Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 26

A Travel Sob Story That Reveals a Common Risk for Travelers

On the Travel Show last weekend, I told about receiving a listener's e-mail that related the worst luck story to end all worst luck stories. A traveler flew with his wife to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to board a Princess cruise for a seven-day sailing of the Caribbean. When he arrived at the dock in early afternoon on Sunday, he found that the cruise had been cancelled because of engine trouble. He immediately phoned his travel agent and asked "Why didn't you alert me?" The travel agent answered that they had not made a phone call to him because Princess Cruises had advised the agent that it, Princess Cruises, would send the passenger an e-mail advising him of the cancellation. And sure enough, on returning home and checking his e-mails, this gentleman found that on Saturday afternoon, about four hours after he had made one last check of his e-mails and turned off his computer for the week to come, Princess Cruises had sent him an e-mail advising that the cruise had been cancelled. Although Princess Cruises will now refund the cost of the cruise, he believes he will be unable to obtain any additional compensation for the substantial expenses and losses he sustained. When he called his travel insurance company with respect to a policy he had taken out on that cruise, they responded they would not be sending him any money because the cruise had been cancelled by Princess, not by the passenger. The policy had been issued to repay expenses if the passenger had to cancel (for illness or other reasons). The lesson from all this? We all turn off our home computers when we go on a trip. And we all check them for last-minute e-mails before we do so. But a smart traveler waits until the very last moment to make a final check of e-mails and to turn off the computer. Prudent people do not time that last glance at e-mails for a full day in advance of leaving home (as he had done). They make a last-minute check for last-minute messages. And if they carry a laptop with them on the trip, they check their laptop at the airport before boarding the plane for the flight to the cruise departure city.  Though my heart went out to this gentleman, he really betrayed his outmoded habits (didn't he?) by checking the computer and turning it off so long a time before leaving for the airport. Or should his travel agent have phoned him? 

If You're Planning a Trip to Europe, You'll Want to Know About Several Remarkable Meet-the-People Programs

I recently came across several initiatives in Europe that all aim at a similar goal: to provide a more up-close and personal travel experience. Meeting the French ( www.meetingthefrench.com ) is a combination B&B agency and activity booker that, in addition to arranging Paris homestays and B&B bookings, also provides experiences in which you can meet French people and learn something about their culture -- particularly culinary. Under "French Gourmet" section of the site, one can book any of a number of short cooking classes, market tours, or dinners with French hosts in their homes. (There is a link for such a dinner on the homepage, but it appears to be broken; however, if you click first on "French Gourmet" you will find several options where the links do work). B&B Ireland ( www.bandbireland.com/Pages/bed_breakfast_experience.html ) has launched a new initiative in which their member Bed and Breakfasts are slotted into nine specialist categories, most of which indicate a willingness on the part of the hosts to provide more than just a bed and a hearty Irish breakfast. They will also provide a deeper knowledge about some aspect of Irish culture or tradition. These new categories range from Farmstays to Adventure Seekers, Food Lovers to Eco Friendly, and Anglers to Gaeltacht Experience (for those interested in the Irish language). Plus One Berlin ( www.plusoneberlin.com ) is a combination of lodging (in a funky, modernist efficiency apartment in an up-and-coming arts area of Berlin) with the services of a well-connected local to provide insider knowledge, either over drinks or on a short tour of the city. The cost -- €120 a night -- is perhaps a bit more than you'd spend for most equivalent apartment rentals in Berlin, but with the added services of a local guide. Moscow Greeter ( www.moscowgreeter.ru ) has been around for a while, and is similar to such greeter programs in North America and Australia, providing a free walking tour of Russia's capital with a local resident. Meet the Danes ( www.meetthedanes.dk ) is a final, government-run program that provides all sorts of assistance and interesting exposure to the life of that country. Take a look at the interesting site.   

My Parting Response to Readers Who Believe That the TSA Should be Disbanded or Restricted

Because I have a hip replacement, and thus have metal in my body, I set off the alarm every time I pass through Security at an airport. I am thus patted down on every single visit to an airport, and in both directions. And because I travel by air much more frequently than most normal Americans, I have been patted down on nearly four hundred occasions over the past ten years. Never once has that patting down been inappropriate or out of bounds. The TSA agents who have responded to the request, "Male Assist," have never once been anything other than totally courteous, efficient and detached. They have explained what they were about to do, have politely inquired whether I would like to have this done privately (I always respond that I have no objection to doing it there, on the spot), and on each such occasion the TSA person has donned rubber gloves and conducted any intimate touching with the back of their hands. Not one of them has been a thrill-seeker or a pervert, and they have done only what was needed to determine that I was not concealing explosives or weapons on my person.  It was therefore with astonishment that I read the dozen-or-so negative comments that have been made in response to my recent blog post (scroll down for the comments) in which I discussed the campaign to discredit the TSA, or to replace them with the employees of private, profit-seeking companies, or to force them to discontinue certain security practices (like requiring passenger to take off their shoes and place them on the belt, or to permit passengers to carry large containers of liquid onto flights). See the comment to my blog that states we should "get rid of the body scanners, get rid of the shoe removal, get rid of the liquid restrictions." One wonders what world these strident sorts are living in. Have they never heard of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who concealed explosives in his footwear that were capable of bringing down a plane? Have they never heard of the would-be terrorist who attempted to ignite explosive liquids that he brought onto a plane? What is especially striking about these comments is the extreme quality of the assertions made in them (please note that I do not call them "hysterical"), assertions so spectacular as to make one wonder. One of the comment-providers actually states that "my testicles were removed from my underwear" by a TSA agent conducting a pat-down. Could this really be? Or is it a fantasy? Slightly less dramatic are the claims that some of the 50,000 members of the TSA have, on occasion, been found to have committed crimes, as any group of 50,000 airport workers would be found to have done. If private companies were now brought in to provide security at our airports, they too would undoubtedly number 50,000 persons in size nationwide, including some unsavory types that had slipped through a screening process. Do the opponents of the TSA really claim that the calibre of TSA's work force is less impressive than the bored and bumbling types that used to maintain the security gates prior to 9/11 and who permitted the 19 hijackers to pass almost effortlessly onto the planes they later seized? We are a democracy that have resolved to thwart the terrorists. We have decided to put up with inconvenience as a means of preventing them from seizing our planes in the midst of flight and crashing them into buildings. And our resolve has paid off: in the ten years since 9/11, no American airplane has been seized by terrorists, as may havehappened if we had simply decided to let people wander onto planes without a thorough check. We constantly hear of terrorists around the world (the latest one killed three French paratroopers, three children and one teacher) who would have been more than willing to sacrifice their own lives in the course of an air hijacking. We have stopped them from doing so by the measures we have taken. And yet, these super-libertarians who have responded to my blog have accused me of making "the sort of argument that allowed Hitler to rise to power." Another such person has argued that 9/11 was a "staged event" that does not warrant our security procedures. I trust that the overwhelming percentage of our readers are grateful for the conscientious performance of their work by the TSA.

Those Newspaper Columnists and Internet Bloggers Who Ridicule the TSA Have Very Short Memories

The media is full of attacks against the Transportation and Security Administration. You can hardly spend a day at a computer without reading the snide remarks of bloggers attempting to ridicule the people who make you take off your shoes and wristwatches as you pass through electronic security gates at the airports. You read sarcastic newspaper criticism to the same effect. Columnists looking for a topic to titillate their readers invariably fall back upon various colorful examples of the TSA's alleged rigidity. We are told that airport agents recently "patted down" a two-year-old toddler. The same thing, apparently, has been done to senior citizens over the age of 80. People in wheelchairs, we're advised, are also subject to totally unreasonable searches. After all, the pundits chortle, those wheelchair-bound elders couldn't possibly be terrorists. And terrorists wouldn't dream of concealing weapons on a wheelchair-bound senior. How stupid can the federal agents be? And so it goes. Without ever suggesting a realistic alternative to the TSA, a steady, withering barrage of criticism has been leveled at the people whom we have chosen to protect us from being blown up in the air. And recently, at long last, those humorous quips have led to an actual practical proposal: Let's go back to the way it was. Can you believe that certain local airports -- some of them on the verge of bankruptcy, many staffed by municipal officials of dubious virtue -- are arguing that they should again privatize the function of security, should substitute their own local paid employees for those of the TSA? One wonders whether these brave airport officials have a memory, a recollection of the way that airport security worked prior to 9/11. Do they remember the bumbling, bored, types -- you'll notice I don't call them stumblebums -- who used to casually wave us onto airplanes? The way it was. Airports wanting to spend the least amount of money possible in hiring private companies to handle airport security. The companies themselves desperately pursuing a profit by paying the least amount of salary possible to the persons they hired. The private security agents themselves working for sub-standard wages, willing to accept the worst possible conditions because of their inability to get a better job.
Frommers.com contributor Sascha Segan wrote this on the anniversary of 9/11:

In 2001, airport security paid less than the starting salaries at airport fast-food restaurants. In 1987, security screeners allowed 20% of dangerous objects to pass through checkpoints, and their performance had actually gotten worse by 2001, General Accounting Office official Gerald Dillingham said then.
Argenbright Security, which ran screening operations at 46 of the nation's busiest airports in 2001, had been convicted in federal court of hiring felons as security screeners; that year, the DOT found it still employed 37 people with outstanding arrest warrants. According to the TSA, federalizing airport security has lowered worker turnover from 125% per year to 6.4%.

 I thank heaven for the zealousness of the TSA. Every time I am patted down, I am grateful for security agents who take their jobs seriously. I am conscious of the fact that their zealousness is deterring all sorts of would-be terrorists from attempting to carry weapons onto planes. And I am astonished at the shortsighted lack of memory on the part of various newspaper and internet commentators who enjoy the act of ridiculing the TSA. Thank heaven we at last have a security agency that isn't affected by the profit motive. Thank heaven they are patting down even the most unlikely suspects, in the hope of deterring a terrorist from attempting to avoid their security barriers. Thank heaven we have an agency that remembers 9/11. Remembers it in the way that various newspaper and internet pundits haven't.

More and More Smart Tourists Are Using Low-Cost Apartments for Their Overnight Stays

When it comes to searching for advantageous airfares, we now have eight websites that are widely acknowledged as being the best possible tools for doing so: Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Dohop, Momondo, Kayak, Hipmunk, and Google's Flight product.
 
When it comes to searching for rental of a short-term apartment in the destination you are considering, the options are far more numerous. That's because each destination has numerous local real estate agencies that offer apartments for rent. Trouble is that these agencies are either unknown to you, or difficult to assess, or lacking in their ability to communicate in English, or perhaps unreliable.
 
Apart from the local firms, six apartment-searching websites are now established as worldwide in the areas they search, and quite effective in finding a good value in the short-term rental of an apartment. These are: Rentalo.com ( www.rentalo.com ), Airbnb ( www.airbnb.com ), Wimdu ( www.wimdu.com ), VRBO ( www.vrbo.com ), HomeAway ( www.homeaway.com ), and Enless Vactaion Rentals ( www.eventals.com ).
 
Travelers making use of these six websites are, in my view, the most likely to enjoy an affordable vacation. With international airfares skyrocketing, it has become necessary to offset those fares with low costs for accommodations, and the most effective way to do so is to take advantage of alternative lodgings in place of high-priced hotels. For travelers who are unwilling to stay in hostels (the other alternative means of cutting your costs for accommodations), the apartment offers spacious and comfortable lodgings, a non-tourist residential location, and the ability to prepare an occasional meal in the kitchen that comes with almost every apartment. Quite often nowadays, the ability to continue making international trips depends on your decision to seek out an apartment for your overnight stays -- a decision that often requires that you schedule a stay of at least a week in each of the destinations you visit.

Late Bookers Celebrate! Rates are Down This Year for Stays in Most Spring Break-Type Locations

Most public schools, and a great many colleges, schedule their spring breaks for the immediate days before Easter. And because Easter is unusually early this year -- April 8 instead of April 24 last year -- you have only a matter of days to schedule your travels for that period, if indeed you wish to avoid the dreaded staycation while all your friends are living it up.
 
A number of recent articles, including one by my daughter, have listed some of the major travel decisions that both families and students are apparently making for their own spring break. Surprisingly, there seems to be a trend towards less raucous vacations -- i.e., those spent in Europe and Asia -- by students wishing to beef up their resumes by showing that they have attempted to widen their horizons by traveling overseas. (It all reflects the poor job situation that will probably be faced by graduating seniors in June of this year, resulting in an effort to improve the presentation of their background and experience).
 
For the non-serious spring breaker, the cruise is a leading contender this year, because cruise prices are unusually soft, and a great many bargains are to be had. It was recently pointed out by Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor of Cruise Critic ( www.cruisecritic.com ), that as desirable a ship as the brand-new New Amsterdam of Holland America is occasionally charging as little as $449 for a seven-day cruise of the western Caribbean.
 
Cancun and Cabo San Lucas remain cheap and popular stand-outs in Mexican tourism, as contrasted with Acapulco and Mazatlan that have lost much of their following because of nearby, drug-related violence. Cancun and Baja California have escaped that opprobrium and will be full of spring breakers in the weeks ahead.  And because of the unseasonably warm winter in the northeast, badly reducing travel to the Caribbean, a great many Caribbean resorts have slashed their prices for stays in late March and early April, according to my daughter. For the same reason, Miami, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach are currently offering attractive prices. National parks are big, too, including Yellowstone (enjoying atypically warm weather).
 
As far as finding advantageous airfares to these destinations, I recently tested the newly-expanded Google.com/flights against several of the other airfare search engines, and got mixed results. In many cases, Google.com/flights disclosed the cheapest airfare for a non-stop flight, in other experiments using the same dates of departure and return, Expedia.com, Hipmunk.com or another came up with the best fares. It all goes to show that if you are determined to save even as much as $60 or $70 per person, you must now spend half-an-hour testing the same flight dates against no fewer than eight airfare search engines or aggregators: Google.com/flights, Expedia.com, Travelocity.com, Orbitz.com, Kayak.com, Momondo.com, HipMunk.com, and DoHop.com. Doing so is a bit tedious, but the exercise sometimes pays off in big savings, provided you're buying tickets for several persons traveling together. No one search engine is always the price leader.

Pauline Frommer Will Speak at Tomorrow's Travel & Adventure Show in Washington, D.C.

The winter travel show season comes to an end this weekend, with the Washington, D.C. Travel Show at the Washington, D.C., Convention Center, Hall A from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-4pm on Sunday. And my daughter Pauline, who has represented the Frommer travel guides at several important shows over the past months, will once again be a featured speaker at the last of those shows. She and I have recently appeared together at similar shows in major cities, like the New York Times Travel Show and Boston Globe Travel Show a few weeks ago, and she'll be condensing the points previously made by both of us in a fast-moving one-hour presentation from 11:30am-12:30pm on Saturday. I'll be taking the day off myself, preparing for Sunday's radio show, when both of us will be presenting two hours of travel starting at noon on the WOR radio network (live-streamed over www.wor710.com ).
 
Following her talk, Pauline will then be signing books at the author's booth maintained at the show by the Politics & Prose Bookstore of Washington, D.C. As always, she'll be delighted to meet readers of this blog and of the Frommer's travel guides generally, and we hope that a great many of you will stop by to say hello.

Again, her talk will be on Saturday morning only, starting at 11:30 a.m. Cheers to all!

Adding International Flights to Its Airfare Search Engine, Google is Now a Powerful Competitor to Online Travel Agencies

Over at the offices of the various airfare search engines, they're pouring themselves a stiff drink this morning to calm their nerves. That's because the mighty Google has just added international destinations -- some 500 of them -- to the airfares listed on Google's own new search engine, which features attractive maps that you "swipe" with your cursor to consider alternative itineraries. Google's newly-expanded service also includes charts next to your desired dates of departure and return that show alternative dates when better airfares might be available.
 
You can also refine your flight search by the characteristics that are listed on the left-hand side of each page you consult (e.g., filtering by airline alliance, connection cities, or specific times). Testing the new service, which Google calls Flight Search, you can put in a sample round-trip between Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia, which normally costs $1,416. And lo and behold, you'll find you can save $300 per person by flying to Sydney on Air Pacific via Nadi, The Fiji Islands.
 
All in all, the now-complete Google search engine -- which you'll find at www.google.com/flights -- is an attractive competitor to the others, and you'll want to give it a try when you are next looking for an airfare.

For Want of a Heavy Transformer, I Was Almost Unable to Recharge Electronics on a Recent Trip to the Caribbean

Like many of you, I carry a laptop and a cellphone on international trips, along with a small adaptor permitting me to plug a recharging cord into the electric outlet on my hotel room's wall. But on a recent trip to the Caribbean, I nearly came a cropper on an island where the electric current generated 220 volts. Plugging into an outlet there, I found that the electricity did nothing at all to recharge either the laptop computer or the cellphone, both of which apparently require voltage of 110 volts.
 
Actually, I was lucky, according to a techie friend. He claims I ran the risk of seriously damaging both of my electronic devices. When I saw that neither device was re-charging their batteries, I hastily phoned the front desk and learned they have a transformer for such purposes. Up to my room it came, a bulky metallic object weighing at least four pounds, and looking like it would power a nuclear energy plant. On came the lights on both my laptop and cellphone, and in a couple of hours, both of them were fully re-charged. At another hotel on a different island, I simply drew puzzled stares when I asked the front desk personnel whether they had transformers. They didn't.
 
I suppose it's possible to obtain a transformer before leaving on an international trip. I've never done so before, and was disappointed to learn that the Radio Shack near where I live doesn't carry any. Previously, I had assumed that the brick-like mechanism on the power cord for my laptop computer was such a transformer. It apparently isn't.
 
Anything I'm missing here? Although some hotels apparently have dual outlets, or separate outlets for 110 volts and 220 volts, other hotels don't. How do out readers solve this problem. Do you actually lug one of those heavy transformers with you on the plane?

I've Spent the Past Week in a Caribbean Destination Where the Setting and Atmosphere are Like the Tropics of Old

I've been a bit sporadic in my blogging over the past week, and my explanation (or excuse) is that I've been in the Caribbean, where the combination of a magnificent natural setting, strong sunlight and heat, and the constant sound of tropical music just aren't conducive to effort of any sort. And what's more, I've been in an unusual stretch of the Caribbean -- shuttling among some of the 32 islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines -- whose novelty and unspoiled nature are totally opposed, in my case, to hard work.
 
This is the southeastern Caribbean, about as far down as you can get in these tropical seas before you hit the coast of Venezuela. It's an area that's little known to many Americans, a place where you feel that you've gone back in time by about a century or two, a group of islands so sparsely populated that some of them boast a population of 200 to 300 people apiece. The island where I spent most of my time -- Bequia -- has 5,000 residents, and once you leave its main city of Port Elizabeth, you see very few other residents.
 
St. Vincent and the Grenadines are the usual model for that hoary cliché "the Caribbean as it used to be." It has no high-rise hotels, no international airport, no casinos, no giant modern shopping malls, and is visited by only an occasional cruiseship or two. Its main touristic activities are yachting and deep-sea diving, and to those pastimes you can add long, lazy afternoons on deserted beaches, drinks at makeshift wooden bars erected on an occasional and otherwise-deserted beach, lots of snorkeling, hiking to visit remarkable natural attractions, and an extraordinary turtle sanctuary (on Bequia) where an idealistic former skindiver devotes his life nowadays to protecting the turtle population from extinction.
 
All this may change about two years from now. An international airport capable of receiving large jets is now in construction on the main island of St. Vincent, and is predicted to become operational some time in 2014. That will permit people to fly directly to St. Vincent from major international cities. Currently, you get to St. Vincent (or to the seven other inhabited islands of the "Grenadines" which make up 31 of the total 32 islands) by boarding a small plane from either Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, Stl Lucia, or a few other places. I flew to St. Vincent from Barbados on one of those small planes, spent a few days on that "big" island (100,000 people), then took a ferry from St. Vincent to Bequia. I could have flown directly from Barbados to several other islands of the Grenadines, like to Union Island, Mustique, and several others.
 
Mustique is perhaps the best known of the Grenadines to readers of U.S. tabloids who follow the antics of the millionaires and billionaires who constitute most of Mustique's tourist crowd (Mustique has a population of 500 people, most of whom serve as servants at the 70-or-so magnificent villas that make up all the accommodations of this ritzy place, other than the 19 rooms of its sole hotel, the Cotton House ($1,500 a night for an average room in high season). Mustique was also the vacation home of the late Princess Margaret of Great Britain, and her presence here was dutifully noted in the world's press. Mustique is truly expensive, and it's a pity that its sky-high costs have stoked the incorrect assumption that the rest of St. Vincent and the Grenadines are just as costly. They aren't, and on both St. Vincent and many of the Grenadines (other than Mustique), you can find inexpensive b&bs and guesthouses, small tourist hotels, and modest villas that can be rented for very reasonable per-person costs if four or more persons occupy a villa.
 
Anyway, if you're looking for a different kind of Caribbean vacation -- one that resembles the Caribbean of old -- you'll want to buy a ticket on American Airlines or Jet Blue to Barbados, and then a ticket on either Liat Airlines or SVG Ailrlines to either St. Vincent or one of the islands of the Grenadines. I can guarantee you it will be a singular experience, and one that will blot out all thoughts of work, just as it did for me his past week.
 
But get there within the next two years. The opening of that international airport on St. Vincent may greatly change the atmosphere here, although everyone in the tourist industry swears it won't. And in fact, even when the first tourists board a standard jet to St. Vincent, rather than a small propeller plane as they now do, it may take a few more years before the real estate developers start planning their high-rises here.
 
I'm grateful I saw St. Vincent and the Grenadines in its present state, and I now return -- refreshed -- to my standard life.