Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 5

To the Dismay of Flight Attendants, the TSA Reduces List of Weapons Prohibited on Planes

The big news in travel is the announcement by the TSA that starting on April 25, they will permit air passengers to carry on board their flights a whole array of potentially-damaging devices that used to be prohibited. Prominent among them are pocket knives less than 2.5" long and half an inch wide. Though all of us know that such knives can fatally hurt a human being, they will now be permitted in carry-on luggage, which means they can be accessed by their owners in the course of the flight. 

In the same gesture, the TSA announced last week that sporting equipment of the pole or bat variety can now be carried on board. You can bring with you a golf club, a children's-size bat, ski poles -- even though these items can be brandished or swung overhead to knock out a flight attendant or another passenger. 

What's particularly disturbing to me is the allowance of pocket knives. It is widely suspected, and partially confirmed by the luggage the hijackers left behind them, that the terrorists who brought down planes on September 11 were not equipped with box cutters, as was widely assumed, but with pocket knives. Such knives, drawn across the neck of a person, can kill them just as effectively as a box cutter. Various union officials representing flight attendants have bitterly complained about the TSA's new liberal policies and asked that they be reversed.

I'm with them. Despite all the seeming safeguards -- locked doors to the cockpits of all planes, federal marshals flying aboard surreptitiously -- there is now a greatly enhanced opportunity for either crazed people or terrorists to create mayhem aboard a flight. I can't for the life of me guess what caused the TSA to take a step that no one at all was really advocating, but simply assume that the constant, unreasoned criticism of that federal agency has made its officials eager to be liked. No one can constantly listen to the carping and criticism of our airport safety agents without wanting to take a step that will mollify the attackers. Too bad that the rest of us must now fly with less assurance that the terrorists, or the lunatics, will be thwarted.

Looking for a New Destination? Consider the Colorful Island-Nation of Taiwan.

On Sunday's Travel Show, my daughter Pauline provided a fascinating description of her recent trip to Taiwan, a long journey from which she returned last week.

Not many Americans include Taiwan on a list of potential vacation destinations, but the Taiwanese government has recently launched a major marketing effort to change those attitudes. Actually, the largest current group of tourists to Taiwan are Chinese, who can now fly there non-stop from Beijing. That totally unexpected cooperation in aviation marks a startling shift in what used to be a policy of unending enmity between the two republics (Taiwan persists in calling itself The Republic of China, while Beijing styles itself as The People's Republic of China).

Why did the change come about? Why non-stop air between two former adversaries? A political science professor-friend of mine suggests that Taiwanese businessmen are now so heavily engaged in making investments in mainland China that the Chinese have felt compelled to soften their tone. And obviously, Beijing wants Taiwan back, and may now be offering a carrot rather than a stick. That's also (perhaps) why some mainland cities are partially subsidizing the trips to Taiwan of their residents wanting to experience the strong, historic culture of China.

There remains, of course, the ever-present possibility of an armed takeover of Taiwan by mainland China. Beijing's threat is so sensitively felt by the Taiwanese, according to my daughter's observations, that citizens of Taiwan are unusually cordial to visitors from the United States, which they regard as their chief defender against such a Chinese move. Invariably, people would broadly smile at her, make friendly comments, even hug her on occasion, the moment they learned she was an American. The stay was made unusually pleasant by such gestures, as it will be for any American tourist going there.

When the nationalist army of Chiang Kai-Shek was finally defeated (around 1948) by the Chinese communists, they fled to Taiwan, and were accompanied in the immediately-succeeding years by more than two million Han Chinese from the mainland. They also brought with them many of the most precious and important historical relics of the Chinese culture (especially from Beijing's Forbidden City), and placed many of them in an important Palace Museum in Taipei. Accordingly, a visit to that museum is a stunning immersion in the ancient culture of China, stronger perhaps than what one sees anywhere in today's mainland China (where so many artifacts of history were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution). Scattered throughout Taiwan are also numerous religious temples, seemingly more numerous than anything one views in mainland China. These are intricately decorated; and the religious rites and exercises within are done with surprising force and fervor.

But despite those two million Han Chinese that came here with Chiang Kai-Shek, the demographics of Taiwan are amazingly diverse; there are large ethnic groups representing some 17 tribes that historically occupied Taiwan, along with a large number of Japanese who once ran Taiwan. In the "night market" of Taipei, Pauline saw scores of food stands, each one totally different in content than the next. She tasted numerous different ethnic cuisines, one better than the next. In restaurants, she never repeated the ethnicity of a meal.

And prices were surprisingly moderate. She paid the equivalent of one dollar for a bowl of Pork Liver Soup, the equivalent of two dollars for an astonishing Oyster Omelette, one of the best dishes she has ever had.

She ascended to the top of Taipei 101, the world's second highest skyscraper. She went to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, and witnessed an intricately-choreographed Changing of the Guard. And at stores and market places, she never felt herself harassed to purchase, unlike the ever-present and very intrusive hawking of tourists in mainland China.

I've noted only a fraction of her impressions, which you will hear in much greater detail if you turn to the first hour of our March 3 podcast, at wor710.com. I think you'll enjoy hearing her comments, and may be persuaded to consider a trip to Taiwan.

 

 

Next Stop: The D.C. Travel & Adventure Show on March 9

The series of travel shows called "Travel & Adventure" have grown enormously in attendance over the past ten years, and now attract far more than 15,000 persons to each such two-day event, in cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The last show of the current winter season will take place on Saturday and Sunday, March 9 and 10 (i.e., about a week from now), at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center (801 Mt. Vernon Place N.W.), and I'll be speaking there on Saturday, March 9, from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the main auditorium of that center, on the subject "The Coming Year in Travel." Immediately afterwards, I'll then be signing books and speaking personally with visitors to the show at a bookstore area located near the auditorium.

It always happens at such shows that readers of this blog appear in fair numbers, to talk about travel issues that they're confronting, to discuss recent topics covered in this blog, and generally to shoot the breeze on any and all subjects. I so very much like those encounters, and hope that readers living in the Washington, D.C. area will come to the show, hear the talk, and then remain to converse.

Although a ticket purchased at the box office costs $15, you can buy the same in advance for only $10 by buying it online at www.adventureexpo.com. For any questions about the event you can call 203/878-2577, ext. 100 or e-mail info@adventureexpo.com.

Hope to see you there.

Balloon Crash in Egypt Highlights Staggering Risks Travelers Take While Engaging in Extreme Adventures

I can't remember why I consented to ride in a hot air balloon during an African safari in Kenya some years ago, but I do recall that the moment we went aloft, I became painfully aware of how foolish I had been to do so. Our pilot was a somewhat deranged middle-aged man of British extraction, reacting ecstatically to the joy of being aloft. Instead of simply skimming along the tree line, as he had initially done, he suddenly manipulated the balloon to soar to altitudes of several thousand feet. And suddenly, standing in a small wicker basket hanging from the balloon, I looked down from an unimaginable height at the earth far below, and realized how vulnerable we all were.

It was not only that we were hanging from a flimsy balloon, kept aloft by a sheet of flame, but we were also flying above a games park filled with prides of lions, thousands of wildebeest, cheetahs by the dozens, and other wild animals, in a balloon whose exact place of landing we could not control. What if it set down among those lions, I asked myself? It was only after I emerged with knees shaking from the completed ride, and climbed out of that slightly-worn wicker basket hanging at an angle over the ground, that I realized how dangerous it is for tourists to subject themselves to such risk. And I reacted with sharp, sensitive awareness to the news, this week, of those 19 foreign tourists to Egypt who were incinerated while hanging from a hot air balloon that caught fire.

Imagine the near insanity of consenting to ride in a hot air balloon in a country where the entire activity is unregulated and the pilot unlicensed and the entire activity is undertaken by local entrepreneurs out to make a fast buck.

But hot air ballooning is only one of the "extreme sports" or "extreme adventures" that tourists sign up for in numerous foreign countries. Each year, people are severely injured, somewhere in tropical waters, by plunging down from a parasailing device drawn by a motorboat whose engine has suddenly stopped. This happens with surprising frequency. Each year, a tourist consenting to ride hanging from a zip line over a deep ravine in Costa Rica is suddenly found stuck on that line high in the air. This happened to a relative of mine. Each year, tourists to Belize take unimaginable risks by swimming into a cave and then being directed to dive underwater to a passage that supposedly leads them to an open-air room in the rock.

All over the world, untrained entrepreneurs in an unregulated activity, taking no safety precautions whatsoever, offer thrills to the visitor for a modest payment. Even in the United States, the regulation of hot air ballooning is apparently confined to the requirement that pilots be licensed as supposedly aware of the need for precaution. How many unreported accidents take place in hot air balloons carried aloft by air heated by jets of flame that can easily be misdirected at the balloon itself?

Persons in the travel industry should direct warnings to their clients against succumbing to those offers of extreme adventures. The risks are greater than assumed, and the possibility of grave injury or death is tangible.

Air-and-Land Packages to China Remain a Spectacular Value for Travel in April

While most other foreign currencies fluctuate up and down, the Chinese yuan stays solid as a rock. That's because the Chinese government is obviously engaged in unabashed currency manipulation, keeping the yuan at a virtually-motionless level of 6.23 to the dollar. All this is in support of the Chinese export industry, and the other major consequence of it is the cheap cost of a China vacation. If you'd like an example of that, you need only go to the air-and-land packages operated by China Spree in the month of April, 2013.
Provided you depart at least a month from now, and choose any listed date in April, you'll pay only $1,499 for a nine-day tour to Beijing and Shanghai, consisting of seven actual overnights in China. You'll receive, included in that figure, round-trip airfare from San Francisco (or, for only $100 more, from New York), round-trip transfers to and from the airports of Beijing and Shanghai, seven nights at a good, first class hotel with breakfast daily, and considerable escorted sightseeing, as well as transportation between Beijing and Shanghai. When you consider the normal cost simply of a 13-hour round-trip flight completely across the Pacific to China, which alone is worth $1,499, you realize what a staggering value is this week in two fascinating cities. No other destination anywhere else in the world is as comparably cheap.
If you'd prefer a more extensive introduction to both Beijing, Xian, Suzhou, Tongli, and Shanghai, you can buy a 10-day tour of China's so-called "Golden Triangle" (flying you, among other features, not simply across the Pacific round-trip to China, but also transporting you by air from Beijing to Xian, to see the terra cotta warriors enshrined in Xian), for an April 2013 departure, for only $1,859 from San Francisco, and $1,959 from New York. You'll again receive first class lodgings, several meals, and considerable escorted sightseeing, for 4 nights in Beijing, 2 nights in Xian, and 3 nights in Shanghai (on one day, you'll be driven by motorcoach from Shanghai to Suzhou and Tongli). This air-and-land package called "The Golden Triangle" is available to be booked for numerous departure dates this coming April.
The tour operator is China Spree (www.chinaspree.com), which is obviously making a concerted effort to be the leading source of ultra-low-cost tours to China. At virtually every newspaper-sponsored travel shows I've been to this year, I've been accosted by people telling me how much they enjoyed their ChinaSpree-operated tour. The two low-cost air-and-land packages to Beijing and Shanghai, or to Beijing, Xian and Shanghai, are almost always cited as the tour they took.

Some Random Reflections on a Slew of Travel Topics

The weird outcome of last weekend's Italian election -- major vote totals for the outrageous Silvio Berlusconi and the equally-nutty Beppe Grillo -- has at least created positive news for American travelers. It has so unnerved the business interests of Europe that the value of the euro has now fallen to $1.30, with the British pound selling for $1.51. Those rates -- which might even go lower -- have markedly cheapened the cost of a European vacation for us dollar-possessing travelers.

And the Japanese yen remains at a remarkable 90 to the dollar, lowering the cost of a stay in Japan. Provided only that you can find an inexpensive airfare for an overseas vacation (try hipmunk.com, do-hop.com, or momondo.com), the prospects look good for ambitious summer vacationers.

But you'll need to make wise decisions in the choice of destinations. There's an awful lot of misleading information out there, as I discovered in responding to callers on this weekend's Travel Show (Sunday, noon to two E.S.T., at wor710.com).

One listener phoned the show to point out that she was flying in June with her fiancee to Rome, where they hoped to get married in a Presbyterian church (are there any in Rome?) on days one or two, and then to embark on a train trip to Florence and Venice. Her specific question: How can she arrange to ship her sumptuous wedding gown back home, as she did not want to cart it along for the remainder of her Italian trip?

I had the unenviable task of pointing out that as far as marriages are concerned, Rome is not Las Vegas. Unlike Las Vegas, where you can obtain a marriage license and get hitched within a half hour after your arrival, all European countries have severe residency requirements for permitting people to have weddings on their soil. I told her that she had to contact the nearest Italian consulate to learn how many months she would first have to reside in Italy before she could be married there. I could almost hear a groan of dismay from the caller.

Another caller explained that she was planning to go on a Baltic cruise this summer, ending up in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she hoped to make her own hotel reservations for two days of sightseeing in that fabled city. For such a short stay, she reasoned, she would not have to go through the difficult and expensive process of obtaining a Russian visa. I had to disappoint her by pointing out that her plan for bypassing a visa was just not do-able, that Russian requires a visa of any tourist, and that the only exception to that rule was for cruise passengers engaging in a group sightseeing tour arranged by the cruise ship, involving a day-long stay that returned at night to the cruise ship. Even a one-day overnight stay in Russia requires a visa.

Another listener, who had submitted his question by e-mail to the program, announced that he was anxious to cruise the coast of Alaska, but would do so only on a ship catering to young passengers. I had to respond that there was no such thing; that the audience for Alaskan cruises was heavily weighted to mature and elderly people. Was I wrong to be so pessimistic?

Is South Africa safe to visit, asked another caller? I responded that the general consensus is that Cape Town is acceptably safe (provided only that you take the precautions you would follow in any large city), while Johannesburg is iffy -- iffy because of the considerable poverty in that city, that is usually a generator of crime. Nevertheless, a great many tourists stay over in Johannesburg on their onward trip to Krueger National Park, and by taking reasonable precautions, they enjoy a stay without mishap.

Generally speaking, the questions posed to us on The Travel Show are so wide-ranging, reflecting an intention by many listeners to visit the most remote corners of the world, that they prove the continued vitality of travel. In the course of a slow economic recovery, at a time when unemployment is still high, people are still traveling in huge numbers and not simply on weekend trips but to international destinations. One caller this past weekend extolled the pleasures of a trip to Ghana in Africa, which he portrayed as a stable country that recently achieved a peaceful transfer of power from one president to another. It is reached, he said, by non-stop flights, and your visit is among friendly people well disposed to America, in cities with modern hotels.

Travel lives.

The New York Times Confirms My Suspicions: Cruise Ship Safety is Severely Compromised

As someone who obviously doesn't have expertise in ship design or maritime safety, I felt somewhat hesitant in passing comment on the recent tragedy of the Carnival Triumph, whose electrical system -- knocked out by an engine room fire -- caused it to drift without power for five days in the Gulf of Mexico.

And yet it seemed obvious to me. A cruise ship is like a city at sea. Shouldn't it possess back-up generators if the main source of electricity is knocked out? Of course it should, as I proceeded to write in this blog. And if such an event happens during a time of stormy seas, or when the ship is hundreds of miles from land (as on a trans-Atlantic sailing), grave tragedies including loss of life could occur.

Would you believe that The New York Times has this morning published a well-researched article reaching the same conclusion? And it points out, amazingly enough, that the event on the Triumph is the third such instance to occur during the past three years. One such loss of power occurred, amazingly enough, on another ship of Carnival Cruise Lines, the Splendor, in 2012.

Because of an ambiguous situation of government regulation (all ships carry the flags of tiny countries like Liberia and therefore claim to be immune to supervision by the United States), no government has rushed to enforce comprehensive or effective rules for the installation of safety equipment aboard ships. Though various admonitions to create redundancies in the production of electric power have been issued, only 10-or-so modern cruise ships contain back-up generators located far from the main engine room. The other 100-plus cruise ships contain one such system, and if it is knocked out, then the boat and its passengers are out of luck.

Two years ago, the Splendor experienced an engine room fire that eliminated its electrical power, amid resulted in harrowing circumstances almost identical to what befell the Triumph. Yet Carnival did nothing. And passengers of the Splendor rubbed their eyes when they read about the identical later occurrence on the Triumph.

What is needed is strong action by Congress. Asserting its authority over any ship that docks at a U.S. port, or that is marketed primarily to a U.S. audience, Congress could demand that ships be re-fitted with back-up generators. Though this will require the ships to give up a fair number of passenger cabins in order to create the space for those second generators, it is a requirement that cries out to be enacted. Otherwise, we will soon see an even greater tragedy than the one that so affected the passengers aboard the Triumph.

The Overwhelming Number of European Hotels Are Budget-Priced Properties

A revealing set of statistics was published last week, revealing that the single largest hotel chain in Europe is Ibis, the rock-bottom-priced group of fairly-basic lodgings owned by the Accor Group. Ibis now consists of 1,277 hotels with 121,882 rooms.

Ibis replaced America's Best Western Hotels, that now have only 90,738 rooms, apparently making it the runner-up. In third place is Accor's Mercure brand of moderately-priced, distinctly-middle-level hotels, most of them of the three-star level and therefore still reasonably priced.

Those rankings make an important point, in my view: that the public remains extremely cost-conscious in its choice of travel facilities, that the people concentrating in their writings and their interests on deluxe or first class approaches to travel are limiting themselves to a tiny portion of the travel market. They are like defeated candidates who have confined their political message to the 1%. They are inconsequential players, participants in an industry that increasingly has nothing to do with them.

In our publications and in this website, we at Frommers.com have nearly always been sensitive to the make-up and interests of the traveling public, who are cost-conscious to an extent of which the haughty publications are woefully unaware. In travel, Budget and Cheap are the names of the game.

And by the way, England's Premier hotel chain -- another low-priced grouping with limited amenities -- has 50,744 rooms and is now fourth in European rankings. A similar low-priced chain, England's Travelodges, is close in size.

Just Days Away, the Sequester Would Wreak Havoc with U.S. National Parks

The dreaded sequester -- a drastic cut in federal appropriations for the Defense Department, on the one hand, and discretionary civilian operations on the other -- is scheduled to go into effect at the end of February, unless Congress takes action to enact a more gentle and balanced approach to government spending.

The politics of that development are not for this travel blog to discuss.

But one aspect of the sequester does call for comment by persons concerned with both the travel industry and the quality of life in our nation, and that is the effect of those cuts on the National Parks Service. An official of the National Parks Retirees Association appeared with my daughter and myself on The Travel Show last Sunday [listen to that podcast] to point out that the sequester, taking place near the end of the Parks Department's fiscal year, would require an immediate cut of $110,000,000. A slash that great would require the firing or reduced hours of thousands of Parks rangers and other service and maintenance personnel. And the result of that downturn in employment would require the closing of numerous National Parks facilities, or shorter hours or days of operation of the parks, or a cut-back in vital maintenance of Parks buildings and roads.

It would, in effect, decimate our superb Parks system, ruining or eliminating many attractions and services, and drastically reducing the ability of citizens to vacation in these magnificent and pristine areas of America.

Write to your representative in Congress, demanding that they take action to prevent such a wholesale destruction of great national assets.

St. John's College Announces Greatly-Rewarding Learning Vacations for Summer 2013

As best I know, there are five outstanding opportunities in Britain and the U.S. to enjoy a weeklong learning vacation this summer at a great college or university. I've already written at length about the programs at Oxford ("The Oxford Experience"), Cambridge ("International Summer School"), and Cornell ("Cornell's Adult University"), that operate in July and early August, and are open to people of all ages, without entrance requirements and without examinations to take or papers to write. You can't possibly enjoy a better holiday interlude in a hallowed academic institution whose challenges to your mind will remain vivid in memory for years to come.
Each program offers housing and all meals, in addition to tuition and such other extras as evening entertainment and lectures, and late afternoon tours. Simply insert the above names into a major internet search engine, and you'll learn all about what's offered.
I'm writing now to disclose that the two St. John's Colleges at campuses in both Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland, have just announced their programs ("Summer Classics") for the coming summer, and these, too, are among the top learning opportunities available to you. For the second summer in a row, St. John's in Annapolis will conduct its program in June, while the Santa Fe campus operates in July. Each school bases its presentations on great books of the Western tradition, as you would expect from an institution whose four-year undergraduate curriculum consists entirely of the study of the 100 most important works of that tradition (from Homer to Freud), read chronologically and in full. Summer courses are taught by the distinguished faculty of each school.
If you have questions about the Santa Fe program, you can phone 505/984-6105 or e-mail summerclassics@sjcsf.edu. To learn more about the Annapolis program, either phone 410/626-2530 or e-mail kathy.dulisse@sjca.edu. In either case, you'd do well, in my opinion, to simply request the recently-issued 40-page catalogue, as the programs are so comprehensive and varied that they deserve better study than you could obtain over the phone -- or from this blog. But don't pass these up. They provide the single most important vacation that any intellectually-alert adult could have, as I can confirm from personal experience with them.