Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 40

Save Money by Flying to European via Helsinki on Finnair

[image error] A lesser-known tactic for saving on trans-Atlantic flights is to fly to your ultimate destination on Finnair via Helsinki. True, this may require a stopover and a few hours-long connection time in the Finnish capital, and the advantageous fares will not permit departures on a weekend. But if you'll accept those drawbacks, you can get to London this coming September for as little as $728 round-trip, including all taxes, fees and surcharges.

Your saving will be even greater if your ultimate destination is one of those expensive-to-reach eastern destinations like Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Budapest, or Moscow. Again, you go there via Helsinki, and you'll need to be prepared to cool your heels there for a few hours before boarding a connecting flight. You've flown a fairly long distance out of your way, but you'll save as much as $300 off the cost of making a non-stop flight to such cities.

Go to Finnair's webstie ( www.finnair.com ), and you can test this thesis.

Photo Caption: Helsinki's cathedral. Jonicool/Frommers.com Community

Iceland Express's Fares to Copenhagen, Oslo & Berlin are even Better Those to London from NYC

In reviewing the September airfares of cost-cutting Iceland Express (not to be confused with the more expensive Icelandair), I've focused on their round-trip prices between New York and London (including all taxes and fees). Those are frequently as spectacular as in the high-$500s. I should have pointed out that their round-trips between New York and Copenhagen, Oslo and Berlin are even better. Try a test booking for a Saturday departure in September, a Saturday return, and you'll frequently find tickets selling as low as $608 to Copenhagen from New York, round-trip and including all taxes and fees. You'll pay only slightly more to Oslo, and you'll pay about $866 round-trip to Berlin (including all taxes and fees). Considering the distance flown, the inclusion of all taxes and fees, and the normal September prices on the standard carriers, those are excellent fares from Iceland Express.

All flights, of course, are via Reykjavik, which some travelers regard as a major advantage, lending them the opportunity to tour the capital of Iceland for a day or two en route.

On TripAdvisor, I was Staggered to Encounter Such Extreme Opposing Views Regarding a Single Las Vegas Hotel

For a glimpse into the difficulties of relying on TripAdvisor for your hotel choices, I can think of no better example than its ratings of the Excalibur hotel in Las Vegas. I went to it recently simply to test the ability of TripAdvisor to be of assistance.

Of the 3,741 write-ups of the Excalibur hotel in Trip Advisor, on the day I consulted it (August 23, 2011), 655 rated the hotel as "Excellent" (the highest rating) and 743 said it was "Poor" or "Terrible" (the lowest rating). Nine hundred twenty-five write-ups said it was "Average," and 1,418 said it was "Very Good."

If you go to the fifty-or-so initial travelers' comments on the Excalibur, you find-interspersed among those fifty-eight write-ups that are individually headed with the words "What a dump," "They don't care," "Stayed here once, won't be back," "The hotel is very dirty," "Stay away," "Disappointing," "It stinks,""Very disappointing."

Yet among the same fifty, you find eight persons claiming "Amazing experience," "Great choice," "Fantastic holiday," "Fantastic . . . great hotel," "Looooooved it!," "We love the Excalibur." "A great place to stay," and "Great stay."

How to choose? Were some of these appraisals written by starry-eyed, open-mouthed innocents? Were some written by caustic, hard-bitten haters? Were some real? Were some fake? It so happens that I have my own opinion of the Excalibur (which I won't reveal, in order not to prejudice these comments). But which opinion is correct? "Fantastic . . . great hotel" or "It stinks"?

I find it difficult to believe that some travelers rely on TripAdvisor. I'd rather go with the professionals, whose reputation depends on their correct appraisal of travel facilities.

Gate 1's One-Week Trip to Beijing Adds Additional Dates to a Crowded Period

Sensing the massive demand for a cheap week to Beijing in the month of November, Gate 1 Travel (tel. 800/682-3333; www.gate1travel.com ) has announced its own air-and-land package there for a six-night stay: $799 for persons booking prior to August 29, plus taxes of $290, for a grand total of $1,089, including round-trip air to Beijing from Los Angeles and a hotel with breakfast daily for six nights.

That price compares with China Spree's November package to Beijing from Los Angeles of $849, plus $71 in taxes (tel. 866/652-5656; www.chinaspree.com ), for a grand total of $920 per person. Not only is China Spree's program cheaper, but it also includes substantial escorted sightseeing of the major attractions (which Gate 1 does not), and it makes use of an outstanding hotel (while Gate 1 doesn't name the hotel it uses).

Nevertheless, it's important to keep Gate 1's package in mind—because two of China Spree's November dates are already sold out, and it seems probable that the remainder of its November space will be fully taken in just a short while. November is a fine time to tour China, and far more pleasant than in January and February (when still another tour operator, China Focus Travel, chimes in with an additional large number of seats for a one-weeker to Beijing at remarkable low rates).

Because these one-weekers to Beijing in November are an obvious big hit, and will all sell at a very rapid rate, you'll want to consider Gate 1 Travel as still another, third source of these excellent travel opportunities.

An Update on Room Rates in Las Vegas Reveals That Sin City is Still Having Problems

The price of a suite at the ultra-deluxe Vdara Hotel on the Strip in Las Vegas has just fallen to its deepest low ever. On August 28, 29, 30, 31 and September 1, and then again on September 5, 6, 7 and 8, glamorous suites at the Vdara will rent for $99 a night. We have never seen a price that low -- for suites, mind you -- at any ultra-deluxe hotel in Vegas.

The discounts are almost as dramatic in late November and during the first three weeks of December. Then -- and you can check this by going to the booking charts either at the websites of Vdara ( www.vdara.com ) or at MGM Resorts ( www.mgmresorts.com ) -- suites will rent for $105 a night per suite on November 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30 and December 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22.

The very cheapest digs in Vegas? Those are undoubtedly at the El Cortez Hotel, recently refurbished, on Fremont Street, where rates dip as low as $30 a night for a "vintage" room. $30 a night, did I say? Negotiate, and (according to people I trust) you'll end up with a decent room for $27 a night. This, of course, is in a somewhat seedy district of Vegas, but safe nonetheless, and in a 300-room hotel with a small fitness gym and other goodies.

Clearly, Vegas is still going through a difficult period. And your very best bet is to phone up the Vdara and negotiate for a suite at even lower prices than the ones I've cited.

A Team of Grad Students Has Developed a Tool to Root Out Fake Hotel and Restaurant Reviews

Not simply The New York Times, but a number of other worthy publications, have recently written about the effort of three graduate students at Cornell University to create a computer program that would enable user-generated websites to delete fake reviews. Yet in explaining the formulas and algorithms in their program, those students have also given tricksters a sure method for avoiding being caught.

A key factor in spotting a fake hotel and restaurant review, according to the Cornell students, is the absence in the fake recommendation of any physical characteristics of the hotel or restaurant. That's because the author of the fake recommendation has never been to the establishment in question.

But starting now, all that needs to be done is the insertion of a statement referring to "pleasant cream-colored walls of the coffee shop." That, in the logic of the new computer program, will immediately mark the review as authentic. And if the writer wants to be especially sure that his or her recommendation will pass muster, they need only pull up a photograph of the establishment on the internet, and comment about the actual physical characteristics of the establishment.

Other aspects of the new algorithm will also provide the secret of avoiding being caught. It's obvious that in the future, skillful writers of recommendations, or skillful authors of critical condemnations, will easily be able to avoid whatever patterns have been discovered by the Cornell whiz kids. Although these graduate students are now being offered jobs by the frantic, worried, recommendation sites (who all realize how serious is their inability to filter out fake reviews), the effort seems bound to fail.

To repeat my mantra: if a hotel is dependant on TripAdvisor and the like for its success, why won't it generate its own reviews? And how difficult is it to write a fake review that's indistinguishable from a genuine review?

The New York Times Addresses Bogus Reviews on User-Generated Recommendation Websites

This weekend, The New York Times devoted extensive coverage to the argument that TripAdvisor and Yelp, along with many non-travel related sites such as Amazon.com, are being massively manipulated by companies backing the products they purport to rate. You'll have to forgive me for feeling a certain sense of vindication: For years in this blog, I've argued that the very logic of user-generated content must ultimately lead to its exposure as being less than reliable.

When a hotel or restaurant becomes dependent for its success on receiving a large number of rave reviews, it stands to reason that such hotel will itself generate favorable reviews, that it will arrange for friends, associates, and even blatant tricksters to compose such reviews -- and direct them towards the nearest review site.

The New York Times put the matter in a more colorful manner. It actually found a number of websites that are currently paying $5 for each fake review (which it then posts on the user-generated website). In fact, in one such site, a fellow named nat1257 writes: "I will do 3 reviews for $5."

So people are making a living of sorts out of submitting fake reviews to TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Amazon. Thus, according to the Times, when you read in Amazon that a particular novel is "better than Tolstoy," that review was likely written by someone who was either compensated in some manner or has never read the book in question (or both).

I based my initial doubts about the usefulness of user-generated rviews on my own experience. In the early years of writing and publishing Europe on $5 a Day, I printed verbatim excerpts from the letters I had received from readers, in which they recommended particular budget hotels or restaurants. I placed those colorful excerpts into a section called "Readers' Selections" in each chapter. And I was proud to be the source of such helpful information.

It only slowly dawned on me, over a course of years, that many of these letters that purported to be from readers, had actually been generated by hotels and restaurants wanting to be in the book. And some of them were of unworthy establishments. Eventually, I had to drop "Readers' Selections" from the $5-a-day books. Readers, for better or for worse, had to rely on my judgments rather than on unsolicited letters.

The widespread practice of generating recommendations to TripAdvisor in particular, has become so prevalent that it is hardly any longer concealed. Public relations agencies boast that they will generate campaigns of fake recommendations. When my daughter recently spoke to the management of a tropical hotel, which had been named the best value on its particular island, she asked how they could have achieved that status, given that a much better and yet cheaper hotel was just a short walk away. She was told that the hotel itself had generated a letter-writing campaign to one of the recommendation services.

And when I pointed out, in a blog post of a few weeks ago, that a certain Caribbean hotel had received several hundred wildly enthusiastic ratings and several hundred angry disparaging ratings in a particular website, I wrote that this outpouring of comment had to reflect an organized campaign either to recommend the hotel or to disparage it (letters generated by competitors). And I went on to say that it had become utterly impossible to determine whether the hotel was to be used, in the face of such obvious manipulation.

So you'll have to forgive me if I repeat my own preference for the recommendations of travel professionals. The wildly contrasting comments appearing in most user-generated reviews are so very suspicious, so impossible to appraise, so obviously packed with reviews that were originated either by the establishment itself or by its competitors, that they have eliminated the usefulness of these services. In the face of a hundred statements that a particular hotel is the best on the island, and a hundred statements that the same hotel is the worst on the island, how do you choose?

Here's an Advance Preview of the Travel Show Interviews for Sunday, September 11

As I've already noted, the 10th anniversary of the tragic events of September 11 falls on a Sunday, September 11, 2011, which happens to be the day of the weekly radio program that my daughter and I present on a network of approximately 120 stations ( www.wor710.com ). We shall be devoting that entire program to topics associated with that anniversary, and yesterday afternoon we conducted four recorded interviews on the impact of September 11 on travel.

We began with Scott Mayerowitz, aviation reporter for the Associated Press, who recently traveled on a dozen test flights totalling 8,000 miles, to interview typical passengers about the state of aviation over the ten years since September 11.

Their responses, according to him, were rather depressing. What had once been a pleasant, high-spirited, and even adventurous experience -- that of flying from city to city -- has become, over the past 10 years, a time of anxiety, stress and incivility. From the moment that passengers appear at airports a required two hours in advance, until they pass through T.S.A. security, to when they cram themselves into overcrowded flights and deal with other stressed-out passengers and crew, they react to air travel as they would to a schoolroom test -- they dislike it.

Oddly, according to Mayerowitz, Americans fail to appreciate the few improvements in air travel since 9/11 -- the video screens on the backs of airline seats, the Wi-Fi on an increasing number of flights, a definite improvement in airport food, and most important, a 20% decline in airfares since 9/11. Not a single person mentioned the last-named development. And yet, Mayerowitz says, even with the luggage fees and other distasteful charges that airlines have imposed upon us, the cost to passengers of air transportation is 20% less than it was on 9/11.

If passengers are having a hard time with air travel, airlines have it worse. It took them three years after 9/11 to recover the passenger numbers they were enjoying as of 9/11 -- substantial numbers of people required those three years to overcome their fear of flying, creating three years of heavy losses for the airlines. Adding the losses they then incurred to the same starting with the recession of late 2007 and onward, airlines have had seven loss years out of the last ten.

Following Scott Mayerowitz, we interviewed the marketing director of the National September 11 Memorial (Kim Wright), which will open on Sunday September 11 for families of the victims, and will then, starting Monday September 12 and thereafter, be open to those members of the public who have used the internet to obtain free-of-charge passes. The memorial consists, she pointed out, of a large plaza surrounding the two recessed reflecting pools where the twin towers once stood. Each pool, she pointed out, will receive a downpour from the two largest man-made waterfalls ever constructed. Adjoining the reflecting pools: walls containing the engraved names of the nearly 3,000 victims of September 11 -- office workers in the twin towers and first responders, the police and firefighters who rushed into the buildings to save their inhabitants.

Approximately a year from September 11, 2011, the underground museum of the Memorial area will open "in the fall of 2012," according to Wright. She would not be more specific than that.

Four hi-jacked passenger airplanes made up the attack on America on September 11, 2011. Two of them flew into the towers of the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one other -- United Airlines Flight 93 -- was meant (by the hi-jackers) to fly to Washington, D.C., to crash into either the Capitol or the White House. It originated in Newark, was bound for San Francisco, carried 40 persons in passengers and crew, and attempted to turn around over southwestern Pennsylvania to steer a course for the nation's capital. It was then that heroic passengers rushed the hi-jackers, apparently burst into the cockpit to grapple with hi-jackers flying the plane, and then died with other passengers, crew and hi-jackers when the plane dived into the ground -- an open field which our next interview subject, the Acting Superintendent of the National Flight 93 Memorial, called "The Field of Honor."

According to him, the National Flight 93 Memorial operated by the National Parks Service (as contrasted with the National September 11 Memorial in New York City, which will be operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), will open a day before September 11, and can be visited by the public without further need for a pass or ticket. It will consists of various new roads built through the site and leading up to and along the Field of Honor, which is flanked by a marble memorial containing the names of the 40 passengers and crew who died on Flight 93, but had fought back to prevent the plane from being used as a flying bomb against public buildings of the U.S. capital.

What is opening now at the National Flight 93 Memorial is only "Phase 1" of the project. Construction has commenced on a visitors' center to open in a couple of years, which will serve as a museum of Flight 93, its passengers, their heroic conduct, and the resulting tragedy.

We finally interviewed an official of the Air Transport Association on the status of the security measures that have been put in place at American airports ever since 9/11. He was hopeful that various measures now being studied -- especially a biometric "trusted flyers" I.D. that will permit qualified persons to avoid T.S.A. procedures when they appear at airports to board flights. His interview, as well as the three I have summarized above, was of course far more detailed than I have space to relate in this space.

I hope you'll tune in on September 11. If your own area doesn't have a radio station carrying the program, you can hear it streamed live on the internet at www.wor710.com from noon to 2pm, Eastern Standard Time. And if you aren't able to hear it at that time, you can access it later, by podcast, appearing on the same website.

And if you have a relevant comment to add about the impact of 9/11 on travel, please contact us (via a comment to this blog) and tell us how we can reach you. We will be playing interviews throughout the two hours of our program, and we hope that every such statement will be both useful and appropriate to the occasion.

August 23 Is a Milestone in Consumer Protections for Airborne Travelers

Although several of the Department of Transportation's recent proposed rules for consumer protection have been put off until January (because of a lawsuit against them brought by several airlines) two other rules go into effect just a week from now on August 23:
The application of the tarmac-delay rule to foreign airlines, A major increase in the compensation to persons involuntarily bumped (in other words, overbooked) from a flight. Specifically, if a foreign carrier strands you on the tarmac for four hours, it must allow you to deplane or else pay a giant fine. (That compares with a ban of more than three hours for domestic carriers.) You'll want to know your rights if you're the victim of such a delay.

And starting August 23, the compensation that must be paid to a passenger involuntarily ousted from a flight (because of overbooking) rises dramatically to between $650 and $1,300 (depending on whether you can be re-routed to arrive at your destination within two hours). This should make you think twice if the airline offers you a lesser amount to voluntarily step off the flight.

Progress.

One Week Winter Trips to Beijing Are the Best-Priced Opportunities for International Travel

The rich rivalry between the two budget champions to China -- China Focus (www.chinafocustravel.com) and China Spree (www.chinaspree.com) -- is so fierce that some of their offerings are priced so low as to create concern about their future financial health. That is certainly the case with their forthcoming one-week, air-and-land packages to Beijing from San Francisco. For a few days in November, and then throughout the months of January and February of 2012, both companies will be charging only $875 (actually $870 in the case of China Spree) for a one-week stay in Beijing that also includes round-trip airfare from San Francisco on Air China. Since those prices also include a $270 fuel surcharge imposed by the airline, one wonders how in the world they're able to charge so little. Can they really make a profit on an $875 air-included trip to China? Or is the Chinese government slipping them some moolah on the side?
[image error]
Specifically, both companies fly you back and forth to Beijing from San Francisco (and for modest add-ons from New York, from which you can also fly non-stop to Beijing), provide you with round-trip airport-to-hotel transfers, put you up for six nights in decent hotels (the Huabin International in the case of China Spree, the Jade Palace in the case of China Focus), provide you with six buffet breakfasts and three lunches, and supply roughly the same amount of escorted sightseeing. And their selling price for the entire package is roughly identical: $875 in the case of China Focus, including tax; $799 in the case of China Spree but an additional $71 for tax, bringing the total to $870.

Because the Chinese currency is so badly undervalued (the Chinese government raised its value by about 1% two weeks ago), the cost of your additional lunches and dinners in Beijing will be very little. So literally, for less than $1,000, you can have a fine look-see at China's impressive capital city (including the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Great Wall), including the long 12-to-13-hour flight for getting there.

The China Spree package is called "Timeless Beijing," the China Focus package is "Simply Beijing." Frankly, I would recommend you spring a few hundred extra dollars for a lengthier tour of China going to multiple cities (like Shanghai or Xian, in addition to Beijing). But the packages offered by these two formidable tour companies are something special: a cheap way to begin your knowledge of China, a superb winter interlude, a glimpse at an important world capital. At the price charged for the features given, these short-duration stays in Beijing this winter are my choice of the best current values in travel today.

Photo Caption: Night street market in Beijing. LynnH/Frommers.com Community