Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 7

From $34-A-Day Repositioning Cruises to Europe are THE Spring Bargain

What's the world's lowest-cost, high-quality vacation? From the looks of those trips whose prices have thus far been announced, it's an eastbound, transatlantic re-positioning cruise in late March, April, and early May. I've just studied the rates announced for several dozens of these sailings (the transfer of cruiseships from American waters to European waters that takes place every spring), and can't remember seeing lower prices in earlier years. As surprising as it may seem, it's possible to book a transatlantic cruise of two weeks' duration. Departures are from New York, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, New Orleans, or Galveston arriving at London, Barcelona, or Rome. The lowest price is as little as $34 a day per person. That's on a glamorous ship offering six meals a day, a fitness room, deckside chairs, and professional entertainment at night.
The website that presents these opportunities in the clearest possible fashion is www.vacationstogo.com. Access that site, click on "Atlantic," and you'll scan a logical list in chronological order of every big cruiseship making that transfer sailing -- with the number of nights of each cruise, the originally-announced price for the one-way trip, the discounted price, and the percentage of the discount as compared with the original rate. Some of the sailings are marked down by as much as eighty percent. On a 16-night cruise from Galveston to Barcelona, for instance, on a quality ship, you are often able to pick up a cabin for $549 per person.
Now why is that? It's because, apparently, the public doesn't like spending long periods of time at sea, crossing the Atlantic on a leisurely, south-Atlantic route (that avoids the high seas of the northern Atlantic), without the port stops that a normal cruise makes. What is to me the most desirable of vacations is regarded by most people as a big bore. So the cruiselines are forced virtually to give away their cabins.
And therefore, if you're the sort who enjoys the maritime experience, who likes having the time to read, reflect, and engage in long conversations with your fellow passengers, you will jump to book one of these extraordinary vacation bargains.
It's true that having accomplished such an eastbound voyage, you'll then have to fly back to the United States on a one-way flight. But even when you add the cost of such a return trip, the resulting total price is still a steal for a two-week interlude.

Travel Potpourri: Yen, NOLA, Cuba, Beijing, Turkey and More

Here is a roundup of recent news that could have an impact on your future travel plans.
Probably the biggest recent news in travel is the plunge in value of the Japanese Yen, which has dropped by a full 15% since November. At a new exchange rate of 90 to the dollar, which some expect to fall to 100 to the dollar, Japan is markedly cheaper to visit by the American tourist, in the same way that Japanese automobiles and electronics have now also become cheaper. By staying at "businessmen's hotels" (far less expensive than the ordinary variety) and utilizing other widely-circulated tips of low-cost dining in Japan, it is possible that this fascinating nation may again be added to the list of possible vacation destinations.
And far more significant than the Super Bowl itself was the fact that yesterday's sports event took place in New Orleans, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina damaged the city so badly seven years ago. New Orleans is back in travel, in a big way, and Americans have a fully-restored destination for superb food, music, architecture, drinks, and reduced inhibitions.
A question I couldn't answer yesterday, on the Travel Show, was whether it is now safe to visit Beijing, given the horrendous situation there of dense pollution in the atmosphere. On my own visits, I haven't been bothered by that phenomenon, but the present level of pollution is supposed to be unprecedented, and careful tourists might want to cancel a current trip, and book instead for a few weeks from now when the situation -- it's hoped -- will be corrected. The Chinese avoided bad air during the time of the Olympics approximately four years ago, but they did so via the drastic step of shutting down nearly every factory on the outskirts of Beijing. Whether they're willing to repeat such drastic action isn't presently known.
I was also asked on the Travel Show whether it is not safe to visit Turkey, in light of the attempted suicide bombing of the American Embassy last week. Keep in mind that this happened in Ankara, to which few American tourists go, and not in Istanbul, which is the chief touristic favorite.
Has YMT Vacations cancelled its relatively-inexpensive tour program to Cuba? Searching endlessly on its website, I haven't been able to find mention of the popular program, which has either been cancelled -- of perhaps has been totally sold out, and is therefore no longer mentioned.
Recently, podcasts of The Travel Show presented every Sunday by my daughter and myself dropped out of iTunes, where they could once be heard. The reasons are technical and totally unimportant, and the good news is that such podcasts are once again found on iTunes, as well as on www.wor710.com (click on "Podcasts" at the top of the main screen).
Disney Cruiseships are free-of-charge for kids under 17 on 5-night sailings from Miami throughout most of April, and on 6-night and 8-night sailings from Galveston, Texas, from March 29 until near the end of April. That's provided the kids are accompanied by two full-paying adults, and the booking must be made through travel agents.
And speaking of bookings, the hotel search engine called Booking.com is making a big splash because, virtually alone among the hotel search engines, it does not require that you pay in advance; rather, you pay on checking out. Booking.com has been immensely popular in Europe for many years, but now hopes to succeed in the U.S. and Canada.
My daughter Pauline will be speaking about travel at next Saturday's Boston Globe Travel Show at the Seaport Convention Center in Boston, and she'll be appearing twice -- once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. And I'll be speaking at the Los Angeles Times Travel show, once in the morning (I believe at 11 a.m.), on the Saturday three weeks from now, February 23. If any of our readers would like to stop by and say hello, Pauline and I will be happy to meet them.

Untours Adds Istanbul to its Broad Repertoire of Cities

Long before there was an AirBnB, there was an Untour. Created in 1975 by Pennsylvania college professor Hal Taussig, Untours created a method of living like an "untourist." Instead of staying in a hotel for two or three days per city when you went to Europe, you stayed instead for one or two weeks in a local apartment, an entire apartment, living like an actual resident, cooking some of your own meals, interacting with your local neighbors, all as part of a package that also included round-trip airfare and the services of a local representative with whom you might speak if you got into trouble.
Untours, for un-tourists, became like a cult. Participants stayed in touch with one another, eagerly perused a magazine published by Untours that alerted them to new apartment destinations, regarded themselves as a better sort of traveler who didn't move about on the standard conveyor belt of organized tourism, but struck out on their own -- as an untourist.
All this, of course, was before the idea of directly renting a European apartment took hold among multitudes of American tourists. Untours was before the days of AirBnB, Homeaway, Rentalo, VRBO, Endless Vacation Rentals, and the like, and you would think that the arrival of those many, trendy, apartment-supplying websites would have made Untours obsolete.
But that hasn't happened. Untours (tel. 888/868-6871; www.untours.com) remains alive, well, and tremendously active in sending its members to one- or two-week apartment stays in Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Prague, Budapest -- and most recently, Buenos Aires and Quebec City. And Untours has made a particular splash with its recent announcement that it is now operating one-week and two-week packages to Istanbul.
A glance at the services offered by Untours to their Istanbul-bound clients shows why it remains a success. In addition to putting you up in an Istanbul apartment that the agency's inspectors have thoroughly vetted and approved, Untours also provides you with all the following:
Round-trip airfare to IstanbulThe services of a local representative, who stays in touch with you, throughout the stayAn airport transfer to your apartment on arrival, in a private car with driverAn "Istanbul card" permitting you to enjoy 20 rides on the city's transportation system (streetcars and buses)A refrigerator already packed with groceries, in your apartment on arrivalA local cellphone, with your own number!An orientation lecture; andA group activity, at some point in your stay, with other Untour participants who may also be living in Instanbul during your time there
Perusing the Untours website will give you a complete view of all the many vacations this dynamic organization provides to its "un-tourists." I have met and spoken with a number of Untours employees, and can confirm that they are a unique group of dedicated individuals, who have superbly sustained a travel organization for nearly forty years.

This Website Might Be the Key to An Unusually Satisfying Stay in Rome

With admission to the Vatican increasingly expensive and difficult, visitors to Rome will be looking for alternate routes, in that city, for experiencing the awesome culture and artwork of Italy. I found such a guide in Katie Parla, a resident of Rome who was in New York recently to appear at the New York Times Travel Show and on the weekly radio program that my daughter and I present on wor710.com. Parla, who was an art history major at Yale, and has a Master's Degree from a university in Rome, is a growing force in tourism journalism dealing with Italy. If you will look her up in any search engine, you'll find a growing number of websites and publications for which she is responsible.
Her advice is not for the casual tourist, but for the person intensely determined to get underneath the surface of things in the main Italian cities. She mentioned, for instance, that without paying an admission charge at all, one could gaze upon great masterworks of art in the secondary churches of Rome, of which there are dozens. Superb works by Caravaggio, for instance, are found  in scattered religious structures where you can appreciate them at length and without disturbance from others. And you find the names and addresses of such churches in a website maintained by the City of Rome under the unusual address of 060608.it/en. At that address you'll also be able to input requests for information on "hop on hop off" sightseeing buses, free days of admission to museums, and numerous other important items of touristic information. That web address deserves study by visitors to Rome.
The best for last. Though I failed to get the address, I was told by Katie Parla of an extraordinary restaurant known to the smart young people of Rome, called Lazio Duro. There, she swears, you can have a complete meal -- including wine! -- for 12 euros ($15.60). I'm passing along the tip, in the hope that you can find it among the thousands of restaurants in Rome. And if any of our readers already has that information, we'd all be grateful if it could be passed along to us.
Arrivederci Roma!  What a place!

Some Comments Submitted to User-Generated Websites Are an Enduring Mystery

Short days before we are scheduled to embark on a tropical vacation, my wife suddenly got cold feet when she read a comment on a user-generated website dealing with the place we had chosen.

The background: We have made reservations to stay in an apartment-with-terrace-balcony on the fifth floor of a guesthouse overlooking the sea on that island. In commenting on that guesthouse, a member of the public had stated (in a website read by my wife) that the atmosphere a block away was "like Times Square, rowdy and loud."

"You've booked us into a place like Times Square!" my wife accused me. "How could you?!"

A day later, I received a wholly coincidental e-mail from a travel-writer friend of mine, a person who has devoted three decades to traveling in the tropics and writing guidebooks about the experience. Learning where we were booked to stay, he passed on his congratulations over the choice, using these exact words (I am eliminating only the name of the guesthouse and its address):

"I've stayed there [he names the guesthouse] -- it's great! Nice little neighborhood -- not big and bustling like [he names the area a mile away], but more intimate."

So whom to believe? A self-appointed, amateur, one-time critic who has been once in his life to the place in question? Or a professional author of travel guides? And isn't it probable that this reference to Times Square was a momentary lapse of judgment, a bit of anger having nothing to do with the actual character of the neighborhood in which we are staying, but probably provoked by a totally unrelated incident or observation?

I have carefully read and considered all the condemnations of my skeptical reaction to user-generated websites. And I'm sorry, I've just experienced another real-life problem with those sites. And I will be reporting to you, on my return, from what seems to me to be an idyllic, quiet, spacious and comfortable beachside location for a 10-day stay starting just a few days from now. What's more, I will be reporting on my return with the actual name of the establishment that is supposedly situated in an area "like Times Square."

Wall Street is Paying Close Attention to the Growth of AirBnB & Its Offer of Low-Cost Short Apartment Stays

On her stay in Chicago last weekend prior to delivering a talk at the heavily-attended Chicago Travel and Adventure Show, my daughter Pauline stayed in a comfortable bedroom of a centrally-located Chicago apartment, for $65 a night (including the right to raid the refrigerator for snacks or breakfast). She had made the arrangements through AirBnB.com, and enjoyed a visit that she found greatly superior to any comparable hotel, and certainly at a substantial saving in price.

The world of economics and finance is keeping a close eye on the fortunes of AirBnB.com, as evidenced by a lead, cover article on that internet service in the current issue of Forbes magazine. Forbes finds AirBnB.com to be the most striking example of a larger trend that finds Americans renting the partial use of their assets -- like their cars, their bicycles, their parking spaces, their camping equipment and RVs -- as a means of supplementing their incomes in these tough economic times. The Forbes profile of AirBnB.com is titled, "AirBnB and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy."

According to Forbes, AirBnB is currently seeking to expand its reach by attracting new capital of 150 million dollars, which would give AirBnB.com a valuation of $2.5 billion dollars. Each of the founders of AirBnB (two college roommates) would then be worth 400 million dollars apiece. Last New Year's Eve, 141,000 people worldwide stayed in accommodations booked through AirBnB.com -- more than stayed that night on the entire Strip in Las Vegas.

AirBnB.com still faces problems, especially in cities like New York and San Francisco where the practice of renting short-term stays in whole apartments has been made illegal. (My daughter carefully ascertained, before she embarked on a search for a Chicago room in AirBnB.com, that Chicago had no such legislation.) In the sharply-critical comments I received from dozens of readers when, in a recent blog, I approved the short-term rentals of apartment bedrooms, I also saw that a great many apartment dwellers are fiercely opposed to what AirBnB.com is doing. They clearly don't want strangers staying down the hall. And the hotel industry, of course, is out to stop AirBnB at any cost.

But thus far, in the overwhelming percentage of touristic cities (and in 300,000 apartments), AirBnB.com can legally enable you to save a great deal of money. And if the organization continues to receive the funding it needs to build an even more powerful network of apartment-seeking, AirBnB.com will become a mammoth source of accommodations, perhaps rivaling the hotel industry of numerous cities in size.

You might give them a try.

Context Travel is Rapidly Revolutionizing the World of Sightseeing Tours in Major Cities

I have now received such good comments on the remarkable walking tours conducted by Context Travel that I need to concentrate on it in this separate treatment.

Context Travel is deliberately snobbish in its appeal -- but only in an intellectual sense. It operates walking tours conducted by what it calls "expert level docents" who are occasionally PhDs and almost always M.A.s. It frankly states that its tours are for intellectually curious people. They do not consist of the memorized, joke-ridden spiels of self-appointed experts in the life of a particular city, but are conducted by recognized experts in various aspects of those cities. And they are not canned lectures, but are geared to the knowledge already possessed by members of each tour group (limited to six persons on each tour). When my daughter recently signed on for a Context tour in the parks of Paris, it was conducted by an administrative official of the Louvre whose offices are in the Louvre. When she signed on for a "children's tour" of the Vatican with her then-12-year-old and 8-year-old daughters, it was conducted by an art-history doctoral student in a university of Rome.

This past weekend, in the Sunday travel section of The New York Times, Context Travel was cited for its operation of an unusual tour of Parisian restaurants and cooking schools, featuring new trends (which include the application of "molecular gastronomy" in top establishments of the French capital). In New York, one of several Context tours features the art galleries of the Chelsea district. Another is called "Birth of the Cocktail," and deals with the development of those drinks. Context tours are available in four U.S. cities (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.), in 15 European cities (all the major capitals and touristic favorites), and in Beijing and Shanghai.

Context's tours are not cheap -- they seem to average about $65 per person -- but they last for three to four hours, which is much longer than the duration of the standard walking tour conducted by an amateur historians. They are scheduled for particular dates, but require that you make advance reservations. And to do that, you really need to spend a half-hour navigating their website and examining their offerings. You go to www.contexttravel.com, and the rewards of doing so will be major ones -- a claim I can make because of the many enthusiastic comments I've received, from people I trust, about this unusual travel facility.

 

 

Relying on the Internet to Choose a Vacation Rental Can Lead to a Puzzling and Difficult Experience

Stupefied by the experience of venturing outdoors into temperatures of 15°F my wife and I decided last winter that we would treat ourselves to a week in the tropics during the early days of March. And after we'd discovered that such quick-stays were already sold out in various locations in Florida, we hit upon a better solution: We'd go to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where it was reliably hot. We would rent a comfortable condo for that week.

Out came the laptop and on came the listings in VRBO.com, Homeaway.com, and Rentalo.com. But what a buzzing and blooming confusion! We were confronted with literally scores of possible rentals, all of them seeming alike, all of them profusely illustrated with photos of bedrooms indistinguishable from each other, all of them supported by breathless descriptions composed by the owners of each flat. As for those famous user-generated recommendations, these were equally impossible to decipher. Seventy-eight persons found each condo to be fine, 59 persons found them to be "terrible." Whom to believe?

And then a thought occurred. We'd go to a guidebook. And what a relief. There, in the relevant pages, was a calm appraisal of several leading properties in the Condado Beach area and Isla Verde, of which it was obvious that the experienced author was enamored of three in particular. The choice became easier, the selection was made, and in the early days of March, 2012, we flew off with confidence to the sands of San Juan.

Call me prejudiced, call me stubborn, but I will remain enamored of travel guidebooks for the rest of my life. I will enjoy relying on the judgment of a skilled journalist who is writing the third or fourth yearly edition of a guide that bears his or her name and on which they'd placed their personal stamp of approval. I will depend on the obvious self-interest of a publisher who wants the readers of that guide to be pleased with its results, so that they'll buy another such guide to another destination at some time in the future.

Does that made me a Luddite, a stick-in-the-mud? I'd claim otherwise. And I'll leave it to you to decide.

Despite Hesitations that Travelers Might Feel, Tourism is Attempting a Return to Haiti

I am writing not about realistic, near-term travel planning, but about a far-more-vague desire for a future trip. And my decision to do so is prompted by the news that Haiti has just opened a tourist office in Tampa, Florida (where the current head of that office is the aptly-named Davidson Toussaint). What's more, I'm told that Transat, the Canadian vacation airline, has just successfully operated its first group tour to that suffering country and is apparently scheduling more. All this is written in the context of the fact that Haiti's president, the popular Michel Martelly, a former singing star known as "Sweet Micky," has declared tourism to be a key priority of his administration. 

Haiti certainly has all the natural ingredients of a top touristic destination, including a guidebook published by my colleagues in the Bradt organization. Its beaches and waters are pristine, its snorkeling/diving spectacular (healthy, undamaged reefs), its cuisine quite tasty, its robust arts scene produces some of the world's most distinctive paintings, and its people are friendly to a fault. Several airlines now service the island (and are met by shuttle transportation going to a few small beachside resorts), and there is even a chic new four-star hotel called the Royal Oasis (designed, admittedly, for business travelers and not vacationers) that recently opened in Port-au-Prince, with fifteen other hotels reportedly in the pipeline. But although most of the debris from 2010's 7.0 earthquake has been cleared away, the country remains desperately poor, and most standard tourists would be hesitant to go there. 

Nevertheless, as my own contribution to a people who deserve our aid, I'm writing now that adventuresome tourism has returned to Haiti. And we all hope, certainly, that a thriving touristic industry will eventually emerge to assist the economy of that much-deserving nation. If you'd like to know more, there's information at www.haititourisminc.com (it lists, pictures and describes a half-dozen attractive coastal resorts and hotels in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel), and a major travel agency in Port-au-Prince that you can contact at www.agencecitadelle.com. Last but not least, the former Club Med in Haiti is now back in operation (my information is based on hearsay, to be sure) as the Hotel Indigo.

It's Foolish to Disregard Aggregators in the Search for Low Airfares

Although I have recently dealt with one aspect of the discounted airfares often available from aggregators, the subject is so important that it deserves lengthier treatment.

Though very few members of the public ever use the word "aggregator" to describe the search engines that scan and compare the fares offered by the world's airlines, an increasing percentage of the public are making use of them. This could even be called the "era of the aggregator," as wealthy private equity firms and other wealthy companies compete with one another to offer a billion dollars and more to acquire some of the aggregators.  So it may be helpful to remind you of them.

Kayak.com, which was recently bought for 1.65 billion dollars by Priceline.com, is among the biggest of the aggregators, and you'd be well advised to search it when you're in the market for a cheap airfare. Snapping at its heels, like an aggressive terrier, is the much smaller Hipmunk.com, which has recently created all sorts of innovative ways to display special deals in airfares; it's fun to use. A third U.S.-based aggregator is Mobissimo.com, favored by many.

Overseas (though selling tickets for flights within the U.S. as well as abroad), the Copenhagen-based Momondo.com is an effective firm that frequently presents you with the cheapest fare, as does its Iceland-located competitor, Do-Hop.com, and the Edinburgh-headquartered SkyScanner.net.

And then there are a whole bunch of aggregators that seem to specialize only in the cheapest of fares: CheapOAir.com, CheapFlights.com, Vayama.com, FareChase.com, CheapTickets.com, still others.

The aggregators don't actually sell you the air tickets whose bargain price they've discovered; they simply relay that information to you and depend on the airline itself to actually sell you the ticket. Nevertheless, the airlines incur a small commission expense when an aggregator directs you to the airline's site, and therefore all the airlines are busily engaged in creating all sorts of advantages (priority boarding, increased frequent flyer mileage, advance seat reservations, reduced cancellation fees) designed to bring you directly to the airline's website without first consulting an aggregator.

The airlines are even more determined to avoid selling their tickets through one of the so-called Online Ticket Agencies (OTAs), whose names are Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity; they need to pay a heftier commission to Expedia et al., and therefore they're working hard to persuade the public not to go that route.

What's the lesson to heed from this dizzying array of sources? It is to go first to one of the aggregators, then to one of the OTAs, and finally to check what all of them are offering against the fares offered directly by the airline, by going to the airline's site. Though this may require a half-hour or so of searching at your computer, the savings more than merit the time, especially if you are two or more persons traveling together. And if you are really in need of a cheap fare, above all other considerations, you will also go to the airfare "consolidators," the companies that supposedly take blocs of seats from the airlines, which they are obligated to pay for whether or not they are used. I'm skeptical about that assertion, but it's the claim made by such companies as 1800flyeurope.com, dfwtours.com (airfares from Dallas), www.picassotravel.net (airfares from Los Angeles in particular, but offices in other U.S. cities as well), and www.economytravel.com (tel. 888/222-2110 for the best fares, and especially fares for religious or adoption travelers, from Atlanta).