So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.

When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”

My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United’s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.” 

Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.

Push Back. Always Push Back.

Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.

So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day’s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.

In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it would get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.

So, why not?  Famous last words.

We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.

Status Still Matters

This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.  

Every phone and chat agent opened with: “Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer”  and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.

At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent’s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.

Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.

The Second Plane Also Broke

We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.

The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it’s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.

As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.

Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.

We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.

Give Credit Where Credit’s Due

Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best. 

I don’t know how much of that was training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day. 

One More Problem: French Trains

We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too. 

I fire up the SNCF Connect app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too. 

Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.

Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants. 

But what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?  Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.

What I’d Do Differently

I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal. 

Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.

Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing

That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.

First stop: the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.

Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to Ocelot Brewing. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?” 

“Years of practice,” I replied.

Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually

The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.

Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.

No problems at CDG passport control despite the horror stories circulating of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. 

And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.

My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you’ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.

Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn’t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.

Tabasco Detour

A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the self-guided tour; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper “tang” in the air. 

But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.  I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.  The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.

Walking Around Lafayette

Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past Pop’s Poboys, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu — the classics plus some new twists — and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.

Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is Vermilionville Historic Village. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time. 

Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.  I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.

More Parade Strategy

We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start. 

That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it’s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.

We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the Krewe of Bonaparte on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren’t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.

Driving Out to Cajun Country

Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.

We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag. 

On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great. 

On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.

Hunting Boudin

On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific. 

Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig. 

In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.

My Boudin Trail research called out Charlie’s Meat Market & Grocery in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.

Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.” 

It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit The Best Stop Supermarket in Scott and Billy’s Boudin & Cracklins back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.

Next Stop – Pork Cracklins

Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It’s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group. 

Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.

Heading Home

We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the Atchafalaya Swamp. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it — three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.

Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country. 

New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it. 

And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.

I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.

Recommendations for Lafayette and Acadiana

Food & Drink

• Pop’s Poboys — Solid poboy menu, classics and twists; right downtown
• Charlie’s Meat Market & Grocery, Mamou — Best boudin on the Boudin Trail; arrive before noon on Saturdays
• Billy’s Boudin & Cracklins, Lafayette — Good cracklins; solid all-around stop

Culture

• Vermilionville Historic Village — Quick drive from downtown if you’re into history
• Fred’s Lounge, Mamou — Show up on Saturday morning for live music
• Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys — Check their Events  page to see if you can catch them live

Check out the first two road trip stops —

Mobile

New Orleans

But shifting from road warrior travel to retirement travel isn’t just a swivel from business to leisure. It’s a change in what I’m optimizing for — from doing everything to survive the travel friction that stands between me and the next meeting, to giving myself a better shot at enjoying where I am. Which translates to a few key changes.

First, slower travel. I’m not triangulating across three cities in four days anymore. As I said back in the TravelCommons Redux post, retirement travel means not having to do any more stupid travel — the ORD-MIA-SEA or ORD-LHR-DEN bunny hops. Retirement travel means longer stays in fewer places, which changes what I’m packing for and how I do it.

Second, no corporate travel expense account. I no longer have other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam. In road-warrior mode, I’d pack light and assume I could buy or replace whatever I forgot. I had a company card. I filed expenses. None of that exists anymore. I own the whole stack — research, booking, insurance, disruption recovery, all of it.

Third, I’m older. I confirmed this in the mirror while shaving this morning. Not a complaint, just a recognition of reality. But it does mean I can’t take as much for granted as I could back in 2005 when I started TravelCommons; skipping sleep for red-eyes, heaving heavy bags into the overhead, tossing nothing but Advil and Zyrtec into a random pill bottle.

So, having reset the baseline, let’s get into it.

Core Packing Rules Still Stand — With a Few Tweaks

Rule 1: Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black.

A long-time rule that’s still true. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner (always nice-to-have), it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains (absolutely need-to-have). I can’t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap. But the real point of this rule isn’t black, it’s wardrobe discipline. If black gives you PTSD flashbacks from your teen goth phase, then go for blue or grey or earth tones. But pick one. Don’t pack five shirts that all demand their own separate color ecosystem.

Rule 2: No one-and-done outfits.

Every piece has to do at least two jobs. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and with more than one pair of pants. If it can only be worn one way, it doesn’t make the bag. Pack a travel wardrobe, not a series of costume changes. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.

Rule 3: Pack layers, think additively.

Multiple thin layers beat one bulky piece every time. Thin layers give you range; bulky items are a commitment. A black merino wool sweater has been my long time go-to, but merino has been taking over more of my travel wardrobe — quarter-zips, t-shirts, socks. It’s versatile —  naturally odor-resistant so I can wear it multiple times before washing, wicks moisture, and is wrinkle-resistant enough that I can pull it out of a fully-packed bag and wear it to dinner without looking like I slept in it — which maybe I did.

Rule 4: Leave most of the workout gear at home.

Gym shoes take up a lot of space — that hasn’t changed. But in retirement travel, they’re no longer just for the 6 a.m. hotel gym session. The right pair can take you from the gym, through the museum, and into a casual restaurant for dinner. And as we get older, resistance training is important for maintaining muscle mass. So a tweak to the original rule: wear your gym shoes on the plane and stuff a couple of rolled up resistance bands into your packed shoes.

Rule 5: Use a nondescript black rolling carry-on bag.

Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.. My daughter’s baby-blue roller was a walking invitation to be gate-checked; her current dark-purple bag is much closer to black and mostly sails through. Hard-side versus soft-side still depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. If the risk is a budget carrier’s strict sizer — or if you’re prone to overpacking — a hard shell can help. If the risk is weight, I want the lightest stripped-down bag I can get. 

New Rules For Retired Travelers

Rule 6: Laundry becomes part of the itinerary.

Here’s a new rule. When I was doing road warrior travel — one-night hops, weekly returns home, hotel laundry on the expense account in a crisis — I didn’t think about laundry at all. Now my trips are longer; sometimes multiple weeks before heading home, which should mean I need to pack more.  But it doesn’t. Slower travel leaves time for laundry. My default itinerary these days is to book an Airbnb with a washer/dryer every 7-10 days. Toss the underwear into the washer and head out for a beer. Come back, swap in another load and go tour a church… or go back for another beer. Longer trip, same size bag.

Rule 7: Medications earn their carry-on slot before your clothes do.

Looking back at my What’s In My Briefcase posts — I did one every 4-5 years — two of the constants were the bottle half-filled with Advil and Zyrtec tablets I mentioned earlier, and a tin of wintergreen Altoids. But age is often accompanied by more medicine — maybe a statin or a beta blocker, or something with a little more oomph than ibuprofen. And pack extra because, where you’re going, they might not be as easily available.

In Croatia, Irene had an itchy rash — must’ve brushed up against something on one of our hikes — and went looking for their version of Cortizone at a pharmacy in Hvar. But she couldn’t get it. In Croatia, hydrocortisone cream isn’t over-the-counter; it requires a prescription. Good thing to figure out before getting on the plane.

Just One Key Change

The through-line from 2006 to now isn’t really about bags or black or merino wool — it’s about who I’m packing for. Road warrior me was packing to survive the trip. Retired me is packing to enjoy it. I’m not packing to survive a bad connection and make a 9 a.m. meeting in an unwrinkled state; I’m packing to enjoy the destination instead of just surviving the itinerary.

That changes a few things at the edges — a pill organizer, scheduled laundry stops, more stylish gym shoes — but the core really hasn’t changed. I’m still pulling out my now-kinda-beat-up black bag, still making sure everything that goes into it has earned its place.

Coming next: 2026 updates to What’s In My Briefcase and My Travel Tech Stack

Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans. 

Biloxi Detour

After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, Parrain’s Cajun Cooking. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?

Back to An Old Haunt

Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, Pêche. 

I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed – the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar. 

It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would’ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.

After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables. 

I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I’ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try. 

Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we’d passed up. So we’d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp’d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.

Gift from the Weather Gods

When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.

Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, Cochon Butcher. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.

Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — Femme Fatales — starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.  No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.

Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue

We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into Boil Seafood House for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.

Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “neutral ground,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.

Avenue Pub Balcony View

I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, the Avenue Pub. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.

We got to the balcony railing just as the Femme Fatales rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.

Wednesday Night Let-Down

After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The Muses parade wasn’t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home. 

We were parade-ed out.

Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.

We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I’ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn’t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago. 

Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake

We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: Dong Phuong Bakery.

It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we’d be fine.

As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.

The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.

A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.

Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.

After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.

But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.

Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywater

On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.

I’ve been going there since my “Drive South” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)

Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides. 

I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don’t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.

This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.

Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..

Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.

Packing Up and Heading West (again)

We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the subsequent inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.

Maybe it’s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on a raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I’ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.

We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.

Coming next: Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana

Recommendations for New Orleans

Food & Drink

• Pêche Seafood Grill, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.
• Cochon Butcher, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates
• Avenue Pub, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list
• Boil Seafood House, 3340 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood
• Dong Phuong Bakery, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to

Parade Strategy

• Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades
• Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws
• Avenue Pub’s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection
• Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything

Neighborhoods

• Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants
• Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)

Planning the Trip

I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.

Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.

First Mardi Gras Parade

Our first parade in Mobile was the Order of the Incas on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,  yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.

I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.  After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.

Krewe Barn Party

Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the Cosmic Cowboys, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday. 

Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the Krewe of LaShe’s (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)  where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as Neptune’s Daughters squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.

Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade

We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s Knights of Ecor Rouge parade was even more so.

Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.

King Cake Crawl

Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.

I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes. 

Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the USS Alabama battleship, swerve the parade barricades, and hit Dropout Bakery for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.

We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.

Packing Up

Next Stop: Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans

Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay

Mobile

• Dropout Bakery, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip
• Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases
• Braided River Brewing Company, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop

East Bay

• Kitchen On Main, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant
• Pearl, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection

Following Up

Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out. 

Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.

If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.  But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.

You can find all this here on TravelCommons.com, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

In the meantime, if you’ve got questions about a place I’ve been or topics you’d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at comments@travelcommons.com, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons Facebook page.

Remember that you can find all my posts here on TravelCommons.com, on the TravelCommons RSS feed, or the Substack newsletter.

And so here it is, words without the voice.

The New Tagline

I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “more about the journey than the destination” to “as much about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters. 

When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered — the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.

What “Retirement Travel” Really Means

What first comes to mind is what retirement travel isn’t. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before. 

Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast stupid travel; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.

Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident. 

Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI. 

Where’s the happy accident here? 

Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the BWI Cardio Trail, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at G&M Restaurant and then beers at Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.

Leaning Into Flexibility

Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops — from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) — and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD. 

Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries. 

Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote – Loui’s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD. 

What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.

What To Expect Going Forward

I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I’m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here’s how I’m thinking it’ll go:

More About Destinations:  I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the “here’s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.

Trip Mechanics that Matter: Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).

Honest Recommendations: If I recommend a place, it’s because I’ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some “Top 10” list.

It’s All My Words: No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.

You can find all this here on TravelCommons.com, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.

In the meantime, if you’ve got questions about a place I’ve been or topics you’d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at comments@travelcommons.com, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.

Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms

Nashville

• Vinyl Tap Talk to any Nashvillian who’s lived here for more than five years and it won’t take long ’til they start complaining about all the changes — especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago’s Wicker Park, and Madrid’s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who “urban pioneered” East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they’ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend’s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.
• Barrique Brewing This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There’s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It’s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans’ new stadium and Oracle’s new corporate headquarters. Don’t sleep on this place ’cause it’ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.
• Tailor Owner Vivek Surti calls his food “First Generation American Cuisine,” built on his “experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent”. Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends — Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti’s explanations of what’s in front of you. I’ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.

Louisville

• Angel’s Envy You can’t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational… and great whiskey too!
• 610 Magnolia Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call “comfortable fine dining” — a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.

Chattanooga

• Calliope Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it’s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).
• Elsie’s Daughter And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.
• Niedlov’s Cafe & Bakery Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.

Memphis

• Gus’s Fried Chicken While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there’s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through Tom Lee Park along the bank of the Mississippi River.
• Wiseacre Brewing – Downtown I haven’t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn’t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the National Civil Rights Museum, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There’s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.

Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)

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

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

Book

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

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

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

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

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

Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities — Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis — talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200:

Since The Last Episode

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) Tour de Lou, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville feels bigger — more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ Overton Park is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments failed to plow a good bit of it under back in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.
• As I said, all three are river cities — Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated Tom Lee Park in Memphis — guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds — and I biked along Louisville’s Waterfront Park; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does much more with the much smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.
• But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer — even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.
• Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.
• Bridge music — Another Way by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938

Following Up

• Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the last episode’s biometrics discussion
  • “I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.  I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”
  • Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late ’50’s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.
• Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition eGate system was down for 4 hours last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition — that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a similar 3-4-hour eGate outage. Note to self — don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.
• Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that 50% of business travel will go away; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels; as did Hilton and Hyatt. Regression to the mean, you might call it “behavioral inertia”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.
• And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the previous episode where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s Pictures of You song.
  • Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”
  • Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.
  • Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.  I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”.   Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”
  • Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer wrote “Truly the end of an era!”
  • Roger Nash left the Instagram comment — “Going to miss you, sir”
  • And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say — “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.  However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.  Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”
  • Robert Fennerty wrote – “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:
    • Travel Tips: I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside. 
    • Cogent Observations: The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.
    • You: Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.
• Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot. 
• Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.
• Bridge Music — release.JOY.release by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)

Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey

• So here’s how it started 19 years ago
  • This is the first TravelCommons podcast, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we’re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you’re interested in travel, that’s what we’re gonna talk about — the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who’s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That’s me. We’re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don’t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I’d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC. 
  • I’m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I’m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day — 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It’s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.
• And here’s how we’re ending it — with, if nothing else, a lot better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent — capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination. 
• A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called Steal This Beer. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast — “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”
• And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time — years, actually — where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.
• Some road warriors who “think way too much” go full-on George Clooney in the movie Up In The Air, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”
• If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble — by taking subways and commuter trains instead of taxis and Ubers, searching out local beer joints, and just roaming randomly around a city — or what the cool kids call flâneuring. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before — seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.
• And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length — 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter — the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations — because I don’t understand it. 
• But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.
• But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up — landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005. 
• So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website — fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty pinged me about last June; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next — written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around. 
• I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about our January 2021 trip to Tucson. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently — from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a taproom who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That beer bar down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.

Closing

• Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200
• I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride. 
• As I said earlier, you can still ping me at comments@travelcommons.com, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media — which I can completely understand — and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at comments@travelcommons.com and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.  
• Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, Pictures of You by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to episode #14 where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.
• As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.
• Willie Evans – “Hi, I’m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s energizing, and it’s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song Pictures of You from our Hard Way album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you’re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”
• Follow me on Twitter
• “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
• Direct link to the show

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

But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.

Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199:

Since The Last Episode

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the Southern Illinois University Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What did matter is that Carbondale was right in the center of the solar eclipse’s path across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse. 
• Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon — I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if there was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls — all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.
• Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match — the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.
• We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.
• Bridge Music — Another Girl (instrumental) by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas

Following Up

• Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the last episode:
  • “I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.  As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago – exclusively for hotels though.”
  • Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours — never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!
• One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger — industry lingo for “irregular operations” — you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American — our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading — no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push very hard, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.
• And another travel tip that seems to need retiring — “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind — only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else — like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.
• And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.
• If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
• Bridge Music — Nube – Djiz Rmx by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO

Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel

• Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction — “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me — “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven’t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.
• But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass — just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.
• Which got me wondering — where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in episode #189 in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…
  • Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.
  • Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver’s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there’s a reason why they’re doing this. They’re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff — prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that’s where we’re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.
  • Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?
  • Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don’t even know if they’re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.
  • Mark: It’s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It’s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.
  • Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they’re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They’re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same — one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I’m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we’ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn’t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there’s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren’t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.
  • Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?
  • Sheldon: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know if I can say that.
  • Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that’s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You’re right. I mean, there’s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with — with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.
  • Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That’s all they’re paying for and they’re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.
  • Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.
  • Sheldon: It’s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you’re entitled to, imply that you don’t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.
  • Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear — and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),  Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we’ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I’ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.
  • Sheldon: Exactly. I’ve never been impressed with their business model. They’ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,  it’s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don’t see the future of it being very bright.
  • Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?
  • Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It’s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you’re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you’re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I’m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It’s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they’re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.
  • Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That’s great stuff.
• Our second guest is Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…
  • Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don’t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I’ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What’s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?
  • Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it’s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it’s scooting all over the place. So let’s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it’s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It’s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They’ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don’t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there’s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that’s boarding. But let’s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it’s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver’s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it’s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we’re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn’t comfortable using biometrics.
  • Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.
  • Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it’s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it’s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don’t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.
  • Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?  Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”
  • Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.
  • Mark: Yes, absolutely.
  • Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here’s where I have been” and so on.
  • Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to — how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?
  • Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it’s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they’re willing to share their personal biometric data — fingerprints, iris scans, etc. — with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they’re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It’s faster, it’s less stressful. It’s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we’re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It’s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.
  • Mark: That’s an interesting distribution.
  • Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here — if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They’re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I’ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”
  • Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that’s why I’ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”
  • Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they’re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there’s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it’s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.
  • Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you’ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it’s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.
  • Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.
• Thanks to Dr. Sheldon Jacobson and Henry Harteveldt for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.

Closing

• Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199
• I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.
• As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure — I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. 
• You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.
• If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.
• And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.
• Follow me on Twitter
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• Direct link to the show

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

Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198:

Since The Last Episode

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

Following Up

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

London Vacation Rental Woes

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

Closing

• Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198
• I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. 
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• If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.
• And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.
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• Direct link to the show