Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 42

A Tour Company Has Finally Created an Affordable Tour to Cuba

Under a new government policy tour companies are permitted to operate educational, religious, and cultural tours of Cuba, and several prominent firms have now obtained Treasury Department licenses to do just that. But to the disappointment of many, the first such companies to announce their programs -- firms like Insight Cuba and Abercrombie & Kent -- have all listed prices of $3,500 to $4,000-or-so per person for an eight-day visit, not including airfare to Havana. That tab is simply too high for average American travelers.

When I recently reported these prices, and commiserated about them, I quickly received comments from readers stating that other companies were planning to charge much less for their eight-day and ten-day tours to Cuba; and one source claimed that other tour firms had already announced such lower prices.

I have been able to find only one program of affordable tours to that controversial Caribbean state, from a company known as Witness for Peace (tel. 202/547-6112; www.witnessforpeace.org ), headquartered in Washington, D.C. Starting this month, and monthly thereafter, it will operate ten-day tours of Cuba for $1,550 per person (including lodging, meals, transportation within Cuba, translations and more), plus round-trip airfare to Havana. Its program, in sharp contrast to those of the other companies that have thus far announced, is highly political, from a firm that is obviously favorably inclined towards Cuba and its government. Tours are characterized as "people-to-people" in nature, and are usually themed to concentrate on various aspects of Cuban life, like agriculture, Cuban law, "environmental sustainability," and so on.

Have I missed any other affordable tours to Cuba? I don't think so, but if readers know of any, I'd be grateful to be advised, via a comment to this blog.

My Learning Vacation at Cornell's Adult University Has Been Like Returning To Those Joyous Years As An Undergrad

For four days now, I have been a Cornellian -- a one-week student at Cornell's Adult University in Ithaca, New York. And although I'm simply on a one-week learning vacation, and not really enrolled at any college, the experience has been so exhilarating that I've been hearing, in my mind, those unforgettable lyrics about the time that most of us spent at a place of study: "Bright College years, with pleasure rife, the shortest, gladdest years of life ..."

For four days, I've been strolling an immense campus, past all sorts of shrines to a better world: a quad of liberal arts, a giant library, a science building, the music school, the art museum, the medical school, the law school, the school of architecture, theaters, auditoriums, laboratories and other research facilities. I've studied my assigned readings while sitting against a two hundred year old tree on a grassy expanse. I've seen groups of high school seniors, their faces alive with expectation, as they went about their guided campus tours.

I've eaten in student cafeterias where nearly half the undergrads seem vegetarians from the contents of their trays; I've been surrounded by stern admonitions to respect the environment, to use only bio-degradable materials for my containers and bags. I've witnessed the unusually high percentage of Asian students, and students from other countries, that today make up part of the student bodies of leading U.S. universities. In the student union, and other lounges, I've engaged in active and enlivening conversations with people willing to accommodate new ideas, ready to ponder provocative theories and beliefs, unwilling to close their minds.

And best of all, I've been invited to stretch my mind in courses where the level of discourse is infinitely higher than most of us experience in our normal lives, or in the publications we routinely read.

At the best of U.S. universities, people are searching for knowledge and answers, they are ready to jettison the irrational phobias and conventions that most of us encounter in non-academic life. I have found that to be the case in my earlier learning vacations, and it has been wonderfully refreshing to return to that same student openness this past week.
 
I have two more days of classes, and then a closing, Friday evening farewell banquet, at which we'll express our thanks to the teachers who have taken time in summer to conduct classes for an adult audience. Cornell's Adult University, like the Summer Classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, takes place for four consecutive weeks ending around August 6. You can sign up for one to four weeks in 2012, and expect to pay around $1,500 for tuition, room and board, coffee breaks, open bar (in the CAU lounge), parking, and much more, per week. The full details are found at www.sce.cornell.edu/cau .

Cornell's Summer Learning Vacation Program Holds up Against the Best of Them

It is a common mistake among persons who comment on learning vacations to assume that Cornell's Adult University in Ithaca, New York, is not of the same level of learning, the same profundity, as the summer classes in Britain's Oxford or Cambridge, or America's St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To some extent, that mistake results from the fact that Cornell sprinkles its summer curriculum with some courses of light entertainment, like Wine Cultivation. And Cornell also offers children's courses that enable parents to bring their offspring with them to Ithaca. Children go to their own classrooms at 9am, have lunch with the other children, and are not handed back to parents until late afternoon.

Apart from these light touches, Cornell's Adult University, in summer, is as intellectually respectable as anything at Oxford, Cambridge, and St. John. And I say that as someone who has now taken summer courses at all four. Roberta and I are in the midst of a great adventure, to which we're being introduced by Professor Glenn Altschuler of Cornell's history department (he is also a Vice President of the University) and Professor Faust Rossi of the Cornell Law School.

Professors Altschuler and Rossi are conducting the class on "Political Trials" which we will now be pursuing for five consecutive days, from 9am to 3:30pm. It has been a great adventure. We have heard remarkable lectures by these two eminent scholars and then participated with them in a free-wheeling, no-holds-barred discussion of the issues raised by the trials of Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart, of Tokyo Rose and the "Hollywood Ten," of the Haymarket Labor Martyrs and the Suffragette Alice Paul.

Evenings, we've gone to lectures by other eminent Cornell professors (on a variety of scholarly topics), seen a foreign art film screened in a university auditorium, and tomorrow we'll be taking a tour of the architectural highlights of the huge Cornell campus. We've talked with fellow participants (adults from all over the nation, aged 30 through 80) in a Cornell lounge stocked with free wine and beer, visited the University's renowned Museum of Art, taken our meals in a student dining room where several different stations offer every conceivable kind of food.

Going back to college, which we're now doing, is an immensely refreshing, eye-opening experience, about which I'll have more to report tomorrow. In a four-week session of adult classes, Cornell is now in its fourth and last week of the summer. Your own opportunity to attend must wait until the summer of 2012. You might want to start planning now, by seeking out the various websites of Cornell's Adult University.

This Week's Posts Are Coming From Cornell's Adult University, Where I am Enjoying a Learning Vacation

I am writing this short report from a room in Ithaca, New York, where I have just returned from a day of registration and orientation at Cornell's Adult University. Tomorrow morning, my wife and I go to the first of a week of day-long classes called "Political Trials" taught by three eminent professors from the American Studies division of Cornell's College of Arts and Science, and the Cornell Law School. We shall be discussing a series of eight important and contentious judicial trials ranging from last century's Haymarket prosecutions to the more recent court epics involving Martha Stewart and Scooter Libby.
 
In the world of leisure travel, learning vacations are certainly among the most rewarding of all trips, and I've tried to experience a number of them, ranging from summer attendance at Oxford University ("Ancient Egyptian History") to St. John's College ("Dante's Inferno") in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have always known that the Cornell program was also one of the major examples of such adventures, and this week I have at last managed to free myself from other obligations to take the plunge in Ithaca. Everything I have thus far seen confirms that Cornell's Adult University is a remarkable travel opportunity.
 
Two of our professors for this week have solemnly warned that we need to be on time for tomorrow's 9 a.m. class, so I have cut short a 10pm reception for class members to return to my lodgings to quickly type this initial report. There will be more tomorrow and all the days of this week.
 
It's back to college, for the best kind of vacation.

China Spree Has Introduced a $1,399, 10-Day Tour to Major Cities of China

I get a big kick out of the competing salvos of China Focus Travel and China Spree, aimed at each other. In winter months, the prices they charge for an air-included, fuel-surcharge-included, multi-city tour of China, are among the top bargains of international travel, offers that should be considered by every avid traveler. Who can't spare 10 days in winter for a look at the Chinese society?

The latest China Spree offer is heralded in a press release of yesterday, pointing out that its new four-city tours (called, strangely enough, "the Golden Triangle") bring you to Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, and Suzhou for $1,399 in November, January, February and March -- a direct competitour to China Focus' "Great Wall and Terra Cotta" tour for $1,399 going to Beijing, Shanghai and Xian in the same period of the year, including tax. The tour consists of (and here I quote verbatim from the release) "round-trip, non-stop transpacific air from San Francisco, fuel surcharge, 4-star hotel accommodations, daily American breakfasts, nine other meals, evening shows, comprehensive sightseeing and professional guides... The comfortable, first-class hotels are the Beijing Huabin International, the Shanghai Crowne Plaza, and the Xian Grand Noble."

"All prices quoted are the cash discount rate, are per person double occupancy, are subject to availability and do not include departure taxes of $87. Add-on air fares are $330 from New York (non-stop), $320 from Philadelphia, $190 from Washington, D.C., $320 from Miami, $190 from Chicago, $250 from Houston and $150 from Los Angeles."

For more information, go to www.chinaspree.com and click China Tours, then Winter Specials.

Want a Great Exchange Rate? Skip the Money Changers and Embrace the ATM

On one occasion in the course of my trip to Poland some three weeks ago, I withdrew 100 Polish zlotys from an ATM machine in Bialystok. Today, I received my bank statement showing that I had received 2.69 zlotys for every U.S. dollar I was charged. That compares with a bank exchange rate -- i.e., the rate that big purchasers get when they obtain zlotys, as shown in the financial newspapers at the time -- of 2.79 zlotys.

In effect, my use of an ATM machine to buy zlotys had limited my expense for that transaction to 3.5%. Had I obtained my zlotys instead from a money changer, at a kiosk in the airport or railroad station, I would have been charged as much as 15% for the same transaction. I know this from the outrageous exchange rate posted at all the money-changing kiosks I observed in Poland.

Nothing, in my opinion, can better illustrate the universal practice that all individual travelers should now perform when they go abroad. They should, to the extent possible, limit their money changing to bank ATM machines. They should make every effort possible to avoid those non-bank business people who operate counters, windows or booths for the purpose of supplying foreign currencies.

Is Airline Opposition to the Department of Transportation's New Consumer Protection Regulations Unreasonable?

A number of air carriers, headed by Southwest Airlines (and including, as you'd expect, regulation-hating Spirit Airlines), have filed a major lawsuit seeking to enjoin and nullify the consumer protection regulations recently proposed by the Department of Transportation. And chief among those regulations is a requirement that airlines include the cost of all government fees and taxes in the airfares they advertise. Instead of saying that a particular flight cost $148*, for instance, referring in a small-type footnote to another $127 in fees and taxes, the airlines will have to say, up front, that the flight costs $275.

Southwest says, among other things, that making this change will require millions of dollars of calculations and rewrites, given that Southwest flies between hundreds of cities, at differing prices for each flight.

I wondered, as I read Southwest's objection, if that eminent carrier had heard of the computer.

It does not seem difficult at all to devise a computer program that will instantly calculate the total, all-in price of Southwest's individual fares. Certainly, Southwest currently performs that function when it charges each passenger for the ticket they have bought. Someone, somewhere, needs to include the fees and taxes which will be appended to a particular fare.

I have not yet read the court papers, but only a summary of them in the travel trade press, and would be surprised if the courts upheld the airlines' objections to what seems a reasonable proposal by an administrative agency. Courts usually accord great weight to the regulations proposed by such administrative agencies.

Despite the Merger With Southwest Airlines, AirTran's Stand-by Program for Young Adults Remains in Effect

AirTran U ( www.airtranu.com/cheap-student-tickets.aspx ) offers remarkable airfare stand-by prices -- one-way fares as low as $49 per segment -- to young people (they need not be students) ages 18 to 22 (you're eligible if you haven't reached your 23rd birthday). They are valid on all AirTran flights within the contiguous U.S. states, except of course during various blacked-out holiday periods.

You're required to go to an AirTran ticket counter at the airport at least two hours in advance of the departure for which you're standing by. After registering at that counter, you head quietly for the gate and wait to be told whether you've gotten on the flight. Depending on the length of the flight, you pay either $49, $69, or $99 for the non-stop trip in question; if your plans require a one-stop flight, you pay those amounts for each of the segments of that one-stop flight. Baggage allowance? None (for checked baggage, that is). But you are entitled to bring one carry-on and one other personal item, like a briefcase or laptop computer.

To amplify that last point: you are not entitled to check aboard a standard suitcase.

Subject to these conditions, all of them reasonable, the AirTran stand-by privilege for young persons is one of the best travel deals around. Until further notice from AirTran's corporate parent, Southwest, it remains in effect, and should be carefully considered by all young travelers.

Airbnb Has Emerged From the World of Interesting Start-Ups Into the Select Group of Internet Powerhouses

More than two years ago, I wrote about a San Francisco start-up called Airbnb ( www.airbnb.com ) which encouraged its users to rent spare rooms or spare cots (or even an air mattress) in the apartment of a person who remained in residence throughout the rental. It seemed to me to be a very interesting use of overnight resources, a transaction that was a win-win for both the owner of the apartment and the overnight guest. And on numerous occasions in the ensuing years, I have named Airbnb as a way to find decent but cheap accommodations in overcrowded cities both in the U.S. and abroad.

Yesterday, in a feature article in The New York Times' business section, it was revealed that Airbnb.com has now received a capital infusion of more than $100 million to enable it to open overseas offices. It appears to have reached a commanding position in the world of overnight rentals, used not to rent whole apartments but simply rooms or cots within an occupied apartment, a limitation which enables Airbnb to steer clear of the ordinances of several cities (New York, among them) which rohibit the short-term rental of whole apartments to transient visitors.

You may also recall that more recently in this Blog, I pointed out that Airbnb now has a British rival, iStopOver ( www.istopover.com ), which appears to perform the same function, as does Wimdu ( www.wimdu.com ) headquartered in Rome (with an initial emphasis on capitals of western Europe).

So now, to summarize, we have at least five different means of avoiding the high cost of hotel rooms when we travel:

One is to stay free-of-charge in the home or apartment of a well-meaning, warm-hearted resident, by using either U.S. Servas ( www.usservas.org ), CouchSurfing ( www.couchsurfing.org ), or GlobalFreeloaders.com ( www.globalfreeloaders.com ), all of which arrange for free stays.

The second method is to stay free of charge by swapping use of your own home or apartment for that of another person in another city, during the times of your respective vacations, using HomeExchange.com ( www.homeexchange.com ), Intervac ( www.intervacus.com ), or many others.

The third approach is to join a hospitality club whose members charge only a nominal amount (like $20 or $25 a night) for the right to stay overnight in their homes or apartments: The long-established Hospitality Exchange ( www.hospex.net ) or the The Affordable Travel Club ( www.affordabletravelclub.net ) come immediately to mind.

The fourth is to stay in a hostel charging about $25 or $30 a night per person, of which an increasing number are now found in large cities around the world, using Hostelworld.com ( www.hostelworld.com ), Hostelmania ( www.hostelmania.com ), or many others. Hostels no longer lodge you solely in dorms, but offer an increasing number of private rooms.

And now the fifth approach, bringing your costs in most instances up to $35 or $40 a night per person, is to rent a spare room or spare cot (or air mattress) in the home or apartment of a person who remains in residence during your stay, using the sites mentioned above.

It's an interesting new world of accommodations, isn't it? Increasingly, smart travelers not only save money but improve the quality of their stays -- enjoy a more authentic experience of the life led by locals -- by using alternative accommodations in place of traditional hotels.

Now We've Seen Everything: Several New Websites Let You Rent Your Car to Tourists When You Don't Need It

How big a leap is it from renting a spare room in your apartment to renting use of your car when you don't need it? Airbnb ( www.airbnb.com ), iStopOver ( www.istopover.com ), and others deal with those spare rooms. Now, amazingly enough, Getaround ( www.getaround.com ), RelayRides ( www.relayrides.com ), and London's WhipCar ( www.whipcar.com ) permit you to earn extra money by renting your car out to others. And it permits those renters to save big bucks on car rentals at a time when auto rental charges by the traditional companies (Hertz, Avis et al) are skyrocketing.

The average cost of renting a car through these unusual internet services? They claim that cost to average $8 an hour (but some older cars are offered for as little as $4 and $5 an hour), perhaps $45 a day. Persons with cars to rent post photographs and vital statistics of their cars onto the websites listed above. Their cars must be fully insured, but the renter does not need to have car insurance; that's because the websites claim a one-million dollar insurance policy per car on all the car rentals made through them.

Some of the above companies use the term "collaborative consumption" for the services they provide. One of them claims it is like "Airbnb for cars". Others use such slogans as "neighbor-to-neighbor" car rentals, or "carsharing." They certainly offer a means whereby owners of cars can earn an income -- sometimes a considerable annual sum -- from an under-utilized car. But equally important (and at the risk of repetition), they enable renters to pay far less than they would to Hertz, Avis, or Enterprise (or to ZipCar, in the case of hourly rentals).

They also help keep down the number of cars currently on the streets and highways.

Each such service, incidentally, also claims to vet the safety record of the persons who seek to rent cars through them; they are able, they claim, to search public records to eliminate people who have a history of irresponsible driving.

A final point: although each such service seems to emphasize hourly rentals on their websites, they also offer rentals by the day, the week, or the month, and in a large number of major American cities (or throughout the British isles in the case of WhipCar).

Although I had an initial reluctance to discuss them (because of the insurance question, which they all claim to have solved with their million dollar policies), I have been encouraged by the fact that each of the companies is the subject of an increasing number of newspaper and magazine articles by journalists who have studied their records and their growth. Nevertheless, I can't yet speak confidently about them, and must warn you to undertake your own investigation.