TravelCommons

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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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    • Direct link to the show
  • Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage

    Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage

    This Won’t Help Your Flier Sat Score

    In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of JD Power’s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz’s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. 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 #156:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew — Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland — and then back down to Charlottesville.
    • I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights — into DC Reagan and Nashville — and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention – first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me – and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.
    • Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.
    • In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber — no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week.
    • Bridge Music — Awel by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785

    Following Up

    • That’s the sound of my new Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.
    • I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer — Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the Brookland neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, Right Proper Brewing. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen — first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called Scooter Map that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat — I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow.
    • For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Tallinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the Victorinox Werks 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In episode #121, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the TravelPro Maxlite 5. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in episode #137 — it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.
    • Three years ago, back in episode #125, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.
    • Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity

    Keeping Fliers Happy

    • A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline – “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…
    • Interview with Michael Taylor, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power
    • Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here’s the link to the study summary on the JD Power website.

    Closing

    • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • Find TravelCommons on Stitcher, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iTunes, and Spotify The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe.
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    • If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites.
    • And if you check out the TravelCommons Instagram page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.
    • 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 #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election

    Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election

    An aggressive Uber Pool driver
    An aggressive Uber Pool driver

    Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we’d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded… almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. 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 #125:

    • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
    • Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week — the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller — just a handful of gates — and perhaps a bit dingier — maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses — not a lot of people, but a lot of space.
    • Then I had 3 weeks at home — my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel — standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road — because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.
    • We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine — nothing special in typical German airport style — until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security — it was 10 or 11am on a Friday — but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back — “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.
    • Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic — the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.
    • Bridge Music — Heaven by Los Lonely Boys

    Following Up

    • A few episodes back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions — including one about my stolen passport — took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.
    • Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my Rick Steves rant. Jim writes:
      • My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made
    • And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.
    • David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:
      • Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!
    • I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of Scotland The Best. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.
    • About a year ago in episode #117, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.
    • I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.
    • Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of Travel Security, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer — let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.
    • And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com — you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page — or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
    • Bridge Music — Heaven by Electric Skychurch

    Uber Driver Stories

    • I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.
    • But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)
    • A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.
    • A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.
    • A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam — chartered financial analyst — does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.
    • I find that many morning drivers — the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site — are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away — and she only had a quarter tank.
    • Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.
    • I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.
    • But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.
    • Bridge Music — Shadows by Antardhyan

    Overseas for the Election

    • My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.
    • On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.
    • I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.
    • The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up — “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”
    • Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.
    • After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that — walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky — we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.

    Closing

    • Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
    • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125
    • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
    • If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
    • Bridge music from IODA Promonet and PodSafe Audio
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