when you’re trying to Skype with your kids or download tomorrow’s presentation.  Most of us long ago ponied up the extra $40-50/month to tether our laptops to our smartphones or bought a separate mobile WiFI hotspot (preferably from someone other than our smartphone carrier). So free WiFi as the most important hotel amenity? Not so much. For me, a good breakfast is much more important.

Growing up, we all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but it’s also is the easiest to skip when you’re on the road. A 2011 survey estmated that 31 million Americans skipped breakfast while two university studies found that eating breakfast reduced overeating throughout the day and subsequent weight gain.

Which is all well and good, but for me the free hotel breakfast is about convenience. Unless you’re in a dense urban area like Manhattan or the Chicago Loop or Central London, your hotel is likely centered in a large parking lot off a busy intersection.  Running around the corner for a quick breakfast sandwich probably isn’t an option. And I’m not interested in dropping $20 on the breakfast buffet, not for a 10-minute bite.  I typically just want an egg, a couple of slices of bacon and a cup of coffee while I cool down from 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer. Grabbing that in the hotel makes it easy; saves one stop on the drive into the office. And it let’s me brush my teeth after breakfast for a fresh start to the day.

Here's Looking At You © Mark Peacock

Lots of travel has kept me away from the mic — Beijing, London, Vienna, Phoenix, New York, and New Orleans. Big difference in airline load factor between international and domestic flights. The international flights were at 30-50% capacity while the domestic flights were booked solid. These trips allowed me to compare the different treatment US airlines get in international airports. This was my first trip to China; it made quite an impression. This string of travel has formed a strong opinion that the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #97:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Bless me listeners for I have sinned.  It’s been 8 weeks since my last podcast.  What would be the appropriate penance?  Two Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, sitting next to a mother and lap child on next Tuesday’s 3-1/2 hr flight to Phoenix, and giving up snarky TSA tweets for Lent?  That would be harsh – especially the TSA thing.
• I have been doing quite a bit of travel since the last episode.  10 days in Beijing, 3 days in London, 2 days in Vienna, a week in Phoenix, and then the back end of last week in New York. I hung around Chicago last week, and then was down in New Orleans this week.  March has me in back Phoenix, then Brussels, back in New York, and then down to San Juan, PR for spring break.  In the first quarter of the year – I will have traveled 11 out of the 13 weeks.  That’s probably my most intense run since 3-4 years ago when I traveled every week from the beginning of September – Labor Day – until Christmas week.
• The domestic flights have been jampacked while the International flights have been relatively open.  My flight over to Beijing last month, business class was about half full and coach was less than that.  I had the two-side – window and aisle seat – of a United Triple 7 to myself.  It was an upgraded one – with lie-flat seats and big 22-inch monitors. I had both monitors displaying the flight map at different levels of zoom as we went straight north from Chicago. I saw a lot of frozen Ontario.
• The flight back from Vienna, by way of London, I didn’t upgrade to Business.  I didn’t need to sleep; I had my iPad fully charged and loaded with content, so Coach was fine.  Business was full anyhow, but Coach was two-thirds empty. I ended up with more room than I would’ve had in Business.  People were sacked out across the middle rows.  I had a two-side to myself, so spread out, did a little work, and then mucked around on my iPad.
• It was a rude crash to Earth, though, on my flights in and out of LGA.  I’m 1K on United, but was 15^th in line for the one remaining upgrade. I felt lucky to get an exit row middle seat. I think even the lap kids had status.
• Bridge Music — Wanna luv you by Henta Ellis

Following Up

• In the last episode, I talked about the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker I got for Christmas.  It got a good bit of use in my Beijing hotel room. I was there for 8 days. It only had 2 English-language TV stations – CNN and BBC World News.  You can only watch the 30-minute news rolls just so many times.  I powered through most of my podcast backlog, a few new albums, and a couple of documentaries I’d loaded up before heading over.  Good quality sound and much less awkward than sitting around wearing my Bose headphones.
• In past episodes, I’ve talked about the “slum” terminals in big airports – the terminal where the non-hub airlines have their couple of gates.  At ORD, United has Terminal 1, American Terminal 3, separated by Terminal 2, the “slum” terminal where US Air, Delta, JetBlue.  In PHX, USAir and Southwest split the renovated shopping mall-like Terminal 4, while everyone else slums it in Terminals 2 and 3.
• When I fly home from Europe on US carriers, I feel a bit of the same “slum” treatment.  For what I’m sure are security reasons, the US carrier gates are all seem to be inconveniently located at the end of the longest concourse where there are no services – no restaurants, no shops, no bars.  It’s often a hunt for a restroom.  At Heathrow Terminal 2, they tell you it’s a 20-minute walk from security to these gates. No dawdling in duty free.
• In Beijing, though, it was a very different story.  The United flights to ORD, SFO, and IAD all left from gates conveniently located in the center of the concourse – a 5-minute walk at most from the restaurants and shops.  Nor was there the extra security screening at the gate that you typically go through in European airports.  I just walked out of the bar and right onto the plane.
• In Vienna, I was experienced a different twist.  I was flying to Heathrow on BMI, but somehow ended up in seemed to be a slum satellite terminal entirely devoted to Russian flights.  It was, once again, at the end of the terminal, and down a set of stairs, complete with a smoking room the size of 4 phone booths, in which at one point I counted 7 guys.  It was the only smoking room I saw in the Vienna airport – which may be the reason it and its Russian clientele got stuffed in the slum terminal.  But that still doesn’t explain why my LHR flight ended up there – unless BMI got a smokin’ deal on gate fees…
• We’ve had kind of a discussion thread across a few episodes on the TSA’s Global Entry program – pay $100 (which many travel companies like Amex are reimbursing for top tier customers), give the TSA your life story and a set of finger prints, and you skip the US immigration lines for a set of kiosks over in the corner.  It’s been a huge time saver for me and a number of TravelCommons listeners.
• So imagine my surprise – returning to Chicago from Vienna by way of Heathrow – I see 5-10 people queued for the Global Entry kiosks and no waiting for a live immigration agent.  I had filled out the customs card on the flight, so I walked up to an agent.  He processed me, saw the GE sticker on my passport and asked why I didn’t use a kiosk.  I pointed over to the line.  “Yup,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen eventually”
• Bob Fennerty commented on Facebook
  • Maybe the model will flip someday: Global Entry will be free and instead of paying to use a kiosk you’ll pay to be processed by an agent. I always fill out the customs card on the plane so that I can choose to use GE or not. I probably skip the kiosks every fifth or sixth arrival.
• And if I can slip one last TSA comment in before I try to give it up for Lent, what’s with the incredible waste of machinery at most TSA checkpoints?  On my last trip out of PHX, the TSA lines was 15 minutes – while 4 of 6 lanes of screening equipment sat idle.  Same thing in ORD a week ago – a 15-minute wait in the status line while 4 lanes of adjacent equipment was unmanned.  The problem?  The full body scanners.  Not only does the full body scanner take longer – instead of the second it takes to walk through the metal detector, you have to stand with your arms raised for 5-7 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the remote screener to radio the “OK” to the gate keeper who then opens the gate to let you out. 10-20 seconds per person instead of the 1-2 seconds it takes for a walk-through metal detector – that math isn’t difficult.
• And then add to that the additional staff the body scanner requires – the remote screener, the gate keeper, the one at the front keeping everyone queued… and you see the double effect – not only does the body scanner slow down the two lanes running through it, it also consumes staff that might be manning 1 or 2 of those idle lanes.  I don’t think a little more efficiency and a little less line time is too much to ask from an agency that spent over $8 billion last year.
• If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
• Bridge music — Snub-Nosed Aardvark by Derek K. Miller

First Trip to Beijing

• My first trip in 2012 was a big one from Chicago to Beijing – just short of 14 hours each way on United’s direct Chicago-Beijing flight.  The timing on the flight over was a bit goofy – I left at noon on Tuesday and landed in Beijing around 4:30 Weds afternoon.  I had a hard time figuring out when I was supposed to sleep.  As I mentioned at the start of the show, the flight was a polar route – straight north from Chicago, over Ontario, Alaska, and then down over Siberia.  I did manage to take an afternoon nap, but pretty much putzed around for 14 hours.  I looked out the window a lot after we crossed the Arctic Circle looking to see some Northern Lights – no luck.  Did some work, listened to podcasts, watched a couple of episodes of a BBC documentary on the history of Beijing that I’d ripped down to my iPad.
• After 14 hours in a dry metal tube, it was refreshing to walk out into a spacious, modern, clean airport.  As you would expect since the international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened right before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  And it’s big – with more space than all 5 of London Heathrow’s terminals combined.
• This was kind of an underlying observation during the whole trip – with more than 1.3 billion people – a lot of things just have to be big in China. While I knew this intellectually before the trip, it didn’t really hit me until I was there.  20 million people in Beijing, and it’s smaller than Shanghai. A local guy I was working with said that he was from a small town about an hour west of Beijing.  “And how many people live in your town?” I asked.  “About a million,” he answered.  And he said this with a straight face.
  

  On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock

• The other thing I thought I was prepared for, but really wasn’t, was the pollution.  We all remember the warnings before the Summer Olympics – about how the pollution was going to bring the marathoners to their knees.  And then nothing really happened. Well, the day after we arrived, the first day of business, we walked out of the office building and down the block to a restaurant for lunch.  Halfway down the block, I could feel the itching in the back of my throat.  Then my eyes started burning.  By the end of the day, I had a low-grade headache.  And this was just the first day.
• Not that it got any better.  We started joking that on a clear day, you could see across the street.  Looking up at the sky, we had no problem looking directly into the sun; one guy got a nice photo with his iPhone.  I was running a pollution headache about every other day. I started looking forward to my flight home
• The food was very good – if you like Chinese food, which I do.  We ate at a lot of different restaurants, all of it good.  But at just about every meal, there was one dish that made you go “Hmmm….”
• The first night we ate at the hotel.  We had just arrived a couple of hours earlier; were a bit out of it from the time change and the long flight; and so were just looking for a beer and a bit of food – more to keep us awake to try and adjust to the time more than actual hunger. The wait staff didn’t speak much English, but they had a picture menu, so we that helped us do “point & shoot” ordering.  We’ll take one of those and those and those and those – and 4 beers.  The waiter went away, and then came back with a colleague – who could speak a bit of English. “I’m sorry,” she said, “ but we’re out of the pickled donkey meat appetizer you chose, but we can substitute the specially spiced donkey meat instead.”  And then she walked off.  And brought back the specially spiced donkey meat.  In the next couple of days, we learned that donkey meat is a Beijing specialty.  Shanghai? No donkey meat.  But Beijing, you can get donkey meat. Guess we lucked out on our first meal.
• It was always something. Like when they split the head of the Peking duck and served it on a plate so you could pick at the brains. Or gave me a cup the fish soup with slimy water lily stems and small albino fish staring up at me. Or at the hot pot restaurant where what I though was brown tofu was actually some sort of pressed loaf of duck blood.  And, at just about every meal, there was a plate of jellyfish.
• But when I wanted to share pictures of this food with friends on Facebook, I ran smack up against the Great Firewall of China. Logged into the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I could Skype back home, run e-mail, do most everything – except access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  All blocked, but not with a big “Do Not Go Here/Turn Back” error page. It’s like those sites don’t exist – you get a blank web page and you watch it churn and churn and churn, waiting for a reply, until either you give up and move on, or the browser times out.
• For me, it wasn’t that tough to get around.  I just fired up our corporate Cisco VPN client, nailed up a secure connection to our Scottsdale data center, and bingo, I had a nice tunnel through the Great Firewall. I updated my Facebook and Twitter statuses. Posted a picture of the albino fish soup to Facebook; I was social again. I was also able to download content in iTunes that had been unavailable before – I guess for copyright reasons – things like podcasts from the BBC. Coming onto the Internet from our Arizona data center with a US IP address, everything was back to normal.
• Before I left, I had been pleasantly surprised to find that AT&T’s international data plan included China.  With this trip and a European trip 2 weeks after, I had bought a 125 MB “bucket of data” for $50 just in case.  On the ground in Beijing, trying to find my way around, 3G connectivity was no problem. But what really surprised me was that I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with my iPhone.  For some reason, the Great Firewall had missed mobile data.
• But even with my social networks reestablished, after 8 days in Beijing, I was out of eyedrops and ibuprofen; I was kinda tired of jellyfish. And with all the Beijingers heading back to their “small towns” for the Lunar New Year festivities, it was also time for me to head home
• Bridge music — Baja Taxi by Brain Buckit

Most Important Hotel Technology

• On my Beijing trip, I spent just short of 28 hours on United Triple 7s – a little more than a day.  I spent 8 days in my hotel though, so no matter how good or bad the United flights were, it’s the hotel that would make or break the trip.
• I stayed in a nice hotel – it was in the north part of the city, right by the Olympic Village.  I could see the Bird’s Nest stadium lit up orange every night. I upgraded my room for an extra $10-15/night so I had a nice sitting area – a couch, chair, a little coffee table – or I guess in China, it would be a tea table.  Some extra space so I wouldn’t have to sit on my bed the whole time.
• We’ve talked in a past episode about how the importance of the hotel bathroom is often overlooked.  Not in this room – it was modern, clean, spacious, and the shower had good water pressure.
• But as we’ve talked, a lot of the talk has been about new hotel technology. La Quinta, a US bargain chain, is making noise about their rollout of flat screen HDTVs that let you plug your gaming or iDevices into them. Higher-end hotels are loaning out iPads during your stay.
• After my 8 days in Beijing, though, I decided that the single most important technology in my hotel room is neither the flat screen TV nor my Jawbone Jambox speaker – it was the thermostat.  For the first 5 days, everything worked fine – my room was a comfortable 21 degrees C or 70 degrees F.  Then one night, my thermostat decided I was too cold.  After a lousy night’s sleep, I woke up to 25 degrees C or 77 degrees F.  I pushed every button on that thermostat, turned it off and on, even downloaded the manual from the Internet and actually read it, but no luck. And, of course, the hotel front desk and engineering staff was of no use.  They came up and pushed the same buttons I did – and got the same results.
• Their suggestion – open a window.  Which would’ve been a reasonable one if the Beijing air wasn’t so polluted.  As it was, with the thermostat turned off, the outside air began to leak into the room. I could taste the pollution in my mouth when I walked into my room.
• Maybe I’m a wimp, but after 3 days of this, I would’ve happily traded the flat screen TV and its 2 English-language channels for a working thermostat.
• It’s pretty common sense – first and foremost I want my hotel room to be comfortable. It kinda goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy – you have to meet my basic physiological needs – the right room temperature, a good night’s sleep, a decent shower – before I can begin to think about the self-actualizing potential of half-a-dozen channels of high-def sports programming.

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #97
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• Bridge music from the Podsafe Music Network
• 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 our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
• Follow me on Twitter
• “Like” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook
• Direct link to the show

On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock

Finishing up my annual 2-week travel sabbatical in an unseasonably warm Chicago. In this episode, a listener asks about if and when to use travel compression socks, we discern the popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi service from Gogo’s IPO filing, and dissect a recent article on the best airports for tech users.  We look at the new wave of social media dining apps such as Untappd which helps you drink beer socially, how they’re taking advantage of smartphone cameras and location services. We wrap up with a look at how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier’s experience. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #96:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Happy New Year to everyone! Returning to work after my 2-week sabbatical from travel in unseasonably warm Chicagoland.  I was out in Phoenix for the first two weeks of December, where it was only 10-15 degrees warmer than Chicago.  Then I did a quick up-and-back to DC and was home for good by the evening of the 16^th.  Though we didn’t have a white Christmas, I did have an amazing run of on-time and even early arrivals at ORD – a pleasant change from past December travel odysseys.
• Indeed, my trips at the beginning of December were some of the easiest, most pleasant I’ve had in a while – combination of mild weather and light crowds made travel a breeze – short security lines, non-cranky TSA screeners, plenty of overhead space, and the reappearance of that rarities of rarities – an empty middle seat.
• It feels like from the Tues or Weds after Thanksgiving to the week before Christmas is a bit of tourist dead zone and so the only ones traveling are the professional road warriors trying to close those last few deals, tie up those remaining loose ends before everyone and everything shuts down for the holidays.
• Or it’s frequent fliers doing one last mileage run to get them to the next status level.  I didn’t need to make any mileage runs per se, but I did need those last two Phoenix trips to re-up my Hilton Diamond status and to get me back on United’s red carpet with 1K status.
• Making 1K — or more importantly, getting the systemwide upgrades that come with United’s top status was very timely.  I’m heading over to Beijing in January and being able to confirm an upgrade on United’s 14-hr Chicago-to-Beijing flight – which was one of the best Christmas presents I received…
• Bridge music – Exit by Saurab Bhargava

Following Up

• All the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  Saurab is a friend and long time TravelCommons listener. I’m happy to feature his music. That cut is Exit, which interestingly enough is the first cut on the album.  Here’s a link to where you can buy them.
• Tony White wrote in to ask about travel compression socks…
  • I am not sure if you covered this topic or not.  Do you have a preference of a minimum amount of hours of travel you choose to wear travel socks?
• Tony, thanks for the question. No, I haven’t covered this topic before — because I’ve never used travel socks.  Compression socks squeeze the feet and calves – to improve circulation, which helps fight feet swelling and deep vein thrombosis – blood clots in the lower legs.  When I’ve flown business class on long flights, I haven’t felt much swelling – even on the 16-17 hour NYC to J’burg flight.  I think the lie-flat or near-flat seats reduce the distance between head and feet and so minimize the blood pooling in the lower legs.  Even in coach, I haven’t felt the need for them on an 8-hour flight to London or Honolulu. However, on a flight back from Hong Kong last year, I wasn’t able to score an upgrade.  During the 15 hours in coach I definitely felt swelling in my calves.  It was a full flight, so I couldn’t lift my legs up for any length of time. Indeed, I saw a couple of guys lying on the floor in front of the exit row with their legs in the air.  On my upcoming trip to Beijing, I mentioned that I scored an upgrade to business class on the way out, but my upgrade for the flight back is still waitlisted.  If that second upgrade doesn’t come through this week, I think I’ll be doing some After Christmas shopping for compression socks.
• Two days before Christmas, Gogo, the dominant in-flight Wi-Fi provider, filed paperwork with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.  The filing provided some interesting stats.  Gogo sells Wi-Fi on 4,000 flights a day on 9 out of the 10 North American airlines that offer Wi-Fi, though Delta represents 45% and bankrupt American 18% of their volume.  Gogo is available on over 1,100 planes, which they say is 85 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled planes in North America, and they’re signed up to add another 525 soon. Impressive on the face of it, but if you start tumbling the numbers, you quickly find that only 3-4% of passengers are buying – which syncs up with my experience.  We’ve talked about this in past episodes – while in-flight Wi-Fi has good use cases, especially when you don’t want to go radio-silent for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day, it’s a niche offering.  I’ve used it maybe half-a-dozen times in 2011.  From my anecdotal observations – looking over people’s shoulders walking to and from the aft toilets – most people are enjoying the unconnected time to watch a movie, read an e-book, or play Angry Birds (amazing how long that streak has been going).  Doesn’t seem that most folks are willing to pay $10-12 a flight to update their Facebook status.
• A PCWorld article on the best airports for tech users ranks the 40 busiest US airports on outlet availability, speed of Wi-Fi service (either free or paid), and strength of cellular signal – a good set of basic tech criteria.  DFW ranks #1 – it wasn’t #1 on any single category, but earned above average marks across the board.  ORD, my usual hangout, ranked #34 out of 40, which I think is about right.  Finding an available outlet at a gate is like a grown-up Easter Egg hunt – complete with crawling around and looking under chairs. Everyone wants to board with a full battery pack, especially iPhone users. Apple still hasn’t gotten iOS 5 battery life back to where it needs to be.  And for me, cellular signal is much more important than Wi-Fi service because I tend to use my iDevices much more than my laptop in airports.  At ORD, the AT&T 3G service is unbelievably bad.  I’ll have 4 or 5 bars on my iPhone but can’t pull anything – e-mail, web pages, nothing!  Which is the reason I travel with a Verizon 4G hotspot.  After I’ve gotten tired of watching the “Checking for Mail” circle impotently spin, I fire up the hotspot and – Bam! – I’ve got mail.
• But I dunno, hitting #1 for having visible electrical outlets and decent data signal seems damning with faint praise.  To really be a top tech airport, I think you need to have something like Qantas’s set up at Sydney airport – using RFID technology to make check-in, bag check, and plane boarding 5-second events.  I posted a link to the WSJ article on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Lisa Besso commented, saying that it’s a great system.  I’d be willing to suffer through ORD’s lousy AT&T service is United did something like this.
• Early in December, when my family was trying to get their Christmas shopping done, they started bugging me for gift ideas. Sitting in my room in the Scottsdale Hilton Garden Inn (which, by the way, isn’t a bad place), paging through the USAToday, listening to a podcast on my wireless Motorola headset, I thought a wireless speaker would be nice.  Now I realize that a lot of alarm clocks in hotel rooms have plugs that let you play your iDevice through their speakers, but the quality is marginal at best (except for those few hotels that stock iHome alarm clocks) and you’re stuck in the bedroom – not great if you’re in something like an Embassy or Doubletree Suites.  I asked the Twitter-verse for suggestions and ended up with a Jawbone Jambox under the tree.  My wife said she bought the special edition yellow one so that I wouldn’t miss it when packing up, though the fact that Jawbone donates $50 from each purchase to charity:water didn’t hurt.  The Jambox isn’t cheap, but it puts out a lot of sound from a small package and has the easiest Bluetooth pairing I’ve seen.  Again, not cheap, but I recommend it.
• Bridge music — Yours in Mine by Saurab Bhargava

Dining With Social Media

• Finding interesting places to eat is always a challenge for frequent travelers. When you’re traveling to the same place a lot – like I do to Scottsdale – it’s easy to fall into a rut, going to the same places near the office or the hotel every trip.
• When I started traveling, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you’d rely on recommendations – from folks in the local office, the front desk clerk, a cab driver, a bartender, whomever you ran into.  Or maybe you pulled a top restaurant list out of the local paper or a guidebook.  I remember one project in SF in the early ‘90’s.  The project partner had a list of the top 100 restaurants in SF.  Don’t know where he got it, but it was a Bible to him.  We started at #1 for the project kick-off dinner and started working our way through the list.
• And so here we are, 20 years and billions of dollars of venture capital investment later, and we still rely on personal recommendations.  But on steroids.  The first wave of food social media was powered by the multiplier effect — you weren’t limited to people you physically meet; you could tap the expertise and passion of a broad group of diners and foodies for broad set of recommendations. Chowhound, a food discussion board I’ve mentioned in past episodes, is a perfect example of that.  I’m still a heavy user.  On my second trip to Phoenix last month, I was on my own for dinner every night.  Around 5 every night, I’ve hit the Phoenix board on Chowhound and start paging through the entries until I found a restaurant that hit my tastebuds.  One night I ended up eating a green chile pork stew in a post Scottsdale place; the next night I had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese strip mall in Mesa.
• But if the first wave was discussion board-based, the current wave is smartphone-based, using the GPS and camera to build on the personal recommendations
• Those of you following my Twitter feed may notice the occasional tweet that I’ve earned a badge from Untappd. Untappd is a social media app for beer drinkers, or should I say people who enjoy drinking good beer.  Instead of checking in locations on FourSquare, I check in my beer on Untappd.  It keeps track of the beers I drink and where I’m drinking them, allows friends to see what I’m drinking, and awards badges for “achievements” like checking in 200 unique beers or drinking a stout on Nov 3^rd, what someone designated International Stout Day.
• The whole check-in thing gets me out of my hotel room to search out local beers wherever I’m traveling.  On that same trip to Phoenix, I found Papago Brewery in a Scottsdale strip mall and tried their El Robusto Porter. It wasn’t the best beer I’ve had, but it was something different.
• But when I’m on the road, the best use of Untappd for me is discovering bars with interesting beer selections. One night in New York a couple months back, I was wandering around Midtown looking for a good beer bar.  Standing in some ersatz Irish bar, I fired up Untappd; it used the iPhone GPS to display nearby check-ins.  Paging down, I saw interesting beers being checked in at place called the Rattle and Hum. A couple of clicks and I have it on the Maps app –it’s about a 10 block walk.  It was a pretty nondescript place.  Indeed, I walked right past it the first time.  I go inside – it’s jammed and has a great beer selection.  A great find courtesy of a dozen people I’ve never met, and through GPS I quickly found it.
• Another app I use is Foodspotting.  It also uses the iPhone GPS.  But rather than just showing a list of near-by restaurants, it cycles through pictures of dishes from those restaurants uploaded by diners.  Reading recommendations and menus are helpful in choosing a restaurant. Actually seeing the dishes takes a whole lot of the guesswork out.  My favorite use case is to park my car in a restaurant-rich neighborhood – I’ve done this in old town Scottsdale and in downtown Bethesda, MD – fire up Foodspotting and start cycling through the pictures.  Pretty quick, I get a sense of what place near-by is best matching my hunger pangs, and then map it with a couple of clicks – or screen presses, I guess.
• I’d like to personally thank all the venture capital firms that have invested billions of dollars over the years in all of this to help me quickly vector in on the perfect cheeseburger.
• Bridge music — Through The Line by Saurab Bhargava

Frequent Flier Alliances

• I mentioned earlier that I’d returned to 1K status on United; returning to the red boarding carpet at the United gates.  I also keep the 100% mileage matching – getting a bonus mile for each mile flown.  The 2012 changes to United’s awards program appear to reduce the bonus match for the mid-tier Premiere Exec’s –down to 50 or 70% depending on which of the new mid-tiers you hit.
• The interesting thing is – I didn’t fly that much on United last year – less than a dozen flights.  Just enough status miles to make Premiere – United’s entry-level status tier, which you can get the same benefits – free luggage, early boarding – free for a year by signing up for United’s Visa card.
• I earned most of the 100,000 qualifying miles on US Air and Lufthansa.  So I really didn’t earn 1K on United as much as I earned it on the Star Alliance.  Not that this is anything new – some chunk of my 2.5 million lifetime American Advantage miles are from British Airways.  However, with airlines rationalizing/reducing their number of seats; more tightly coordinating flight schedules and code sharing with their alliance partners, these partnerships – Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam – become more of a way of life for frequent travelers, especially in those critical areas of status recognition, mileage credit, and mileage redemption.
• It’s not a simple situation.  There are core alliance members – United, Lufthansa, US Air in Star Alliance; Delta and AirFrance in SkyTeam; American and BA in OneWorld.  And then there are the “other” partners, and these can move around.  Aer Lingus, for example, was part of the OneWorld alliance with American, but left in 2007 to go independent, and is now matched up with JetBlue and United (but not Continental), while Virgin Atlantic is matched up with Continental, but not United.  There are promiscuous partners – Hawaiian Airlines and Jet Airways seem to be on everyone’s list – while others like Southwest remain single or assemble their own little group like Emirates.
• International travelers been stringing these beads for 20+ years to assemble their itineraries, but to have to do this domestically is a newer thing.  Because United and US Air are both Star Alliance partners, United has cut back their Chicago-Phoenix service, relying instead on code-sharing with US Air. I book the flight directly with US Air instead – one less step to traverse when something goes wrong – but give them my United Mileage Plus number instead of a Dividend Miles number (do I have one of those?). I still get to pre-board and, most importantly, concentrate my miles to maximize my status level.
• The downside? US Air doesn’t take the free drink coupons United sends out to its 1K members.  If they could get that redemption thing integrated, then it would truly be a seamless partnership

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #96
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• As I mentioned earlier, all the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  The tracks were Exit, Yours In Mine, and Through The Line.  Here’s a link where you can buy the songs or the entire album.
• 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 our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
• Follow me on Twitter
• “Like” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook
• Direct link to the show

Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr

Once again skipping the mayhem of the busiest travel week of the year, though it’s getting more difficult as the Thanksgiving travel crush seems to start earlier each year. Good listener comments about last episode’s story of a rare prop plane flight sitting next to a “passenger of size”; then my own thoughts on USAir‘s completely inadequate response to the passenger forced to stand on a 7-hour flight because a “passenger of size” overflowed into his seat.  I update my holiday travel tips — drive or train for trips less than 350 miles, pay extra to fly direct, catch the first flight out, and bone up on your geography so you know all the alternative airports. Watching news reports of the hassles of Black Friday shopping make me wonder why people would go through the hassles to fly airlines like Spirit Air. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #95:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Looking back over the past 5 years of Thanksgiving week episodes, I always say the same thing — Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago, Illinois during the one week a year I refuse to travel… But it’s true.  Let the families have the airports for this week. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to travel on business Thanksgiving week anyways.  At best, you get 2 days of business – Monday and Tuesday – because Wednesday is a complete waste – and even then, nobody’s head is really in the game.
• Indeed, Thanksgiving week has become even more worthless for business over the past few years. With more school districts throwing in the towel and closing down for the entire week, what was a four-day extended weekend has now become a full 9-day extravaganza.
• Which then pushes back the travel crush even further.  An article in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week said that Air Transport Association forecasted that the Friday before Thanksgiving would replace the Wednesday before as the busiest outbound travel day.  Made me glad that I’d returned from Dallas a day early – the Thursday before – missing the crush.
• Over the last 5 years, there’s only one year – 2009 – that I traveled on Thanksgiving week.  A client called a meeting in Philadelphia on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Really? Really. It’s called a power play.
• I had them schedule the meeting first thing Monday morning.  I flew in on the last flight Sunday night, took the meeting on an intravenous coffee drip, and then flew back home after lunch.  It was a 16-hour up-&-back, getting me through security in Philadelphia airport just as the tide of strollers and Hello Kitty roller boards was starting to build…
• Bridge music – Making Circles by the Seldon Plan

Following Up

• Rich Fraser posted this on the TravelCommons website, commenting on my lack of appreciation for the smaller things of travel…
  • Mark, you gotta get to more airports.  As a domestic road warrior, I’ve flown into some of the smallest airports with commercial service on a wide variety of turboprop planes.  Whether it’s Mesaba (Delta) with their Saab 340s or Horizon (Alaska) with their Q800s, just about every regional carrier has turboprops in their fleet.  Up until their demise 3 years ago, Midwest Connect was using the Beech B1900D, a 19 seat flying minivan that did not require a flight attendant.  It remains the only plane that I could guarantee I could fall asleep in.
  • You big time international guys may look down and scoff at the small birds, but as a private pilot myself, I rather enjoy flying in a type that is closer to what I pilot.  It feeds the fantasy that I could possibly jump into the cockpit and take over just in case the crew had the fish for dinner.
• Rich has me pegged.  I self-select out of smaller airports.  I’d rather drive 2 hrs from a major airport with more service than fly into a thinly-served smaller one. A few years back, I had a client in Huntsville, Alabama.  Every visit, I flew Southwest from Chicago to Nashville and then drove the 120 miles down I-65 to Huntsville.  I liked the control it gave me – much more than depending on the one Delta flight a day between O’Hare and Huntsville.
• But as Rich will certainly remind me, you don’t always have that luxury.  I was doing some work in Sioux City, IA – which, of course, is most memorable for its three-letter airport code SUX.  I ended up on a 25-seat United Express prop plane that had an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA.  After half the passengers deplaned in Waterloo, the flight attendant came on, looked at everyone left and said, “you, you, and you – you need move to a seat behind the wing”.  We got up and shifted back, but I can tell you that we weren’t completely comfortable with the eyeball method of weight distribution.
• And continuing that thought about weight distribution, Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast sent this in a few days ago, commenting on my experience sitting next to a “person of size” on my 2-hr prop plane flight from Grand Junction, CO to Phoenix…
  • Your comments on people of size got me thinking about Air New Zealand‘s trans-Tasman and Pacific system, which was introduced a year or so ago; I think to compete against the budget carriers.
  • There are four levels of ticket: 1. “Seat” which is just a seat, no checked bag, no food, 2. “Seat + bag”: a checked bag but no food, 3. “The Works”: a checked bag, a meal and extra entertainment, 4. “Works Deluxe”: all of the above, an extra checked bag and priority boarding, and a guaranteed empty seat beside you. Since the planes are single-aisle with three seats on either side, this means that you’ll be on the aisle or the window with the centre seat empty.
  • I think it’s a great system because it gives the consumer the choice to have a full-service or more-budget flight. But it’s also great for larger passengers, because in buying the most expensive ticket (which is still cheap) they can get a seat-and-a-half for a lot less than the cost of two seats, meaning everyone is more comfortable. Plus it’s a regular option off the seat menu, so there’s no stigma attached to choosing it.
• Linda, thanks for sending that in.  I agree that the Air New Zealand approach is a smart one if they can get the price points to work. Study after study has shown that, far away, the main driver of flyer satisfaction is an empty middle seat. Think about it – every time the middle seat occupant shows up, he/she apologize to their seatmates – “Sorry but I’m in the middle”.  No one wants the seat, and no one wants it filled next to them. If Air New Zealand can make enough money off the “Works Deluxe” tickets, they’re in the bonus round – more revenue, satisfied customers, and not just those “of size”
• Because this size thing just keeps being an issue.  The latest story surfaced earlier this week when a USAir passenger Arthur Berkowitz told the story of his experience on a July flight from Anchorage, AK to Philadelphia to Chris Elliott, a traveler advocate blogger. It was a full flight except for one middle seat, into which a 400-lb passenger tried to fit himself. He apologized, but with his size, he took up his seat and half the seats on each side of him. Not only could Berkowitz not put his armrest down, he couldn’t fasten his seatbelt. He ended up standing most of the 7-hr flight.
• Berkowitz rightfully complained to USAir, not only about the discomfort of having to stand for 7 hours, but also about the safety issues – the inability to use his seatbelt.  USAir offered him a $200 voucher to compensate – on an $800 ticket.  Berkowitz said, and I think rightly, that’s not enough. Their response — “We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns.  The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”  So to make sure I can put my armrest down, to make sure I can use my seatbelt, to make sure I’m not crowded out of the seat I paid for, I should buy an additional seat or upgrade to First Class?  When I first read this, I was dumbfounded.  But then I reminded myself – it’s USAir. Then it all made sense.
• And to wrap on a more attractive note, commenting on last episode’s Hot Flight Attendant segment, Sak writes
  • I recently flew Copa Airlines Colombia between Medellin (MDE) and Panama City (PTY) and flight attendants were still young and hot. Of course, different country and labor laws and in Colombia is normal to discriminate by age.
• There you go, hot flight attendant and Star Alliance miles.  Who could ask for more?
• If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
• Bridge music – Oh Yeah by Eliyahu Sills

Holiday Travel Tips

• Looking back over those past 5 years of Thanksgiving episodes and then listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s recent holiday travel tips episode on their Indie Travel Podcast reminded me that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done my own holiday travel tips, so here’s my updated Road Warrior 201 tips for traveling between now and the New Year.
• Holiday travel generates a real miasma of emotions for frequent travelers.  You’re traveling because (theoretically) you want to – you want to visit those in-laws, don’t you? – not because have to to stay employed. You’re out of your comfort zone, out of your travel groove because you’re not solo-ing; you’re traveling with your family.  You gotta move slower through the airport; can’t react as easily to flight interruptions (are you really going to try stand-by with your wife and two young children?). It’s like Superman dragging along kryptonite – other than early boarding privileges, you’re just another traveler slugging it out with the rest of the teeming mass of travelers.
• Add to this that airplane load factors – how full they’re packing the planes – have been at historic heights for at least 6 months and that, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s winter, making weather disruptions a near certainty…
• Well now, that paints an attractive picture.  So how do you survive this?
• The first question might be – do you really need to fly?  We’ve talked about the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point in a couple of past episodes.  Now driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light either – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike, but depending on how you value your time and the state of repair of your car, I think the breakeven point has got to be at least 350 miles.  And if you’re in certain parts of the US – the East Coast, between Chicago and New Orleans, along some bits of the West Coast – take the train. Amtrak’s on-time record is never a thing of beauty either, but it’s always going to be better than Newark or LaGuardia in December.
• That’s all well and good, but you’re going from Philly to San Francisco.  You’ve got to grit your teeth and fly.  First, fly direct.  I know I say this every time, but it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system.  Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.
• Next, catch the earliest flight you can.  Again, it’s about avoiding congestion. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  If it gets stuck too long, the probability of it getting canceled increases. Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.
• And the final tip, bone up on your geography – know your alternative airports. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck in a rolling delay due to fog in LaGuardia. After two hours, I finally gave up my 1^st Class upgrade for a middle coach seat to Newark – no matter how nice the seat, it has to get me where I’m going.  If LGA is jacked up, EWR – no matter how much I hate that airport – is the next best thing.
• Knowing your alternatives – and their dominant carriers – is a key piece of knowledge when trying to pivot away from a delay or cancelled flight. Now, the LGA-EWR pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – ORD and MDW.  But Milwaukee is only 80 miles north, but not an alternative that it top of mind to everyone.  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or SAC as an alternative to SFO?  I tend to think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.
• But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be a zoo. Give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall.
• Bridge music – Is That Called Love by Liquid Zen

Bad Spirit In The Air

• My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering, which means I had to take too many math courses to allow time for course like psychology or sociology.  Every once in a while, I feel this gap.  Like a few months ago when I walked past a huge line tailing out of a small shop in downtown Chicago. “What’s this for?” I asked.  “Waiting for a free cupcake,” a couple of line standers answered. 20 minutes in line for a $2 cupcake says your time is worth $6/hour.  Minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Huh?
• I kinda have the same feeling about Black Friday – is your time worth so little that you’re willing to camp out in front of a WalMart for a half-price Wii game?  There’s something more emotional than rational about getting a “deal”
• Which must be the reason that Spirit Airlines is still in business.  They advertise “low low prices”, but don’t tell you about all the add-on fees – like the $34 fee for the convenience of booking the flight on-line rather than going down to the airport and queuing up for a ticket agent, but then you will be charged $5 to have that ticket agent print out a boarding pass for you. The Dept of Transportation fined them earlier this week $50,000 neglecting to reveal this full bill of fare.
• And it doesn’t stop there.  Want to reserve a seat? It’ll cost you, depending on the seat, betwee $1 and $50. Want to fly with luggage?  It’ll cost you $18-$38 for a checked bag or $20-$45 for a carryon bag.  Don’t worry, though.  They assure you that you won’t be charged for carrying on “reading material”.
• Once you’re on board, Spirit sports the least amount of seat space of any US domestic airline – 28” seat pitch with non-reclining seats.  Like everyone else, Spirit charges for meals, but unlike everyone else, Spirit will charge you $3 for a glass of water.
• So at what point does one’s self-respect kick in and say “enough” — my time, my comfort, is worth more than this. Certainly for me it happened a long time ago. Spirit flies some of my regular routes – Chicago to LGA or to Ft Myers, FL – but I never consider them.  Indeed, they just annoy me – their fares which are artificially low because they don’t disclose/include all their fees crowd out the fares of other carriers, making me work to get to a true low cost fare.

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #95
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• Bridge music from the Magnatune site
• 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 our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
• Follow me on Twitter
• “Like” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook
• Direct link to the show

Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr

It’s been a while since the last podcast. Contrary to what you might have thought, I haven’t podfaded – at least, not quite yet.  A flight out of Grand Junction, CO gave me a throw-back moment — a flight in a prop plane. Sitting next to a huge guy on a very small plane got me thinking about how to deal with row mates — row mates “of size” and row mates who like to chat. I talk about how the Global Entry program saved me from a huge line at ORD and comment on the now-infamous TSA exhortation to “Get Your Freak On Girl”. We close with an economics lesson — what’s happened to all the hot flight attendants. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #94:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Looking at the calendar, it has been a while since my last podcast. I’ve kept meaning to do a new episode, but then something – usually work – gets in my way. Also, I am absolutely the least efficient/most distractable writer I know. Probably contributes to the problem.
• Anyway, I’ve been bouncing around a bit since the last episode – London, Dallas, Milwaukee, Orlando, Phoenix a couple of times, and a biking trip in Moab, Utah.
• The biking trip did challenge my packing skills – how to pack for a 4-day biking trip followed by 3 days of work in Phoenix, all in a carry-on roller bag.  Luckily, biking gear isn’t that bulky – except for the shoes. And in Moab, a non-faded pair of jeans is considered high fashion, so the after-hours clothing count was pretty low also.
• To get to Moab, I flew in and out of Grand Junction, CO on the first prop planes – a Mesaba Dash 8 – that I’ve flown in a long time.  I thought regional jets had replaced all of these things years ago.  Knowing that I’d be flying down to Phoenix on a commuter plane made my post-bike packing a bit easier. I could expand my rollerboard a bit because I wouldn’t have to fit it in an overhead; I’d be gatechecking it at plane side.
• So I was a bit surprised when the gate agent was encouraging people to carry on.  Really?  When was the last time you heard that?  Usually the gate agents are prowling the boarding area looking for oversized carryons to gate check. Indeed, with sold-out planes being the norm, more gate agents are announcing that everyone in the last boarding group will have to gate check their carryons – not even letting them get on the plane to try. I wonder if it’s a marketing ploy for the new airline credit cards that offer advanced boarding along with a mile for every dollar spent.
• Well, expanded out, my bag wasn’t going to fit in a normal sized carryon bin, let alone the shrunken vestigial one on a Dash 8, so I grabbed a gate check tag and left it plane side like I always do.  I did, though, ask the woman there about what I thought was an odd request – why ask people to carry on? “’Cause we’re weight-restricted” she said, “and carryons don’t count.” So a 20-lb bag counts against the weight restriction when it’s in the cargo hold below the passengers’ feet, but not when it’s shoved above the passengers’ heads?  She just shrugged and pointed me toward the stairs.
• Bridge music — Revolve mix by His Boy Elroy

Following Up

• We’ve talked in past episodes about row mates; seat neighbors.
• Well, once I got on board that Dash 8 in Grand Junction, I found that my row mate was Larry The Cable Guy’s overweight twin – or perhaps the more appropriate way would be to say “a passenger of size”.  Whatever way you want put it, there was no way I was getting the armrest down between Larry and me.  Hell, I couldn’t even see the armrest. I didn’t make a big deal out of it – I had the aisle I could lean into to, and Larry kept his arms forward to try to minimize the spill over. But it still was an uncomfortable 2 hours. Pressing up against Larry for that entire time, I could feel (literally) the justification for making “passengers of size” buy two seats if they can’t fit into one.
• But then there was this huge guy on my DFW-ORD flight. Standing in the aisle for 5 min stashing his stuff, holding up the entire boarding process. |Not that he could’ve stepped out of the aisle – he was too big for that. But then he got offended when people tried to squeeze around him as the flight attendants started banging on about the need for everyone to get seated so we could leave on time.
• I’m not a tiny guy myself. But, in spite of what the spokesperson for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance says, it’s not about rights.  It’s about being polite and living with the choice you’ve made – or purchased. For a given price, you’ve bought a seat of known dimensions in smallish metal tube that you’ll share with 50-200 other people all trying to get in and out of said tube in as short a time period as possible. If you can’t sit comfortably with the armrest down, then buy the seat next to you, or buy a first class seat (or at least an upgrade) on planes that offer it (certainly wasn’t an option provided Larry on that Dash-8).  If you don’t want to be rushed during boarding, check your bags and wait ‘til last call – or charter your own jet.  But don’t get huffy at the rest of us.
• While I was waiting to start my trip to Moab, I had a bit of dwell time in ORD so I did a little test.  I fired up my Verizon 4G Hot Spot and ran the Speed Test Chrome app on my MacBook Air – a smokin’12.3 megabits per sec down, 15 Mbps up. I then fired up the Speed Test app on my AT&T iPhone 4 – 0.3 Mbps down, 0.05 Mbps up. I don’t know what’s wrong with the AT&T data service in ORD, but it’s just pathetic.
• A year ago – in episode 85 to be exact – I interviewed Michael Komarnitsky, founder and chief executive of GoMiles, a mileage tracking and management website.  Earlier this month, AA and SWA went gunning for Michael and other mileage-management sites, serving them “cease-&-desist” letters claiming security and terms of use violations.  What it’s really about, I think, is not wanting travelers to have tools to be “more efficient” in how they cash in miles or frequent sleeper points. Miles are a big money-maker for airlines – they pull in millions selling them to credit card companies and the like.  They’re even more profitable when they expire unused.  Sites like GoMiles make it easier to keep track of your miles, including expiration dates. I’ll put links to our interview with Michael and a WSJ article in the show notes.
• In the last episode, I was getting ready to head over to London, and was looking forward to testing out the Global Entry lane, seeing if it cut my re-entry time at passport control.  Coming back into ORD, it was a huge time/frustration saver. The US citizen line at passport control was longer than I’ve ever seen it – all the cattle-pen switchback lanes were full and then the line stretched out another 50-75 yards into the terminal walkway. I walked up, showed the line marshal the “CPB” Global Entry sticker on the back of my passport and was waved through to a row of 6 Global Entry kiosks.
• It took me two tries to get a valid 4-fingerprint reading, but I was through in 5 minutes. Was definitely worth the couple of hours I invested back in July.
• Robby Smith wrote this on the TravelCommons Facebook wall –
  • I now have 3 data points for Global Entry in the last 3 months.  My average time in Immigration is about 20 seconds. Customs just takes receipt from the GE kiosk and say Welcome Home. IAH has a separate Customs arrival lane for GE only.  I know the GE program is only about 18 months old or so but I should have done this the day it came out. At $100 for 5 years, it would be ridiculous for me not to have it. Finally a Gov program that works and makes life better.
  • BTW; United Mileage Plus 1K and GSM now get this as a free benefit of status.
• Robby, thanks for that.  I agree that it’s a great program – the one thing the Dept of Homeland Security has done to make travel a little easier.  And more programs are picking up the $100 fee.  It’s now a benefit of Amex’s Platinum card.
• And of course, the podcast wouldn’t be complete without a TSA item.  Every once in a while, on those rare occasions that I check luggage, I’ll find a card from the TSA politely letting me know they’ve opened my luggage and searched through it. Sometimes they re-pack things nicely, other times they leave a wadded up mess.  For one woman earlier this month, they left her a more personal note, printing “Get Your Freak On Girl” along the margin of the standard TSA card.  Prompted, she guessed, by the screener’s discovery of what she described in a tweet was a “personal” item – battery powered.  She was stunned, but kept a sense of humor about it. Given recent arrests of TSA agents stealing from screened luggage, she’s lucky the screener just left the note.  There’s a link to an article on the TravelCommons Facebook wall, and I’ll also put it in the show notes.
• If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.
• Bridge music — Earth Soda by septahelix

Plane Conversation Etiquette or The Risks of Talking to Your Seatmate

• Humans love/need to put order to the randomness around them, and one of the most common ways to do it is the “There are two kinds of people in the world” construct – Those who like durian or mushrooms or Brussels sprouts or ferrets and those who don’t.  In travel, the classic split is between fliers who want to talk to their row mates and those who want to be left alone.
• You can see it when you walk on the plane – the people who sit down and immediately power up the Bose noise-canceling headsets and those who are looking all around
• I saw the ultimate example of a talker on the same DFW-ORD flight (yes, it was one of those flights…). The guy in the row in front of me talked for 45 min straight, seemingly without taking a breath – he must’ve been an amateur didgeridoo player trained in circular breathing. He started before takeoff.  Sitting in the center seat, he swiveled his head like an oscillating fan, equally torturing both row mates. I was half expecting him to swivel his head all the way around “Exorcist-style” and include me in his life story.
• Four of us in the two rows behind him traded glances as we watched him in a mix of amazement (equal parts how long he could talk and how clueless he was of what he was doing), horror (at the mental anguish he was inflicting on his row mates) and relief (glad we weren’t sitting in that row). We started a little pool – 5 bucks a piece – would he stop or be told to shut up, and when would that happen. I figured he’d eventually run out of gas – if his row mates hadn’t plugged in their iPods by now, they were going to let him go.  The guy across the aisle from me won the pot, though, because I underestimated how long this guy would talk.
• As you might have guessed, I’m not generally a talker. If you end up next to me on a plane, it’s pretty certain that the only conversation we’ll have is when you ask me to get up from my aisle seat to let you go to the toilet.
• I use plane flights as my alone time – I mostly nap, then read, maybe do a bit of e-mail or play solitaire on my iPhone while listening to podcasts. As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I rarely use in-flight Wi-Fi.  I enjoy that little bit of unwired isolation.
• I do think I miss out on things, though.  On a flight down to Phoenix, USAir screwed up my reservation, lost my advance seat assignment, which dropped me in a center seat.  I was sitting in my seat, not looking forward to the next 3.5 hours. Getting up to let in the older woman who had the window seat, she said to me “I really don’t care for window seats.” “I’ll slide over if you want this center seat instead,” I offered.  She gladly took it.  I got into my usual position – plugged in, eyes closed, waiting for takeoff – my own little world. Only after I was walking down the terminal in PHX did I think – that’s a bit odd about not wanting the window; I should’ve asked her for the back story.
• I’m not like I’m a complete social hermit. Eating at the bar in a restaurant while on the road, I’ll strike up a conversation with the bartender or the guy sitting next to me. At dinner last night at a restaurant with communal tables, I got the thumbnail life story of the couple sitting next to me, even traded splashes of pinot noir for an impromptu wine tasting.
• So what’s different?  Well, in that bar or in that restaurant, if things get a little weird, a little uncomfortable, or a little boring, I can always excuse myself and walk away.  Not easily done in a metal tube 35,000 ft in the air. While I might be kinda curious about a person, I’m not that curious to risk being pinned against the wall of a plane for three hours…
• Bridge music – Hear Us Now by scottaltham

Decline of Hot Flight Attendants

• Megan McArdle of the Atlantic magazine has become one of my favorite bloggers. I’m sympatico with her call-it “wet libertarianism”. Could be because we both graduated from University of Chicago’s business school where a sort of cold-blooded economic theory pervades everything.
• Anyhow, a recent article of hers caught my eye – “The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants”. The TV show Pan Am – set in the ‘60’s, a Mad Men in the air knock-off, has let to a string of “then vs. now” articles, comparing the “Clipper Class” era to today “Greyhound Bus” level of service.  Another blogger, Glen Whitman, had written a Pan Am-inspired post on the “Economics of Hot Flight Attendants”. His thesis – prior to deregulation, with the Civil Aeronautics Board setting prices for flight routes, airlines could only compete on service. Since in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, most fliers were male salarymen, airlines would pay more for attractive flight attendants to differentiate their service.  After 1978, airlines found competing on price overwhelmed differences in service and so out went any rationale for the hot flight attendant salary premium.
• McArdle’s response – “As a libertarianish economics blogger, I would love if this story were true.  But I’m skeptical.”  And then she goes outlines a more plausible scenario – the combination of union representation, anti-discrimination laws and, as she puts it, “feminist shaming”, allowed the flight attendant population to age, resulting in “a workforce composed mostly of older and not particularly attractive people.  Mirroring the larger American workforce”
• Reminded me of when Virgin Atlantic started flight into Chicago. I was running a dot-com consultancy at the time (like 75% of the working population, or so it seemed) and was flying to London twice a month. I quickly became a Virgin Atlantic regular. The flights were much better than United or American or BA. The planes were new, the food was good, and yes, they had hot flight attendants.  On a flight back to Chicago, one of the flight attendants asked me for suggestions on things to do on her layover. She told me that she was bidding on different runs every month so that she could “see the world” since she, like other the other flight attendants, was on a 36-month non-renewable contract.  No danger of declining hotness at Virgin.
• Now, all that being said, it’s wasn’t the “hotness” of the Virgin flight attendants that mattered (though in and of itself, it wasn’t a bad thing), it was their attitude – lack of cynicism, sarcasm, surliness.  This was still new and exciting to them – unlike the 25-year veteran flight attendants at United or American. The Virgin flight attendants would be serving passengers throughout the flight, rather than racing the meal carts through the aisles and then hiding in the galleys. When asked to describe meal choices, I would receive a polite explanation, rather than the “Does this look like a restaurant” reply I received from a Northwest flight attendant.
• We won’t ever get back to the Pan Am Clipper Class days, what’s called the “Golden Age” of travel.  I’m OK with that.  I’d be happy for just some pleasant attitudes in today’s flying buses.

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #94
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• Bridge music from the ccMixter site
• 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 our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
• Follow me on Twitter
• “Like” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook
• Direct link to the show

Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez

Coming up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, I repeat a segment from the September 2005 episode that tells the stories of travelers trying to get back home when all planes were grounded and all US borders were closed after the attacks. Also, we finish up the two-part review of new Google technology with observations after taking a Samsung Chromebook on the road for a month this summer. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Tablet Wars

I walked out of the Google I/O developers conference in May with a pre-release version of Samsung‘s challenger to the iPad — the Galaxy Tab 10.1.  Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me.  I’ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an iPad 2, including a real pressure test — two weeks in the UK without a laptop. Before Apple blocks Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.

Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware.  A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs.   But in the real world, it’s a push.  The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places.  There’s no real difference — they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.

As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named “Honeycomb”) just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the difference isn’t as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest.  Most of the apps that I use regularly — Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds — are all available for Android.

Evernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine.  The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven.  WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets.  The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or “Froyo” and “Gingerbread” in Google’s dessert-themed code names) and won’t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.

Comparing Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and each system’s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.  The Apple experience is a locked-down one — there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it’s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn’t necessarily bad — it’s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.

While in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.

It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system — being without my MacBook Air– easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.

I like Android’s widgets — the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync’ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. It’s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.

The iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet — which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation — at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.

Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895

Into the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as “not as upbeat as others” which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.  First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK — the Lake District, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.  Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there — one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.  Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.  All the bed & breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.
• Just to make sure I didn’t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed & breakfasts the whole time — until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not all that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room — though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.  And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&B owners are typically a bit older/more seasoned that the typical lounge staff.  The main differences — most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.
• Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.  I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was cooler there than Chicago.  But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.
• Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.
• Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just had to drop the top.  The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 — and it felt it when I dropped that top.  Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.
• Bridge music — Crazy Love-The Alex & Lang mix by J.Lang

Following Up

• Let’s take a run through the comment bag.
• Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on episode #85 (!) — she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience — the bathroom.  Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.  I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.  And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It’s the Inn in New Berlin, PA (in case you care).”
• Sarah, thanks for the note — and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.  I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.  The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.  It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.
• Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.  It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like TripAdvisor. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah — it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.
• Fast forwarding to episode #90, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall
  • Thanks for podcast #90, it’s great to hear how 170 degrees isn’t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried
  • You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I’ve a couple of hints to share.
  • Google Maps is great but try City Maps 2Go. I’ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don’t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I’m going in the right direction.
  • I’ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn’t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.
• Thanks Andrew.  Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month — 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.
• Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.  I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands — the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.  I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.  For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.  It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.  If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.  I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.  If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.
• I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.  I kinda did it on a whim.  They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.  I don’t use them — it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.  I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.  But anyways, while in London, I found that my US Starbucks Rewards credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.
• 

  How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?

  Speaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” — Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.  Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?  I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?  And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.  Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.

• And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the last episode, Leo Vegoda wrote
  • What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”
• That is perfect — and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.
• And it shouldn’t be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.  The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by Potomac Electric utility.  Impressive results all around.
• If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.
• Bridge music — August (Reggae Rework) by el-B

The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler

• This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me — as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.
• I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.  Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his Amateur Traveler blog.
• The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.  She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment — “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”
• Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ post.  Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to — “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s Travel Commons. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”
• OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I didn’t think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.  But, because I talk about more about the journey — the act of transiting, travel as a verb — rather than being a tourist — what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience — airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ….  Any podcast whose major characters are 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America just isn’t going to be “as upbeat as some.”
• I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.  It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix — new destination, new air carrier, new plane,…  A couple podcasts ago, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir — the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which — with a 1983 birth date – treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.  I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip — a toss-up between  the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.
• But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?  Most of the times, that’s what my travel is — a commute to work.  Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.  And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.
• First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.
  • “I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.  American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.  The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours — depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”
  • “Oh, that’s too bad.  I’m sorry to hear that”
  • “Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”
• See?  That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.  Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.
• Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They didn’t overbook the hotel or break the plane.  On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.  They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.  Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me — they take an attitude before I even open my mouth — I give them a pass.
• So we’ve identified a lot of people who aren’t responsible for botching up my commute.  Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.  When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.  You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.
• Airlines, hotels, car rentals — you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.  Nothing personal — I’m just collateral damage.
• Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The undisciplined take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.  The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration — fat, salt, and beer.
• Bridge music – I Will Writhe by SackJo22

Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

• Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit — the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing — the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.
• Attending Google I/O earlier this summer, I received a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with the Honeycomb tablet version of Android — I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites — and a Samsung Chromebook. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit — a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.  I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.
• Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home — a real pressure test.
• To cut to the chase — which do I like better? — it’s a real toss-up.  Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware — the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world — it’s a push.  They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.
• As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps — the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps — iPad vs. Honeycomb — would suggest.  Apps that I use regularly — Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds — are all available for Android.  The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one — and it’s really nice — but the others work fine.  The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.
• The operating system — Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps — the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.  The Apple experience is pretty much locked down — there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad — most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.
• When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery near Loch Lomond.  My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it — for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.  Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.
• It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system — being without my PC — easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content
• I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.
• So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.  I think the iPad is a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet — which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation — at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• Bridge music from the ccMixter site
• 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 our 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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