TravelCommons

Podcast: TravelCommons

  • Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History

    Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History

    Old cars and planes on a runway
    Where’d the Racetrack Go?

    Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can’t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can’t meet with people who aren’t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with Professor Janet Bednarek, professor of history at University of Dayton. 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 #176:

    This Week

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business — no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting — just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check — don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic — back in the ‘90’s. 
    • Since the last episode, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual — Spanish and English, in that order — but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe — lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.
    • I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.
    • One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in past episodes, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC — everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.
    • Bridge Music — You are (funky mix) by Zapac.

    Following Up

    • Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:
      • I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.
    • First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.
    • Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page
      • Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.  Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral’s Club members can use Alaska’s lounge. I’m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!
    • Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful — weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack — a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire — click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road. 
    • And in the last episode, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates — Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think — Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration plus TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail — no link, mind you, just a message — “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.
    • This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock — flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, clean; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country — which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal — where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.
    • And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job publishing the daily volumes of air passengers passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing. 
    • And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass — they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again — which I hope is never. 
    • Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just can’t leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.
    • Bridge Music — Two Guitars by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel

    Why Business Travel Will Come Back

    • Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again — at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are OK, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person. 
    • In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to — it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or — many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.
    • A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office — he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest — so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” — a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience — trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.
    • Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting — maybe even more so — and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”
    • Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year — but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.
    • Bridge Music — Garden Of The Forking by J.Lang (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228 Ft: Neurowaxx

    Learning the History of Airports

    • Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #172 and #173, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this — what turned out to be not unique — situation, I came across an article written by Professor Janet Bednarek, Professor of History at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.
      • Mark: Janet, the history of airports. How did you get into that? As a professor of history, you think — what am I going to focus on, the American Revolution, the Civil War, airports? Yes, airports! Perfect!
      • Janet: I originally trained as an urban historian focusing on city planning. But my first paid job was as a historian with the United States Air Force. And so I had to pick up aviation history, especially military aviation history. Then in 1992, my husband and I were moving to the Dayton area; my husband was an air force officer. This job came up at the University of Dayton if somebody could teach urban and aviation history. I began to think — where do those two things intersect? They intersect at the airport. And it was clear to me that not a lot of people had written about airports. And so I thought — wide open field, here we go. When they first talked about building airport, the planners talked a lot about how do we integrate them within the city. They were literally talking about the downtowns. And so if you go back to the 1920s, for example, You will see these fantastical schemes for building airports on top of bridges, on top of a ring of skyscrapers. Even in the 1930s, Norman Bel Geddes came up with an idea of an airport that was floating out in New York Harbor on an island.
      • Mark: Boris Johnson was trying to do that for London when he was the mayor there
      • Janet: On one case, you want to be as close in as possible, but there is the noise, there’s the danger. The other side of it is when airports actually started being built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, they’re being built largely by local interests and they’re interested in the cost, and the further you go out from the center, the lower the land costs are, but they would often try to find it on transportation lines that were already there. The Dayton Airport, for example, is not far from an intersection between what was the National Road Route 40 and the Dixie Highway. But the airport is not far from there and businessmen from Dayton knew to get there because there was a trap shooting club that operated literally right at the edge of the airport until a couple of decades ago. So they knew how to get there and where it was.
      • Mark: That’s interesting. I’ve got a gun range on a flight path of stuff coming in. Okay.
      • Janet: Yes. The Atlanta airport and several other places were where racetracks had been. You could drive there because, obviously, we had to drive there to race your cars around. So it was areas where there was already some accessibility but the land was cheap. Atlanta and I think Minneapolis-St Paul airports — there were race tracks there originally.
      • Mark: So if we pivot, what do we think about looking forward out in the future?
      • Janet: In the United States, building new airports is still extraordinarily difficult and finding the places for them would be very very difficult because, well, let’s think about Denver. They went out and they bought 50 square miles out in the middle of nowhere. Noise complaints went up after DIA opened up.
      • Mark: So you’ve got to wonder, I remember taking some of the first flights into DIA and you went over nothing other than a herd of buffalo. So were the buffalo complaining?
      • Janet: Yes, but it was people who had moved out to that area expecting peace and quiet and now airplanes were coming in there. There’s literally nowhere you could build an airport where there aren’t going to be some complaints about it.
      • Mark: Yes, in that way probably explains the multibillion dollar upgrade to LaGuardia and what they’re going to start at O’Hare, and what they did down in Atlanta with the runway extension.
      • Janet: Yes. Right, expanding and improving the airports that we have I think is what’s going to happen into the future. I mean, if you think about it in the United States, we built very few airports since the 1950s. Most commercial airports that exist in the United States were in place in one way or the other either as a private field or military field by World War II
      • Mark: That makes sense
      • Janet: Completely greenfield airports are relatively rare after World War II
      • Mark: I thought that LaGuardia in that new terminal had gotten security right. When you looked at the whole setup, that was really nice.
      • Janet: After 9 /11, airports had to wedge security in there. A lot of what airports have done since then has been trying to redesign themselves so that the security becomes a more convenient and seamless experience because right after 9/11, it was all improvised and it was wherever you could put it. And no one knew how long those security protocols we’re going to last. So who wants to spend millions of dollars redesigning? But now that it’s fairly clear that these security protocols are going to be forever now, within the last five or 10 years, I would say airports have begun to spend the real money to redesign so that the security fits.
      • Mark: It becomes integral as opposed to a bolt-on. And I think people are saying to themselves, look, it’s been 20 years, it’s about time security stops being an afterthought. Let’s face it, It’s an integral part of the experience.
      • Janet: Yes, Let’s start applying some lessons learned here.
      • Mark: Yes, because there are a lot of them. Thanks to Dr Janet Bednarek, Professor of History at the University of Dayton. Janet, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us on the TravelCommons podcast.
      • Janet: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176
    • I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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  • Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles

    Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles

    Groups of people on a frozen lake
    I think that’s our tour group up there

    I can feel travel beginning to come back. TSA checkpoint volumes are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to Paul Melhus, CEO of ToursByLocals about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. 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 #175:

    This Week

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.  Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of episode #164 — no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive — lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.
    • A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.
    • One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.  On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.
    • I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is regularly reporting new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic — 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back — execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean — at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle — well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.
    • Bridge Music — A Foolish Game by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.

    Following Up

    • In the last episode, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service — spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s screenshots showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night — prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.
    • Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages. 
    • And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.
    • DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.  I was one of them. Back in episode #155 in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head — “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, the news hit my Twitter feed — delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date — if not already?
    • Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app — “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home — on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring that day so she immediately hit the Renew button — and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle — I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July. 
    • United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece – certainly not business travel destinations.
    • I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.
    • The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes #163 and #173 where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Hear Me by DJ Blue  (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.

    How to Find Local Tour Guides

    • This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors — I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little — I don’t do well with other people applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them — I can do better, more authentically with my own research. 
    • But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 — 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening — I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude — a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.  They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections — friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.
    • Which leads me to this episode’s guest, Paul Melhus, CEO & Founder of ToursByLocals, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.
      • Mark: Paul, help us understand your marketplace, how you help travelers search and book for local tours. This is a space that had a lot of startup activity, say five years ago. Everybody was a peer-to-peer tour marketers and the Uber of local tours. And now though, it seems that we’ve got a mix of large companies, Airbnb Experiences, Viator, and then smaller folks, offering a broad range of tours like yourself and Get Your Guide, and then some specialized niches in things like food, Eat With. And then last episode, we talked with Rob Cheshire about what he’s doing in This Week In Craft Beer. So, help us understand the market space.
      • Paul: ToursByLocals is a platform, and our goal is to connect independent tour guides with independent travelers who want to have that kind of unique experience. I’ve often wondered why it is that we seem to have been successful. We started in 2008; somehow we’ve managed to thrive, and we always started right from the get-go to make sure that the guides that we’re on our site were competent, qualified, able to do what they said they would do. So we feel like our network of, we’re at 4,750 guides right now, is a curated list.
      • Mark: So that curation, it’s not so much the Uber for local tours, maybe the Angie’s List for local tours.
      • Paul: Yeah, I guess, Yeah, that’s a good idea because I think a lot of other companies, they just went out and tried to get a lot of guides and they didn’t really worry too much about making sure that every one of them is going to be quality, responsive — that’s a big thing — and then it’s the consistency of everybody knows how it works. In some cases, especially if the tour is more high value, like we have some safaris in Africa, for example where the customer will pay $23,000 and the guide, in order to deliver that tour,  they can’t fund all of that on their own account, so we advance them funds. But you know if things were to go south, well, we’re here. And we have done that in the past, refund the traveler because who knows, maybe there was some weather-related event that caused the thing to get canceled and then, so we’re out the $5-6,000, but the customer is made whole.
      • Mark: So there’s really two things that you’re offering above and beyond just the search and book. You’re offering curation and you’re offering escrow. So you’re taking some of that uncertainty in both of those areas, uncertainty about the qualification and then uncertainty about performance, you guys are taking that on. Paul, you talked about Covid. How has this curated network of tour guides held up through Covid?
      • Paul: Right now, our maximum number of tour guides listed on the site was just over 5,000 and that was February 2020. Now we’re at 4,750. So, not huge and we have a status of tour guide called on hold — for the time being, I don’t want to be on the site, but I want to be able to come back once it’s safe. For an example. We had a guide in Denmark, had an elderly mother and she just didn’t want to be out there with people because she had to look after her parent. So we have a project right now to contact all of these people and see about getting them back on the site. But the other thing that offset the loss was, rather than laying all of our staff off, we repurposed them and tried to infill a lot of the smaller destinations, the Nashville’s, Flagstaff Arizona. And of course, Yellowstone National Park where our sales are up 1,300% over 2019 levels, which was a good year.
      • Mark: That was the trend last fall, and I think going into the spring was everybody wanted to do outdoor stuff. Right?
      • Paul: Oh, it really is. Now that people have got their vaccines, they want to travel and the easiest place to travel is domestically. So, we’re seeing a real boost in US travel.
      • Mark: What do you see around trends?  Do you see an uptick, and where is it?
      • Paul: A metric that we track very closely is the conversion rate of our tour guides. So, if we send them an inquiry from a traveler, what percentage of those inquiries turned into a booking? We’ve noticed that the conversion rate is about half of what it was in 2019. Because normally a  good guide converts about 40% of the inquiries and now it’s fallen down to about 20%. There’s a lot of dreamers out there. That’s what we’re thinking.
      • Mark: There’s a lot of people shopping, but they’re not buying yet.
      • Paul: Not quite yet. Now basically there’s the people that are booking are kind of falling into two buckets. Normally we would have kind of a nice smooth curve of not too many short notice bookings and then it would be a bulge and then tail off farther out. But what we’re finding is that people are booking within a 2-week window, so short notice, or their booking into 2022. We recently extended our booking calendar out 26 months and that’s driven some surprisingly long-term bookings. It’s that middle that’s missing and I think that’s where they want to go. But until such time as you can actually get on a plane and happily go to London without having a 14-day quarantine when you show up, people are just not going to do it.
      • Mark: Super. Paul Melhus, CEO of ToursByLocals. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us here at the TravelCommons.
    • Bridge Music — Gargantua by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer

    Rebuilding Travel Muscle

    • Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have  atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers — well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips — what to pack, when to leave — things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel — to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland — I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.
    • Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown — first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.
    • It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal. 
    • At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need — new places with new people to see and new things to do.  
    • The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight — first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175
    • I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the YouTube channel.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow.
    • I’m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot — before COVID — or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.
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  • Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism

    Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism

    Bar at Modern Times' Taproom
    I wonder what they serve here

    Looking at the Beer section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the This Week in Craft Beer podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz’s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages. 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 below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174:

    This Week

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in Ocean Beach a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.
    • It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day — beaches or rocks — and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.
    • The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.
    • This all really surprised me. All my prior flights — to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix — there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.
    • Bridge music — Dreaming by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

    Following Up

    • Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:
      • “In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.
      • As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.
    • Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to “read the small print” is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.
    • In the last couple of episodes, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.
    • In the last episode, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car — period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill – top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works — except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the Twitter team got back to me pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.
    • There was a spate of articles this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the Financial Times article reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers — re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In episode #160, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Emily and the Djembe by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. Ft: Emily via Briareus

    Taproom Tourism

    • Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his This Week in Craft Beer podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.
      • Mark: So what are you drinking?
      • Rob: I’ve got a Bio Machine Brew Co I had on the podcast about six weeks ago.
      • Mark: I’m doing a Springbock from Half Acre, about 6.8%. It’s not a shy beer
      • Rob: Good Lunchtime beer. Yeah.
      • Mark: Taproom Tourism. Why do we go and search out brewery tap rooms as opposed to the cool beer bar?
      • Rob: You want to be drinking at the source I think is the first point. So it’s just in terms of freshness and, quite frankly, value for money, but also variety. And just everything’s better without the middleman. If I can sit and chat to the brewer while I’m drinking their beer, then so much the better. At least even the guy behind the bar is going to know a lot more about products and the nature of the business than our average barman. And, you know, as good as they might be, it’s always better dealing direct, I think.
      • Mark: As I was thinking about it, I had that same set of thoughts. First of all, there’s more selection and especially if you want to go past the usual suspects. So if you want to go past the usual IPAs, maybe random stouts and stuff like that, and the light wheat that they’ll put on to keep the non-beer drinkers happy. If you want to get past that and you want to see where that brewer is stretching their muscles a little bit, then you’re right. You gotta go to the taproom because nobody else is going to take it. And to your point also, from a cost standpoint, you’re going to be able to do flights or at least small pours, which means you’re going to be more willing to try the wacky beer.
      • Rob: Yes, definitely. I want to taste every single beer in the taproom if I can. Another aspect, I just like the atmosphere in taprooms. Some of them are super slick and fabulously well fitted out. And others are literally some barrels to sit on or empty pallets. Complete extremes of decor, but they’re always sort of charming in their own way. And there’s something about being in a brewery that pleases me, even if I’m not drinking.
      • Mark: My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering and I never practiced as a chemical engineer. But having said that, I really like to go and look at breweries. There was one time we were in Portland. The brewery was in the basement. I’m kind of looking at going “How in the hell did they get these tanks down here?” Because there was no obvious way that you could get a massive steel tank down into this basement. And then we ended up sitting wedged in a table between three fermentation tanks. It wasn’t like we were looking at the brewery; we were in the brewery.
      • Rob: You were actually in an integral part of it. I had a very similar experience, actually, one of the new local breweries that’s opened up here in Reading that I’ve become quite friendly with called Crafty Cats, and they are brewing in an impractical barn, terribly difficult to sanitize everything. It’s a broken concrete floor. We went round this brewery, and we started actually with the finished beer and he said, Well, taste this and taste this and this and which we’re getting right back to the last one we tasted. It was the first time I’ve ever tasted what I can only describe as the overwhelming smell of brewer’s yeast you get in a brewery. That was what this liquid tasted like, and I’ve never tasted anything quite like it before. It was a really interesting experience.
      • Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?
      • Rob: It’s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I’m just going to Google. First of all, I’ll plot a Google map for the city. I’ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I’ll go to Untappd and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable, quite frankly. If a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it’s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it’s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh…;  3.8, it’s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I’m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I’m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.
      • Mark: But that’s kind of the DIY spin. And I know, Rob, that you’re doing with This Week In Craft Brewing, you guys are launching tours, the Good Lord willing and COVID don’t rise…
      • Rob: Yeah. I’ve been lucky enough to travel pretty frequently to East Coast of the US for business trips, particularly the past 10 years. And so I’ve always been comfortable with traveling in the US, And in the last few years, I’ve been basing my travel around taproom visits quite frankly. And so I’ve been doing business trips where I have some business meetings, but really, what I’m doing is trying to plan my schedule so I’m in the right place at the right time each evening to visit the tap room that I want to visit. And so, I’ve become quite familiar with the tap rooms most of the way down the East Coast. Since then, I’ve got my This Week In Craft Beer business (if you want to call it a business) off the ground. It’s a fun side project. We publish a weekly newsletter and we do a weekly podcast doing a different interview with the UK Craft Brewery each week. And so, in conversation with the brewers, I started to float the idea with them, either before or afterwards, when we’re wrapping up and finishing off the beer and whatever. I would say, “Well, I’m thinking about putting together tours to the US. Does that sound like something you’d be interested in?” And so, on the back of a few of those conversations, I started to figure out that what we could do is actually promote it with the brewer and basically sell it to the brewer’s customers and have the brewer come on the tour. So we’ll put together a schedule where we’re going to visit, hopefully, some amazing tap rooms. From what I know about how brewers react to being visited by other brewers, usually they get the red carpet out. Brewers are very hospitable. It’s almost like a private members club. You know, one brewer visits another brewer, and they may be supremely welcome. So I’m hoping that we can leverage that, and I think we can put together a pretty killer 5-day, 4-night tour where we visit 2 tap rooms a day and have a fantastic curated experience at each one.
      • You may be seeding a whole other series of collabs, of cross-Atlantic collabs.
      • Rob: That would be nice. Yeah, I hope so.
      • Mark: Here’s the last thing I wanted to think about – best, worst, most unusual taproom experience. It got me thinking about the number of times that going to tap rooms, search them out, and then going out to them has taken me to parts of town that I would not normally go. I mean, it gets you out of it, busts you out of what I’ve called in the travel bubble or the tourist route.
      • Rob: I’ve been to a few places where I probably shouldn’t have been in search of tap rooms. You know, that’s the thing. Isn’t as well as you know. I think I remember once in Baltimore where I, you know, I ended up probably in a slightly down-on-its-luck neighborhood. Let’s call it that for one of the better turn of phrase. And that’s when you start to think “Well, maybe, you know, is there a taproom down here? And maybe I shouldn’t perhaps be wandering this district.” I don’t know, but I do. What I do know when I’m in the US is I can always break out my British accent and that, you know, it doesn’t matter how sort of threatening the bad guys look as soon as they hear I’m from the UK, they immediately become unofficial tour guides. And, you know, they want to point me in the right direction and give me advice and make sure I’m enjoying my visit to the city. And it is an extraordinary experience and this, you know, it’s overwhelming that level of hospitality that we always get from Americans. And that’s it’s not an exaggeration to say that I don’t think I could find myself in any part of any city where that didn’t work, and it hasn’t happened yet anyway. So probably once too many. I’ll push that luck too far. It’s worked so far anyway.
      • Mark: And again, you talk about doing business trips? I was in mid Jersey, and I found this place Demented Brewing, and I found it on Untappd. And so we head out there, we find it. It’s across the street from a glass repair shop and sort of kitty corner from a motorcycle repair shop. But no food, no food trucks or anything and said “Okay, well, we’re gonna need to lay a base here.” And so, across the street was this little place with an El Salvadorian flag hanging out the front of it. And it’s some little family restaurant/bodega thing, and we roll in there. They look at us like, “Who in the hell are you guys?” We go. We like the menu posted up on the wall. It’s like pupusa is I don’t know. We’re like, give us all of them, right? Just like give us one of all; we’re gonna do a flight of pupusas and then we went back across the street, but at that time in New Jersey, they had to give you a tour.
      • Rob: You have to do a tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
      • Mark: Okay, so you hit that too. You had to do a tour before you could do the sample.
      • Rob: I’ve been to more places in Jersey than probably anywhere else, actually.
      • Mark: It’s the only place I’ve had that happen has been in Jersey. Okay, “Well, you got to do a tour, then you can have beer at the tap room.” I was like, “Okay, fine. Cool.” It was a very abbreviated tour.
      • Rob: Yeah. I actually watched that policy evolve in 2018 from at the start of the year, where they were quite strict about saying yet we’ve got to give you a bit of a tour, you know. And after a while, it got to the stage where they just had laminates printed where they have shown you the map of the brewery. If you’d like us to come and show you any particular feature on this, please let us know. But just otherwise, you can just sit at the bar and look at it while you have your beer and say that obviously sort of figured out that that was sufficient to satisfy the local regulations.
      • Rob: Probably my best taproom experience in Asia was in Hanoi, Vietnam, and there’s a bar there called the Standing Bar, which I think is by far the most celebrated craft beer bar in probably the whole of Vietnam. Actually, a great selection of beer. When we were there, they had a comedy night and they’d flown in English- speaking comedy acts from a number of different Asian capitals. And it was fantastic. There’s a big local beer scene in Vietnam. It’s called Bia Hoi. It’s basically lager, 3.5-3.8% alcohol I think, but served almost ice cold in ice glasses. So it’s drunk extremely cold, and it’s very hot and humid there, of course, and these Bia Hoi bars are — to say they’re on every street is understating it. About every third shop front is a Bia Hoi bar, and they’re mostly… they’re not bars in the way that you would recognize that term. They’re oftentimes just a little sort of plastic furniture, almost in, but the front room on the ground floor, you know, So you walk in there and you sit down and they’re always really tiny because we’re obviously taller than the Vietnamese. So you know, you sort of get your knees under your chin. It felt like going back to kindergarten, where you’re going to the parents’ evening at school and you’re sitting on the tiny chairs that are designed for five- and six-year-olds. It was exactly like that, these bia hoy bars. It was a good experience drinking bia hoi.  Crap beer, of course, but you know, it was just, you know, it’s cold and very refreshing. You can drink lots of it because it’s very weak. But the point is, bia hoi is like 20 cents a pint. Something like; that is super super cheap. And the beer in the Standing Bar was, quite frankly, Western European craft beer prices and then some. You know, you were paying probably $10 plus for a pint, maybe more than that. So this was a good beer, you know, They had some good Vietnamese beers. They had imported beers from around Asia. So it was a good choice of craft beer, as I would recognize that. But 20-30 times the price of the local beers, you know. And it was bringing it back to the comedy night. Several of the comedians were absolutely ripping into the crowd, saying, “You know what? Are you guys doing it? How on earth can you justify paying the price of the beer in this bullshit bar when you could be next door drinking pints of bia hoi with the locals for 20 cents a pint? You know, it’s ridiculous. You should be ashamed of yourselves” and you are absolutely right. It was a good experience.
    • Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer podcast feed, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the TravelCommons website, Facebook page or YouTube channel for the full video.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174
    • I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the YouTube channel.
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  • Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles

    Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles

    People Camping Out on Airport Cots
    Wait Here ’til Your COVID Test is Negative

    As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of InsuranceQuotes.com to find out what’s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. 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 below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173:

    This Week

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake — sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.
    • No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking. 
    • And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.
    • I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing — leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected. 
    • Bridge Music — Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve

    Following Up

    • I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the meme you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line — “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance — travelcommons.com — and drop me a line at comments@travelcommons.com with your thoughts.
    • Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an article about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article — there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.
    • Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.
      • I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don’t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.
    • Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you — I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is — Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.
    • One of my absolute favorite beer bars, Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”  Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.
    • After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in episode #164 that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a lot more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks. 
    • If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a data breach at SITA. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in episode #169 when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about SITA. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines — in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with — the Marriott hacks in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at British Airways and Cathay Pacific. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to — often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising — in a sad way — that not more of this happens.
    • Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”  And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules — all of them, not just the ones you agree with — then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck

    What’s New in Travel Insurance

    • A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in episode #163, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at InsuranceQuotes.com, to come onto the podcast and give us an update: 
      • Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of InsuranceQuotes.com was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:  a) they didn’t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and  b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What’s the current situation regarding travel insurance?
      • Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there’s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn’t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we’re not going to cover because it’s now a known event.” It would be like there’s a hurricane that’s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can’t fly. It’s a known event, and so they’re not going to cover that. So that’s where we came from. And then, you’re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what’s going on, so let’s regroup.”  And now they’ve regrouped, and it’s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they’ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”
      • Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.  If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you’ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what’s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?
      • Michael: Two main things… One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they’re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it’s going to come down to is whether it’s out of your control. If it’s something that you’ve neglected to do, it’s never going to be covered. The policies I’ve reviewed, I haven’t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven’t got a negative test. So if you’re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you’re delayed at security while you’re being tested, that’s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you’re going to have time to get through security.
      • Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I’ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I’ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?
      • Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that’s going to be everyone’s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can’t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.
      • Mark: So now let’s flip that. I’ve taken my test, it’s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I’ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can’t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?
      • Michael: There’s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they’re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they’ll jump in and cover anything that’s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that’s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you’re delayed because you can’t travel because of a restriction like that, and that’s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you’re waiting and meals while you’re waiting, and they’ll get you back home safely. So that’s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.
      • Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I’ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn’t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I’ve actually bought that coverage?
      • Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.
      • Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?
      • Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who’s offering that policy. If it doesn’t really go into much detail, or if it’s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider’s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that’s gonna be probably your best resource.
      • Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I’m thinking about booking, say, a week’s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn’t letting Americans in” but won’t cover the more generic “Oh, I’m afraid to travel” kind of reason.
      • Michael: The question of “if you’re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it’s not laid out your policy, it’s not gonna be covered. So that’s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you’re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I’m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I’m going to bravely travel wherever I’m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I’m seeing, they’re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That’s kind of the cheapest “I’m feeling brave” policy. “I’m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.
      • Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at InsuranceQuotes.com, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.
      • Michael: Thank you so much.
    • Bridge music — Crazy Love-The Alex & Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex & Bradsucks

    Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles

    • Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs — those that I know of — and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances — enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night — at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.
    • When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.
    • But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible
    • Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
    • But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.
    • But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.  First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend all Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, “‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’”. OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.
    • And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12. 
    • Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.
    • But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts — your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put all my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her Fascination Design firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.
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  • Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson

    Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson

    Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of Koala about how he’s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go over to the Subscribe section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #172:

    This Week

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, with a big Polish population, it’s Pączki Day and I had mine for breakfast — Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.
    • But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, and not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita — which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.
    • Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (Delta’s the last one standing), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.
    • Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest — the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row — aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.
    • Bridge Music — P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin

    Following Up

    • The story of the guy who lived for 3 months on the secure side of O’Hare’s domestic terminals after getting off his flight from LA using an airport ID badge that an airport operations manager had reported missing back in October.  Shades of Tom Hanks’ character in “The Terminal”. Now, O’Hare is a big airport but it’s not “hang out for 3 months unnoticed” big. There are hundreds of TSA, Chicago Police, and airport security staff — not to mention all the airline gate agents, wheelchair porters, restaurant workers, and airport maintenance staff. And not one of them noticed this guy wandering around at all hours with an expired badge, even when passenger volumes are cut in half — until finally, 2 United Airlines workers asked to see his ID. This is bad — like Cats, The Movie-level bad, like Fyre Festival bad. Seems that, 20 years on from 9/11, “see something, say something” has faded. The TSA and Chicago Dept of Aviation should have to come up with some answers — but a month on, I think they’ll quietly drop the charges and bury this thing, hoping that the next guy is a bit more obvious.
    • In the last episode, I wondered what the airlines and hotels will do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer and closed saying “it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May”. Well, I was off by, say 4-5 months. Things are moving fast. A week after posting that episode, I got an email from Southwest saying they were extending my Companion Pass from June to Dec, and then offers from American and United for status qualifier accelerators. The slooow roll-out of coronavirus vaccines is cutting into what was an end-of-year travel planning spurt. ValuePenguin — we’ve talked to them in prior episodes about travel credit cards — they did a survey in December and found people getting rev’d up for travel — 16% of respondents booked travel as a result of vaccine approvals, 34% had bought plane tickets within the last month, and, in a turnaround from earlier in the year, 47% had increased use of travel credit cards to earn miles to fund their next trip. But two months on from that survey, you already hear some folks starting to write off the summer. Which, with airlines talking about new furloughs and hotel unemployment back up to 23% in January, isn’t great news for anyone.
    • I also got emails from Iberia and British Airways reminding me that I have Avios balances with each of them that are expiring; Iberia’s at the end of March; BA’s the end of the year (interesting difference in warning periods). Iberia and BA merged 10-11 years ago to form IAG which later bought Aer Lingus, and all 3 use Avios points for their frequent flyer programs but they keep their programs separate. So I have different Avios balances at all three. For most of these programs, you need to have some activity over 24-36 months to keep your point balance. Some airlines have extended these timelines for COVID, but apparently not Iberia or BA. In the past, the easiest thing to do was transfer over the minimum number of credit card points from Chase or Amex — usually 1,000 points — and that activity would reset the clock. I was about to run that play again, but something made me check out the rules first. And, sure as hell, the Iberia website says that transferring miles doesn’t count as activity. Now while Iberia’s and BA’s Avios programs are separate, you can transfer points between them if you dig hard enough — I talked about burning a Saturday afternoon on this back in episode #136. But they’ve made it easier in the intervening years; I scrounged around and found the page I needed to transfer all my Iberia Avios points to my BA account. I’ll give it a month to see if BA considers this transfer as enough “activity” to reset the 36-month clock. If not, I have until the end of the year to try an Amex transfer or, failing that, code a night’s Marriott or Hyatt stay to my BA account. Reminds me to make the rounds of my other odds-n-ends loyalty programs and see what else might be expiring.
    • I mentioned in the last segment that we hit the PHX Amex Centurion Lounge before flying home from our desert hiking week. I’ve talked in past episodes about how these lounges are head-and-shoulders above the regular US airline lounges — great food, open bars. The only problems — not enough of them and, because they’re a great deal, they get crowded. Or did pre-COVID. Walking into the PHX lounge, we saw maybe a dozen people. They’re still serving food, but they now have staff dishing it out for you from the buffet line. But we’d picked up a couple of sandwiches from Pizzeria Bianco, a great pizza and panini place, so we were just looking for drinks. I thought about a beer, walking up to the bar, the tequila bottle caught my eye, reminding me we hadn’t been able to find a good margarita in Tucson. The bartender solved that problem; she made two great margaritas. So good, that I wanted to squeeze one more in before heading down to the gate. I walked up to the bar; different bartender; I hoped her margaritas were as good. She looked at me for a moment and then said, “I have to be honest with you; I’ve never made a margarita before, but I’ll give it a try.” She was one of the girls from the buffet line standing in for the bartender while she was on break. I could’ve pivoted to a beer, but when she said “I’ll give it a try.” “No problem,” I said, “I’ll walk you through it.” Grab the shaker, fill it with ice. Take the tequila bottle, fill the large end of the jigger, pour it into the shaker. Now turn the jigger over and fill the short end with Cointreau. Pour that in. Now a short shot of lime juice. Now put the lid on and shake it. Now strain it into that martini glass; we’ll skip the salt rim. She was great; a little nervous, but game for it. We thanked each other — me thanking her for yet another good margarita; she thanking me… but for what, not being another miserable, entitled Platinum card holder? Absolutely my best Centurion Lounge experience yet.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow

    Timeshares Without The Pitch

    • For our Tucson trip, Irene ended up booking on Airbnb what turned out to be someone’s timeshare rental in a golf resort west of Tucson. It was a new one for us, and a little different than the typical Airbnb experience — we had to put down a credit card for incidentals, and then had to check-out and check back in halfway thru the stay — but it was a nice place and, better yet, we didn’t get trapped in a small room for an hour-long sales pitch.
    • And so when we got back home and I got a note from Mike Kennedy introducing me to Koala, the timeshare rental search platform he co-founded and launched last August, I asked him to come onto the podcast to talk about timeshare rentals and how they fit into the travel eco-system:
      • Mark: Mike, help us understand how timeshare rental fits into that spectrum of accommodations that travelers might be more familiar with. If I think about that spectrum, I could go from hotels to B & Bs to vacation rentals to private home rentals. Where does timeshare rental fit?
      • Mike: That’s a great question. There’s kind of a natural bifurcation in options when you’re selecting accommodations for vacations. You’re either going down the route of an Airbnb or a VRBO.  You want to rent a home because you want some space, or you want to stay in something that is a hotel. But in those two scenarios, you typically have compromises, and the compromise with hotels is that, especially if you have a family, you’re typically getting one hotel room in cramming your family in or getting adjoining hotel rooms. But you get the confidence that it’s managed by Mariott or Hilton, etc. Conversely, if you’re getting a home rental, it’s the opposite. You have the ability to rent a whole home. You don’t have to leave three times a day for meals. However, you don’t know who it’s being cleaned by, or what protocols are being upheld. And in today’s world, those things are really important. The timeshare product is the only natural hybrid product in the marketplace. You have all the benefits and features of your vacation rentals like the living rooms, the shared bedrooms, washer and dryer; all that space that you want from a vacation rental. But it’s managed by a Marriott or Hilton, and it has resort amenities like swimming pools, check-in desks; things like that that give you the confidence again in today’s world with that, people really want. Before us, the options to get one of these was to pay a lot of money on these OTAs, these online travel agencies through a rental, or to go and buy into one of these programs. And that’s not really either affordable or even appealing to a lot of people.
      • Mark: What does Koala offer travelers that, say, Airbnb doesn’t? I recently rented a Club Wyndham timeshare in Tucson from an owner on Airbnb. So how would that transaction be different/better/more optimized on Koala?
      • Mike: So, a couple things. One. You don’t see a lot of timeshare inventory on Airbnb for the reasons I’m about to discuss. And that is because it is not a platform that is built for that product.
      • Mark: What are some of the unique pieces that make Airbnb not optimized for timeshare rental?
      • Mike: If you own a home, you can open up a calendar for 365 and you can set different prices and different availability based off of that open calendar. If you own a timeshare, you typically own a seven-day interval.  And how do you fit that into some place where it gets visibility for someone that may not be searching for those exact beginning and end dates? So, what ends up happening is that a lot of people show up to the resorts and the reservations are incorrect or wrong, or just not there at all. You know, it is a system because there’s a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like you had a fine experience, but they don’t manage that in a way that is designed to be managed. There’s a third party involved in this, the resort.  When it’s an Airbnb, it’s a host and it’s a traveler, and those two will figure out and arrange something. With a resort stay, there is a third party. There’s a guest certificate transfer that happens on the back end to ensure that your name as a traveler gets switched to the reservation ledger in the system to ensure that the guest gets to walk into that check-in successfully. We do all that. There are extra steps involved that we ensure. And we handle all of that.
      • Mark: So it feels like you’re acting as an OTA, an online travel agency like an Orbitz or an Expedia, to provide search, discovery and then booking.
      • Mike: Correct, yes
      • Mark: As you were working towards your August launch, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting that inventory so that people could search and book?
      • Mike: That is the question, right? So, I know this from my time in Hilton Club that there was a problem in how people underutilize their timeshares but still had fees to pay. And that went from “I bought this thing; I don’t understand it” all the way up to “I loved it for 10 years; I’m just done with it and now what?” and everything in between. But at the end of the day, if you have a $2000 annual fee to pay, it becomes a problem. So, I knew that it was something that if we connected with these owners, we could help solve that problem for them. What we didn’t understand was that, in many cases, these owners don’t even know what they own. They don’t know where to start. It’s not like you have a vacation rental, and you’re like “Oh, here’s the house; I take some photos; I’m going to throw up a price and I’m going to rent a couple nights out, and I’ll adjust the cost per night based off of rentals.” You have this thing that is either a fixed week or it’s not; it’s a specific resort or it’s not. And in many cases, people don’t really know what they bought. And in some cases, they bought something and then upgraded to something else. So that was by far the biggest problem was getting people to understand what they own. How do you create an asset out of that and leverage that asset in a way that could earn you some revenue? It’s still a process that we’re going through, like really making it very, very simple. You know, we’re not really just tapping into this supply; we’re really empowering a whole group of people to understand this process.
      • Mark: Mike, last question. How did you get this idea? How’d you get started on this down this path?
      • Mike: Yeah, good question. I was a musician when I was in my twenties, and I kind of meandered into residential real estate. And the real estate market in 2007 in New York, everywhere was just kind of flat. So, one of my good friends was like, “You should come check out this condo hotel; it’s fractional real estate.” I ask “What the heck is fractional real estate?” “No, come check it out. It’s Hilton.” “Alright.” I went in there. I’m like, This is cool. There’s a lot of hustle and bustle. My office is kind of dead; this office is moving. So, I joined the team. Three weeks into training, I ask “Is this a timeshare?”  They’re like “Yeah…”, but I was already hired in the job. It really started to resonate with me — the more and more time I spent with people that I sold, after they’re coming in over and over again, and we’re trying to upgrade them into something else. It was cool, this product is great, but now people are looking for ways out, and I don’t have answers for them. The solutions weren’t there on the back end that I was hoping for. So, it really was a direct result of me being in touch with those situations that I felt like I could help. And yeah, I took the leap and I said, Look, this is where this is a problem we’re solving. I think the industry is great. I think there’s a lot of upside. I think it’s got a bad rap, but I think if we mitigate some of that and amplify what people love about this industry, I think it will go a long way.
      • Mark: Fantastic. Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of KOALA. Mike, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast
      • Mike: Thanks, Mark.
    • Bridge music — The Long Goodbye by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476

    Notes on Tucson

    • As I said at the top of the show, Irene and I had a good trip to Tucson at the end of January — pretty much just hiking, eating, and drinking. I wrote it up in a blog post on the TravelCommons website — “Quick Notes on our Trip to Tucson”, though at over 1,700 words, I’m not sure it necessarily qualified as “quick.” But there are some pictures, and links to all the parks, restaurants, and taprooms we enjoyed. Also a link to the Tucson Instagram story on the TravelCommons Instagram page if you want to see some more informal pictures.
    • We flew into PHX rather than TUS because the non-stop flights were cheaper and there were more of them. I was going to rent a car anyways, so the 100-mile drive straight down I-10 seemed a good trade-off for better flights. The only hitch in that plan was the bus between the terminal and the rental car center. They limited capacity to 15 people, which made sense. However, they didn’t add buses to make up that lost capacity. Wasn’t a problem when we got on the bus at the terminal, but the queue at the rental car center stretched the length of the center; hundreds of people trying to get back to make their flight. I saw some folks bailing out and calling Ubers. Made a note to add an extra 30 minutes to our return time. Turned out we didn’t need it; walked straight from the Hertz lot onto a bus. But that was OK. I used that time for my margarita lesson — definitely a greater good.
    • Tucson sits kinda at the bottom of five sets of small-ish mountains; they’re an awkward size — bigger than hills, but except for the Santa Catalinas, don’t feel big enough to be “mountains”. Which was OK because all we wanted to do was hike, well really walk, the trails. To be outside under blue skies in the high 60’s/low 70’s; that’s what we really wanted to do; to take a break from grey Chicago and to be far enough away from people that we could walk around without masks. 
    • Back in episode #168, we talked about traveling for food, that food is one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. In that episode, I talked about eating our way through South Philly and a pasty tour of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Tucson, it was the hunt for Sonoran food, a type of Mexican cuisine that you don’t see much outside of, well, the Sonoran desert — Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It hasn’t “broken out” the way that, say, Tex-Mex and Baja and Oaxacan styles have. It’s all about beef, mostly carne asada grilled over mesquite and served in a thin flour tortilla that’s more like the wrappers you get with Chinese Mandarin food than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Cross-referencing a couple of local food blogs, I had a list of places to try. And honestly, it was a bit of hit-and-miss; mostly misses the first couple of nights, but then we hit gold at the end of our stay. Looking back, I think we tried the nicer places on the list first. They weren’t bad; they were fine, but not places I’d go out of my way to recommend. And after that — disappointment is too strong of a word, we kinda said, screw it. We found the Sonoran hot dog truck and ate a couple of $3 bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde off the hood of our rental car. And then drove over to a restaurant that’s website made it look very foody — scrolling photos of nicely plated dishes — but almost passed the building by; it looked like a repurposed Arby’s or Hardee’s with a vinyl sign pulled over the original one. But the food, especially the cabrito, the goat tacos, were phenomenal. Not all the dives were great; some disappointed, some were “meh”. But the ones that were great made it worth the “meh’s”.
    • But the absolute highlight of the trip? I was standing out on the back patio of our timeshare watching the sun set over the Tucson Mountains; it was beautiful; when I heard some rustling off to the right. What looked like a good-sized wild pig walked out from between two bushes and across the backyard. And then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – walking the same path across the backyard. They were javelinas, and Wikipedia told us that their groups are called “squadrons”.  Well, our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. And the next morning, a couple came back sniffing around the patio door. I wondered if they smelled the egg and toast I made for breakfast. They reminded us to keep that patio door closed.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #172
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her Fascination Design firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.
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  • Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips

    Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips

    Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!

    Was all set to head to San Diego for a week’s break from Chicago’s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions… and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of Privacy4Cars joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go over to the Subscribe section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171:

    This Week

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of 1.3 million on January 3rd, the last Sunday of the holiday season — though, to be fair,  this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.
    • However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after  Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.
    • I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.  And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it
    • On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement — “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.
    • So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.  
    • But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP — focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.
    • Bridge Music — Say Their Names – Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang

    Following Up

    • Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers — myself included — got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations — Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet. 
    • What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in the November episode (#169) when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales — it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.
    • We’ve talked in prior episodes about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID — deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast — open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout — that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use — things like Google Maps, Yelp — can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split Swarm from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic — Uptappd. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic — people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars — but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.  After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.
    • We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the last episode. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November — in one of my favorite publications, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (I’ll link to it in the show notes) — saying that temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements on top of their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion — especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a good fake driver’s license.  Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of Aruba was the first country to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, CommonPass, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, Travel Pass from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont

    Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car

    • A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article – the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.  I dunno — fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.  I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car. 
    • And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company Privacy4Cars, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.
      • Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?
      • Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.
      • Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I’ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full — personalized names, Jan’s iPhone, Timmy’s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that’s just bad in so many ways.
      • Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.
      • Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don’t clear themselves out of a rental car?
      • Andrea: All sorts — your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There’s all sorts of stuff that people really don’t understand that they’re living behind.
      • Mark: But when people do delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?
      • Andrea:  By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer’s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer’s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.
      • Mark: That’s where Privacy4Cars comes in. That’s where your app comes in — helping people get that right?
      • Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the Apple App Store or Google Play, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.
      • Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019.  I’d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I’ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.
      • Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it’s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here’s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance —  where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that’s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight  into the USB port of the car, don’t charge the phone unless you’re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger’s car. So you definitely don’t want to do that.
      • Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of Privacy4Cars.com, you can find his app on the Apple App store and on Google Play. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.
      • Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.
    • Bridge music — Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD

    2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips

    • I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here — and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.
    • First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk. 
    • Second, check your destination’s health requirements — and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think United’s is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, Sherpa, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.  Delta’s is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new. 
    • Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination — like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson — depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.
    • Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer — airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues — all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.
    • And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans — a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in episode #147, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago — me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done –this interview with Andrea, episode #167’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and episode #166’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Music, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe.
    • Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons Facebook page, and Twitter and Instagram feeds.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
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  • Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors

    Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors

    How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone
    (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)

    No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said “No vax, no fly”, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more – click here to download the podcast file, go over to the Subscribe section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then — not surprisingly — got cancelled at the beginning of September.  So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years — staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK — pre-kids — Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids — which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK — after kids — we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.
    • I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day — Sunday at about 1.2 million — was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.  Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode #147, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s busiest day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded. 
    • Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake — seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field — then  over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously — one to the north of the terminal and one to the south — and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them — 2, 3, 4…. Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck — because what else was I going to do? — and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes — sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers — some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.
    • Bridge Music — Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109

    Following Up

    • TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini — changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.  Allan wrote:
      • I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…
    • Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.
    • TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s Walden. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with The Brothers Karamazov, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And Walden, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving — it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto Civil Disobedience before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, Why We Sleep, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the  international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.
    • And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his Millennial Travel Podcast.  I’m trying to remember when we recorded this — had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning — it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.
    • In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering — “Office for the Day” — that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last — will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.
    • I’ve talked in past episodes about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.
    • In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a CNN article on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me — a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series, Isolation Kitchen, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.
    • For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status — moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone — drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons — one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge music — Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818

    Prove My Vax So I Can Fly

    • Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO — “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” — and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board. 
    • I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my Yellow Card — officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis — listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,….  It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot. 
    • That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the CommonPass app on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the AOKPass developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, Travel Pass, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app.
    • I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.
    • Bridge music — My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus

    Hereditary Road Warriors

    • I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about jobs running in the family. Some of the stats — a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward  chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.
    • Which got me thinking — does traveling — careers that require frequent traveling — run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods — tools, small machinery — and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery — things like hay balers and cotton pickers — for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel — Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.
    • And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.  So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”. 
    • Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” — comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks. 
    • Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity — an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed — the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts — all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Music, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe.
    • Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons Facebook page, and Twitter and Instagram feeds.
    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, Instagram account,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Follow me on Twitter
    • “Like” the TravelCommons Facebook page
    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers

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

    Locking Down The Christmas Tree

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

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169:

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

    Following Up

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

    Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler

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

    End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers

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

    Closing

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