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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.
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  • Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson

    Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson

    I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago.

    But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren’t wild pigs but javelinas, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called “squadrons”. 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. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.

    To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my Tucson Instagram Story on the TravelCommons Instagram Page

    Hiking

    As I mentioned in the last podcast, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn’t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges, we focused on hiking.

    Saguaro National Park is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, an 8-mile loop that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak.

    We planned to park at the King Canyon Trailhead, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail. It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I’d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.

    We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them.

    Tucson Mountain Park is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the Starr Pass Trailhead. This hike was a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday’s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained. It was a good afternoon’s hike.

    Sabino Canyon Recreational Area was our last hiking spot. It’s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren’t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.

    Eating

    All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into Sonoran food, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn’t yet broken out of its birthplace, in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, the way that Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have. Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it’s a burro, not a burrito; a caramelo, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially carne asada grilled over mesquite, is the default filling and it’s served in a thin flour tortilla that’s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Tucson Foodie and Andi Berlin, food writer at #ThisIsTucson, were my main guides to Sonoran food.

    Ruiz Hot Dogs food truck was our first stop. I’d read a lot about the Sonoran hot dog and coming from Chicago, another town with its own unique twist on a hot dog, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)

    El Taco Rustico was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They’re crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, a sort of “Mexican a jus,” for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn’t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression on us is a credit to Chef Juan Almanza but also a sad commentary on how the meat at too many taco joints is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)

    Tacos Apson was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple costillas tacos, grilled beef ribs. Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)

    Drinking

    I can’t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn’t on anyone’s list of top beer cities, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.

    1912 Brewing Menu Board

    1912 Brewing Company is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and turn out good beer over a wider variety of styles than most places – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105)

    Pueblo Vida Brewing Company is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was still closed due to COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from a walk-up window. We had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)

    Resources

    • Travel and Lodging
      • We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).
      • We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson. It was an easy drive that took us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn’t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.
      • Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at Starr Pass Golf Suites. It was a nice resort though we didn’t get around to using any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We’re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn’t that big, so we weren’t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.
    • Hiking
    • Sonoran Food
    • Craft Beer
  • 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
    • Follow me on Twitter
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    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex

    Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex

    Good End to 2019

    Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year’s Eve episode. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

    Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.
    • Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines — pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.
    • I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying  by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends — doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the Red Rock Country around Sedona, Arizona.  An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now this is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit.
    • Bridge Music — Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050

    Following Up

    • I pushed a picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury — and in my case not an insignificant upgrade — it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago. 
    • But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance — $85/day on a $50/day rental — and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.
    • Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said –
      • I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife
    • Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run — definitely more climate friendly.
    • I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery — at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process — optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys — a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years — “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.
    • Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that the November 2018 episode – #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide – was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick — pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an exposé on Away’s toxic work culture. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit — rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase — mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built a list of the things I really use on my trips, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 — because “Top 10” is a key search term — and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.
    • Number 2 on my list of ideas, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit — no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks — Global Entry 2.0 — that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt — and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off — I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.
    • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along — text or audio comment 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 — Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris & Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish

    Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex

    • Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”
    • And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one — a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket — to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast — gotta feed the beast — usually in public places — in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta  planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue — not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences. 
    • And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story — in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.
    • Maybe the pilot was distracted — a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the Airport Mesa trail in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all — it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to one website, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.
    • I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me — “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.
    • Tonight, though — New Year’s Eve night — I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle… or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
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