Recent surveys by TripAdvisor and Hotels.com report that the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. If they both didn’t misplace a decimal point, then they surveyed the wrong travelers. Experienced travelers know that the most important amenity is the free hotel breakfast. Now I’m not denying that the growth of mobile devices — smartphones,…
Read More
Dinner time on my last visit to Philadelphia and I was sitting at the bar of Tinto, a Spanish restaurant in Philadelphia. My dinner was a couple of plates of tapas — one of grilled octopus, another of sautéed wild mushrooms and caramelized shallots. I put in the order for mushrooms and shallots immediately after the…
Read More
I “sprint toured” Frankfurt using Hemispheres Magazine’s “One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt” article while on a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago. I shot this on my iPhone 4 and edited it in iMovie on my MacBook Air while flying from Frankfurt to Chicago. My iPhone video inexperience shows — I shot the entire thing in…
Read More
One of my annual New Year’s travel resolutions is to “unpack and repack my briefcase.” Some people re-do their closets; I do my briefcase. I’m always amazed at the stuff that accumulates over the year. Why did I think I needed a half-dozen pens, two sets of earphones, $5 of loose change in three different…
Read More
Last week’s winter storms in the Northeast and the South resulted in 70 percent of the US being covered in snow — shutting down airports across the region, canceling thousands of flights and trains. So it seems like a good time to recap some of the travel tips we’ve covered in past episodes of TravelCommons….
Read MoreI’ve never been a big New Year’s Resolution guy. Mine seem to have a 3-week half-life — they don’t even last to February. However, in the spirit of “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” (a quote which has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin and Albert…
Read MoreAs the US dollar continues to swoon, non-US friends, colleagues, and podcast listeners are doing the math and thinking it might just be worth getting fingerprinted and photographed by US Customs in exchange for a cheap holiday. The question I’ve been asked over the past 3 months is “Where should I go?” Not an easy…
Read More
After returning from a 10-day visit to Vietnam, friends and TravelCommons podcast listeners asked me a lot of questions about our trip. In this video, I answer the most common question — “How did they treat you when they found out you were American?” — and give my impressions of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon),…
Read More