Category Archives: safe travel

BREAKING: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez dies

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© Rafał Cichawa | Dreamstime.com

© Rafał Cichawa | Dreamstime.com

Mercurial, controversial president succumbs after an 18-month battle with cancer. Americans in or about to travel to Venezuela need to stay alert and follow events closely.

Hugo Chavez, the only president Venezuela has known for 14 years, died today of cancer at the age of 58. The type of cancer he had has never been disclosed.

Those interested in a look back at his life and political career will find that in a lengthy Associated Press story here.

Vice-President Nicholás Maduro made the announcement and called upon the nation to remain calm. But Mr. Chavez’s tenure saw Venezuela develop some deep political divisions, as well as a testy, uneven relationship with the United States. That makes it hard to predict what will happen in the country over the next few days and weeks.

The fact that this same Vice-President Maduro accused a US diplomatic attache of being a spy who gave President Chavez cancer probably won’t help much.

So far, the US State Department has issued no message to US citizens in the wake of President Chavez’s passing. That is bound to change. Meanwhile, if you’re an American, your best bet might be to stay calm, remain alert — and in the short term, keep your public movements to a minimum until you have a sense of how Venezuelans are reacting to this news.

NORTH AFRICA: A decidedly mixed travel picture

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© Jeffrey Thompson | Dreamstime.com

© Jeffrey Thompson | Dreamstime.com

Resumption of deadly political unrest has Egypt looking like a no-go zone again and Algeria has ongoing issues beyond what the mainstream media focus on, but one major cruise line is returning to Tunisia.

For awhile, it seemed as if things were looking up for travel to Egypt. The political winds of the Arab Spring had swept longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak from power and most Egyptians seemed happy about their prospects for the future.

Tahrir Square was no longer the scene of daily demonstrations and clashes with police and counter-protestors. Tours of historic sites in and around Cairo and Nile River cruises, cancelled during the troubles, were resuming. It was all looking good.

For awhile.

The conflict between the Islamists who back the new president, Mohammed Morsi, and secular Egyptians who fear that Morsi is trying to ram an Islamic state down their throats has erupted into daily street violence that so far refuses to die down. Dozens have been killed, well over 100 hurt.

Morsi has put a state of emergency in effect in three different Egyptian cities, none of which is Cairo, which means the unrest extends well beyond the Egyptian capital.

IBIT says: If you were thinking about making that trip to the Giza pyramids this year, you might want to think a little longer.

To the west, Algeria also looks shaky. Algerians have been protesting for the better part of three years over things like a housing shortage, high food prices, unemployment and corruption, and those issues are far from resolved.

The recent raid on a natural gas facility by radical Islamic terrorists and the bloody government counterstrike pretty much seals the deal.

Cruise ship Rotterdam of the Holland America Line

Cruise ship Rotterdam of the Holland America Line

IBIT says: You go to Algeria now at your own risk — and at the moment, the risk looks pretty high.

The news isn’t all bad, though.

The cruise line Holland America has returned making port calls in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began two years ago.

A spokesman for Holland America Line tells IBIT that the cruise ship Rotterdam is scheduled to make three Mediterranean cruises this fall of 11, 22 or 32 days between Western Europe, Italy and the Holy Land.

Each will be making a stop at La Goulette, the port of Tunis.

Tunis is Tunisia’s capital. It’s also an ancient city whose existence predates the Roman Empire. This originally was Carthage, the land that produced Hannibal, the general who invaded Europe, led an army with elephants across the Alps and for a time, scared the Romans right out of their tunics.

When the Romans returned the favor and overran Carthage, they tried their best to destroy every trace of evidence that the Carthaginians ever existed. They didn’t quite succeed, though, and you’ll find the remnants of that glorious past in Tunis.

Plus, Tunisians are wonderfully welcoming and friendly to visitors, in the true tradition of Islam.

IBIT says: If you’ve got the time as well as the cash why not? Just monitor events closely and make sure you have travel insurance.

Morocco also remains a quiet and stable travel destination these days. However, Morocco may have some issues of its own regarding “us,” which IBIT will be exploring in the coming days.

SUPER BOWL XLVII: The scammers are coming

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Bourbon Street

Bourbon Street, New Orleans — ©Ericsch | Dreamstime.com

Actually, they’re already in New Orleans, selling non-existent rental rooms to tourists ahead of the big game. Don’t get conned.

It’s inevitable. Major events draw criminals, all of them out to separate you from your money. And no annual event in America is bigger than the National Football League’s championship game, the Super Bowl, being played this year in New Orleans.

This game is an annual magnet for larceny, regardless of where it’s played, but New Orleans, meanwhile, more than a few “grifters” of its own. There are folks in this town who would sell you fresh air if they thought they could get away with it.

So it came as no surprise when local television station WWL reported that visitors trying to rent rooms in the French Quarter were being conned.

You can read the entire WWL story here.

Modern technology is making these scams easier than ever to pull off. Phony online ads. Bogus Web sites that look “legit.” Unsupervised online ad sites like craisglist and couchsurfing sites like airbnb. Crooks will exploit any avenue they can find, and the Web gives them plenty.

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When you put it all together, it’s all too easy to wind up on the wrong end of that famous passage from Malcolm X:

“You been HAD! You been TOOK! You been…HOOD-winked! BAM-boozled! Led a-STRAY! Run a-MUCK!”

Or in this case, left without a place to sleep in the run-up to Super Bowl Sunday.

There are no absolute guarantees against this kind of fraud, but there are ways to make yourself a harder target for con artists. Here are a few ideas:

  1. DO YOUR HOMEWORK
    The crooks may have online resources at their disposal, but so do you. Use them. Hook up with local tourism organizations like the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau and New Orleans Online. Ask their advice on finding a guesthouse in “the Quarter” — or anywhere else in the Crescent City.

    Here’s a good tip from the vacation rental site Homeaway: “Contact the owners for information not included in the property description.”

  2. USE YOUR HEAD
    Remember the old saying, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Think. Ask questions. Be skeptical.

    Make use of review sites like TripAdvisor. Check for reviews on the place you’re being offered. If there are none, treat that as a red flag. If there are, contact the reviewers. Ask questions. Use Google to locate pics of the location. Above all, make sure the name of the guesthouse matches the address you’re being given.

  3. GIVE YOURSELF SOME CREDIT
    Be wary of those who insist on cash deposits up front, and never use a debit card to pre-pay a room. Either way, if there’s a problem, there’s no way to get your money back. Look instead for people who accept deposits by credit card. If something goes wrong, you can at least call your bank and cancel the payment.

Of course, you can avoid all of these problems by staying in a conventional hotel or motel, but a lot of visitors want the feeling of staying in guesthouse or apartment in New Orleans, and why not? It can be a great experience, and save you a ton of money, besides.

With some due diligence and a few good-sense precautions, you can rent your room and have a Super time in the NOLA. Laissez les footballs voler!

The IBIT Travel Digest 10-22-12

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The good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

James Bond Island, Thailand

© Ihar Balaikin | Dreamstime.com

The latest James Bond movie, “Skyfall,” is now blowing up (almost literally) in theaters worldwide. 007 has been a lot of places for Queen and country these past 50 years — which locations were your favorites? London’s The Guardian offers up a slideshow of their must-sees. Does their list match yours?

The one that really set my imagination racing was Khow-Ping-Kan on Phang Nga Bay in Thailand, seen above. This was the climactic location for “The Man with the Golden Gun,” one of the lesser flicks in the Bond series. These days, a lot of people just call it “James Bond Island.”

A sight like this could make me happily forget all about Bangkok, at least for a day or two.

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In its ongoing efforts to swallow the Earth whole, Google has bought up the Frommer’s travel brands — all of them — for an undisclosed price. This after buying the Zagat restaurant review publishers.

What all that means for the traveling consumer remains somewhat unclear. It’s unlikely that what you see online or on book shelves from these two well-known travel publishing names will look or feel any different in the near term. But as we all know, things change.

Will Google insist on putting its stamp on its new travel possessions, or will it be content not to fix what wasn’t broken? Stay tuned.

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IBIT doesn’t offer a Travel Outrage of the Week feature. If it did, this might top the list.

There are reports out of San Francisco that the local Travelodge motel recently refused the credit cards of famed New Orleans funk band The Meters Experience on the grounds that they are black.

And no, that’s not a misprint, nor did you misread it.

You can read the entire story yourself at SFWeekly here. For a more detailed report on the incident, go to the NOLA.com story here.

It really shouldn’t make any difference, but it’s not as if we’re talking here about some garage band composed of a bunch of high school kids with delusions of grandeur. The Meters are a New Orleans institution known around the world. Its guitarist, Leo Nocentelli, is a nominee for the 2013 class of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

I have emailed the Wyndham Hotel Group, which owns the Travelodge chain, asking it for clarification and its side of the story. Whatever I get in response will be published here.

There’s no indication that the motel clerk or manager even tried to verify whether the credit cards were valid, a swift and simple process that hotels and motels conduct routinely with all hotel and motel arriving guests millions of times a day around the world. Instead, if the initial reports are correct, the Travelodge people took one look at these black musicians and said, “Forget about it!”

Why are we still having to deal with this kind of treatment in 2012?

ADDENDUM
I emailed Christine DaSilva, a spokeswoman for Wyndham Hotel Group, about this situation. Here’s a portion of what she had to say:

“Hi Greg,
Thanks for checking in with me – not everyone that’s written about this allegation has done that, and it’s greatly appreciated.

As you can imagine, we are deeply troubled by this allegation. We invite every individual regardless of ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation or generation to experience our products and services, and we are troubled that the guests’ experience didn’t reflect our values.

“Please rest assured that we have been looking into this situation and are handling it directly with the franchised property’s owner as well as the guests.”

Sounds like Wyndham’s on the case. I suspect that a certain Travelodge property manager in San Francisco is going to be put in check…bigtime. And that’s exactly as it should be.

And now, here’s the rest of The Digest:

AIR
from ABC News
This is the sorry state to which US airport security has sunk: A list of the 20 airports in this country where a TSA inspector is most likely to steal something out your luggage. It sounds like the punchline of a bad joke, but it isn’t. The joke’s on us.

from SmarterTravel
Seven simple ways to get yourself kicked off an airplane. SLIDESHOW

from Travel+Leisure
If you’re flying out of any of these ten US airports, you’d be well-advised to a) get there early and b) not schedule your connecting flight too tightly. These Tardy Ten are notorious for flight delays.

LAND
from Travel Weekly
According to the numbers the US Travel Association fished out of the US Labor Department, travel has become a major source of new jobs in America. Guess you can’t outsource Disneyworld, can you? It’s also a growing source of cash. Foreign visitors dropped $82 billion in the US in the first half of 2012, an 11-percent increase over last year. So when you see that foreign tourist in your town, be nice. Be very nice.

from the New York Times
In Manhattan, home to some of the priciest hotels on Earth, a decent room for $150 or so a night constitutes a good deal. This guy tells you where and how to find seven of them.

from Travel Weekly
Which would you rather pay for at your hotel — your breakfast, access to the hotel gym or your in-room Internet access? US hotels are making the choice for you.

from Travel Weekly
At the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel, they really give a hoot. Lots of hoots, in fact. Nesting barn owls, it seems, love the place.

SEA
from Travel Weekly
Here’s an idea from Carnival Cruise Lines. Want to get your cabin early, have priority dinner seating aboard ship, be first in line to embark or debark? Easy. Just pay an extra $49.95 per cabin. And you thought the cruise industry wasn’t paying attention to the airlines and their add-on fees.

from Travel Weekly
Bermuda is starting to fall off the cruise ship industry’s radar. Royal Caribbean is the latest to cut back.

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AFRICA
from Travel Weekly
Egypt reopens a major stretch of the Nile River to cruise ships.

from Wilkinsons World
Sitting off the coast of Namibia, Shark Island today is a wildlife preserve and resort. But a century ago, it served a very different purpose. Long before the Nazis came into being, the Germans created the world’s first death camp on this island…to exterminate Africans.

AMERICAS
from Travel Weekly
Go to Mexico, get well? Mexican tourism officials are pushing the nation’s capital, Mexico City, as a medical tourism destination. Meanwhile, they’re also looking at giving small groups of visitors exclusive access to historic sites like Chichen Itza — for a fee, of course. Ever dreamed of having a pyramid all to yourself?

from the New York Times
In Portland, OR, the gritty old industrial area on the east side of Willamette River is going upscale. Check it out while it’s still both fun and relatively affordable. SLIDESHOW

from the Los Angeles Times
Before it was America’s 50th state, Hawaii was a sovereign state, an independent kingdom with its own royalty. The LAT’s Catherine Hamm shows you where to go to dive into the Hawaiian history your mainland teachers left out of their lessons.

ASIA
from Travel Weekly
Europe isn’t the only part of the world where river cruising is taking off. Aqua Expeditions, which operates Amazon River cruises in South America, has its sights fixed on the Mekong River in Southeast Asia.

from the Los Angeles Times
A generation ago, Da Nang was known to the world mainly as a gigantic US Marine base during the Vietnam war. Today, it’s Surf City East.

EUROPE
from Travel Weekly
The competition for the European river cruise market is heating up. After watching the Viking line add fresh new ships left and right, Uniworld is firing back with plans for two new ships of its own.

from the New York Times
The Belgian city of Antwerp, which first gained wealth and power as a 16th-century port city, is undergoing a revival.

from the New York Times
Wine lovers know all about Spain’s Rioja region, and for good reason. But there’s a lot more to Rioja than just great wines. There’s great food to go with them.

Edited by P.A.Rice

NEW ORLEANS: Watch on Isaac

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Nearly on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a fresh tropical storm is building in the Gulf of Mexico. Crescent City visitors need to stay alert — and take a few simple precautions.

It’s hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, and there is no one who lives in that region who does not understand what that means.

Now, with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina almost upon us, a fresh new tropical storm code-named Isaac is building toward hurricane strength — and the city of New Orleans is officially under hurricane watch.

If you live in the Crescent City, especially if you were a resident in 2005, you already know what to do. You’ve been there and done that.

If you’re a visitor to the NOLA, your situation may be a bit different.

PLAN AHEAD
For those whose travel plans could have them arriving in New Orleans at the same time as Isaac, now might be a good time to do a little contingency planning. Check with your travel agent (if you have one) about what happens with your air, hotel or cruise reservations if the storm hits.

If you don’t have an agent, you’ll need to check with those various folks yourself.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t already done so, now would be a really good time to look to buying some travel insurance.

If you’re already in New Orleans, and your scheduled stay falls within Isaac’s timeline, a few good-sense precautions are in order.

The first is to stay informed on what the weather is doing.

Gulf storms are almost willful in their unpredictability. They may build to hurricane strength, or not. They may turn in your direction, or not. They may speed up, slow down, or do any number of other things that no one expects.

In other words, they’re a lot like teenagers, only larger, louder and wetter. Not to mention potentially much more destructive.

** URGENT **
Tropical Storm Isaac is now expected to reach hurricane strength after crossing through the Florida Keys and is currently on a path that could take it into the city of New Orleans. The city is now on HURRICANE WARNING. The city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana are now officially under a state of emergency.

WATCH V. WARNING
A hurricane watch is serious, but it only means that a storm has the potential to strike your locale. It’s not the same as saying, “You’re going to be hit with hurricane-force winds sometime in the next day and a half.”

That’s essentially what a hurricane warning means. When that happens, it’s time to either batten down — to the best extent that a visitor can do that — or get out of Dodge.

I would lean toward Door Number Two, the one with the Exit sign over it. If you lean the same way, you need to take a few steps before things get to the point.

You need to keep your car’s gas tank filled. Decide in advance which direction you’re going to take out of town if it comes to that. Stash a gallon or two of bottled water and some non-perishable high-energy snacks in the trunk, enough for maybe a day or two on the road.

If the car is a rental, contact the rental car company, let them know the situation.

If you have airline reservations, call the airline and see if you can fly out a day or so early. Do this sooner rather than later; you won’t be the only one thinking along those lines.

DON’T GIVE UP THE ROOM
If weather conditions deteriorate rapidly, not only might you not be able to fly out early, you might not be able to fly out at all, as the airlines may well cancel all flights in anticipation of the storm.

If you’re due to check out of your hotel around the time the storm is due to arrive, ask about keeping your room an extra day or two, just in case. New Orleans hotel operators especially understand this situation and generally will do their best for you.

In any case, keeping the room you’ve already got could be a lot easier than trying to find a new hotel with a hurricane bearing down on the city.

Once you feel sure that you’ve taken all the sensible precautions you can, there’s only one thing left to do: Go back to enjoying your visit to the NOLA. Down an extra po’boy. Catch some good music. Dance the night into dawn.

Hell, in this town, you can even drink a hurricane.

SAFE TRAVEL: Can your hotel room be hacked?

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A security expert claims that with $50 worth of hardware and a few hacking tricks, he can break into almost any hotel room locked with a card key. If true, as many as 5 million hotel rooms worldwide may be at risk.

Some time this evening, a young man named Cody Brocious will step out in front of a large audience at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

At that moment, he will demonstrate how, with about $50 worth of palm-sized hardware and in a matter of seconds, he could break into their hotel rooms.

Or mine.

Or yours.

You know those plastic magnetic card-key locks that have replaced conventional metal keys at thousands of hotels around the world?

Well, according to Mr. Brocious, 24, such locks produced by a certain company have built into them not one but two different vulnerabilities that render them virtually null and void against a hacker with a modicum of skills and access to a Radio Shack store.

For a detailed breakdown on all this, check out the Forbes magazine story here.

Mr. Brocious plans to demonstrate this vulnerability himself this evening at the technical security conference known as Black Hat USA, which began last Saturday in Vegas and runs through Thursday.

The number of card-key locks vulnerable to this particular hacking technique are estimated to be somewhere between 4 million and 5 million worldwide.

Uhh…yikes?

If you’re in the room, there are plenty of old-school defensive measures you can take, not the least of which are deadbolt locks that come standard with most hotel rooms around the globe. Travel suppliers also sell special wedges you can use to stop anyone from entering the room while you’re inside.

You could even prop a chair or a suitcase against the door if you felt like it.

The real worry begins once you leave. At that point, the only thing standing between you and whatever you leave in your room is that card-key lock.

Not all card-key locks contain the twin vulnerabilities being outlined by Mr. Brocious. But enough of them do — and if he’s right, the knowledge of this vulnerability is already sufficiently widespread — to make this a concern.

So far, we haven’t heard anything definitive from the company that makes this particular type of lock. IBIT will let you know what, if anything, they intend to do about it.

Edited by P.A.Rice

Coffee, tea…sharp metallic object?

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Delta is trying to figure out how needles found their way into six sandwiches served to its passengers.

A half-dozen sewing needles have become the focus of law enforcement investigators on two continents. That’s what happens when they wind up in peoples’ food aboard airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean.

By now, you’ve heard the story. Six turkey sandwiches, served in Business Class aboard four different Delta Airlines flights from the Netherlands, had sewing needles in them.

The flights were bound for various destinations in the United States and all left Amsterdam on the same day.

Three passengers found those needles the hard way, taking a bite from their tampered sandwich. Among them were a father and son, who each found a needle in their sandwich, while flying on two different Delta flights out of Amsterdam that day.

One passenger was stabbed in the roof of his mouth. Authorities have since put him on HIV medication as a precaution.

The sandwiches came out of an Amsterdam flight kitchen belonging to Gate Gourmet, an airline catering company that provides meals for roughly 10,000 airline flights from nearly 30 countries…a day.

You can pick up more details on this incident from this National Public Radio story here.

The incident is casting a glaring light on something few of us ever really closely examine— airline food. We may love it, hate it or be utterly indifferent to it, but few of us have a clue about how it finds its way to our seat. We have no idea who’s producing this stuff, how or where.

Have you ever seen an airline chef? Neither have I. Airline catering serves hundreds of millions of people 24/7, but from the consumers’ point of view, it may be one of the world’s most invisible industries.

The companies have names like Gate Gourmet, Servair, Dnata. Together, they’re among the world’s largest employers. Gate Gourmet alone has 22,000 employees.

Their flight kitchens, located on or near the grounds of major airports, are more like factories than kitchens, each preparing thousands of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks around the clock.

That may not sound too appetizing, but it has to be that way. You can’t cook fresh on airliners.

Never mind the time constraints of trying to prepare 300 to 1,200 meals for a single flight in the cramped confines of an airplane galley. Open flame in a pressurized cabin equipped with oxygen, seven miles above the Earth?

Not happening.

Enter the caterers.

Several airline catering firms are owned, though not necessarily operated, by individual airlines, while others are independent contractors. All of them serve multiple airlines.

So when the flight attendant asks you “beef or chicken?” on that American Airlines flight, nobody tells you that your dinner may be coming to you courtesy of Lufthansa, the national airline of Germany.

Lufthansa owns LSG Sky Chefs, the world’s largest airline catering outfit, preparing some 500 million meals a day for American — and about 300 other airlines around the world — from 200 flight kitchens in 52 countries.

So who’s Number Two? Gate Gourmet. The needle guys. And this is not the first time there have been issues with its airline food.

Eight years ago, the Food & Drug Administration zeroed in on a Gate Gourmet flight kitchen in Honolulu after 45 travelers were exposed to carrots contaminated with Shigella bacteria.

Shigella causes dysentery, which at best is miserable and at worst can kill. But that incident was about lax food safety procedures, not a deliberate attempt to hurt somebody.

It gets better. Gate Gourmet actually belongs to a family of companies, including one called Gate Safe, which is dedicated in part to…

…wait for it…

…airline catering security.

Gate Gourmet says it’s conducting its own investigation. Delta, in turn, says it’s taking its own measure to protect the food aboard its aircraft. Dutch authorities and the FBI are already on the case.

Everybody…and I do mean everybody… is taking this one seriously. Believe me, this one’s going to get interesting.

Edited by P.A.Rice

EGYPT: Safe for tourism?

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The kidnapping last Friday of two black Boston-area visitors touring the Sinai peninsula is but the latest in a string of abductions targeting Americans in that Egyptian territory in 2012. It raises questions about how safe the country really is for international travelers.

Two African-Americans from the Boston area, the Rev. Michael Louis and Lisa Alphonse, have been abducted from a tour bus in Egypt by a Bedouin tribesman who wants to swap them for his imprisoned uncle. He also kidnapped the group’s Egyptian guide to act as translator.

Rev. Louis is 61, Ms. Alphonse 39. According to the minister’s son, they were among a group of Boston-area tourists on a missionary trip to Israel who set out to visit St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The son, Jean Louis, also says his father is diabetic and may soon need medication.

The kidnapper has identified himself as Jirmy Abu-Masuh, 32. He claims his 62-year-old uncle was imprisoned because he refused to pay a $100 bribe to police while traveling to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. He claims his uncle also is a diabetic and has not been receiving medical treatment in prison.

Abu-Masuh has told reporters the two kidnap victims are being well treated, but threatened to kill them both if authorities try to arrest him. He’s also threatened to kidnap more tourists from other nationalities.

To read details about this story as reported in London’s Sunday Mail, click here.

I don’t know if Rev. Louis and Ms. Alphonse were the only black Americans on the bus, or even the only Americans, so I can’t say at this point they were singled out either for their race or their nationality.

But media reports from the region have been pretty consistent in saying that this abduction is not an isolated case. This from the Sunday Mail article:

“Friday’s abduction is the latest in a series of kidnappings Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula over the past year.

“Abducted tourists are rarely harmed and usually released within days. In February, the AP interviewed two American women from California who say their Bedouin kidnappers gave them tea and dried fruit, and talked about religion and tribal rights. They were allowed to bring their Egyptian tour guide with them.”

That latter point gives reason for hope that the hostages eventually will be freed unharmed. As disturbing as the kidnappings themselves, however, is that they appear to be part of a trend.

Counting the Rev. Louis and Ms. Alphonse, a half-dozen American tourists have been kidnapped so far this year in the Sinai, a sprawling, arrowhead-shaped desert peninsula of roughly 23,000 square miles and a population of less than a half-million people, of whom about 80,000 may be Bedouins (the rest being ethnic Egyptians and Palestinians).

Even before the fall last year of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, government control over the region was spotty at best, and parts of it have become a haven for drug-smuggling, prostitution rings and other forms of organized crime. Add to that a longstanding grievance against corrupt police by the Sinai Bedouins, and you have a potentially volatile mix.

Coupled with ongoing political tensions in Egypt proper, this might give some travelers pause about visiting the land of the pyramids, which doesn’t help the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians whose livelihoods depend on tourism.

Does this mean I cross Egypt off my bucket list altogether? Not necessarily, though I’d probably be inclined to wait until more of the political dust settles before booking a trip to Cairo.

On the other hand, I won’t be trekking across the Sinai anytime soon.

Edited by P.A.Rice

The TSA complaint app

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© Outline205 | Dreamstime.com

Has some TSA airport screener lost your valuables, lifted something out of your luggage or put his hands some place where they really didn’t belong? Believe it or not, there’s an app for that.

Those beloved airport screeners of the TSA, who seem so determined to challenge the Internal Revenue Service for the title of Most Despised Agency in America, have finally hit the big time.

And how do you as an agency know that you’ve hit the big time in the Information Age? You know it when someone creates a smartphone app specifically to receive and expedite citizen complaints — about you.

A couple of Sikhs from the San Francisco Bay area have developed just such an app to direct complaints about TSA screeners to the Transportation Security Administration and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security — all in real time.

What may be more amazing than all that is that the developers say they created their complaint app more or less with the blessing of both agencies.

It should be available for download tomorrow, April 30.

The fact that it was two Sikhs who felt the need to create this app sheds yet another unflattering light on the mindset of the TSA.

Sikhs belong to a religious sect centered in India. Theirs is the fifth-largest religion in the world. Their men wear long beards and turbans on their heads as part of their religious practices.

By now, you’ve already spotted the magic word here: turbans.

If TSA screeners are going to inspect the colostomy bags of the elderly and the diapers of infants — that is, when they’re not feeling up little girls — how likely are they to freak out at the sight of a guy in a turban?

And do you really need me to answer that?

You can read about this remarkable little development in this National Public Radio story here.

In fairness, it must be said that Sikh extremists seeking an independent state in India have been accused of terrorist acts in the past, but to my admittedly imperfect knowledge, there is no record of such acts against or within the United States.

And yet the two guys who created this app felt they were being profiled by virtue of being Sikhs, which is what led them to design their TSA complaint app.

Had you even heard of Sikhs before hearing about this app? But some airport screener goes to DEFCON-5 because some guy with a long beard shows up wearing a turban.

In talking to friends and colleagues about this app and the backstory behind it, one thing really jumped out at me: No one, and I mean NO ONE, was surprised. That speaks volumes about the TSA, none of it very good.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
AIRPORTS: The birth of sanity?

Edited by P.A.Rice

COSTA CONCORDIA: The cruise industry takes a hit

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The Costa Concordia disaster is proof that stupidity is the most powerful force in the universe.

The body count isn’t even finished yet from the half–sunk, half–capsized Costa Concordia, but the cruise industry is already counting its financial losses, which could be staggering.

By now, you know the story. The Concordia took on water and keeled over after ripping her hull open on a rock.

The ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, is under house arrest, expected to face charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship and passengers.

The shipwreck charge alone could get him 12 years in an Italian prison.

Reportedly, authorities want Schettino to take a drug test. To my knowledge, there’s no scientific test to confirm the presence of stupidity in ship captains, but there are traces of it all over this incident.

The ship’s navigational computer had the Concordia on course and on schedule. All Schettino had to do to avoid this tragedy was…nothing. Instead, he chose to show off “his” ship by passing close to a nearby island.

Too close. The rock the ship struck left a 165-foot gash in her hull.

That’s more than half the length of a football field.

Schettino then drove the Concordia aground to keep her from sinking, but it couldn’t keep her from tipping over almost 90 degrees. From there, things only got worse.

The captain left the vessel, leaving his 4,200 passengers and crew in chaos. It took an hour’s worth of browbeating and threats from the Italian coast guard to get him to return — and it’s yet to be confirmed that he actually did.

Schettino has since told investigators that he decided to make the island pass to honor a retired captain and that the course deviation had been authorized in advance, but that he turned too late.

The ship’s owners have already said the course change was unauthorized.

So far, the loss of life stands at 11. The number of missing now stands at 21. Some may simply have found their own way home without being accounted for. The rest, by now, are almost surely dead.

WHEN CRISIS STRIKES
Some are saying that the rest of the Costa Concordia crew was ill-prepared to deal with their emergency. That may prompt some travelers may ask, “How can I protect myself in an emergency at sea?”

First, the good news: Most cruise ships are not captained by idiots. Even so, things can go wrong. What then?

For one thing, don’t just go through the motions when the cruise ship does the required lifeboat drill in the first hour or so after pulling away from the dock. Pay attention.

Once the drill shows you where your muster station is, be aware of it as you walk around, until you know how to get there from any point on the ship.

No time or unable to get back to your cabin to get your life vest? No need. As CBS travel editor Peter Greenberg points out, there are life preservers stowed all around the ship, in clearly marked compartments. Grab one, then head for your muster station.

Meanwhile, the cruise industry is already licking its financial wounds.

Start with the Concordia herself, which cost about $450 million to build. The ship is a write-off, a total loss. Ouch.

Just the process of getting her off the rocks and to a breaker’s yard to be scrapped will take months, and more millions.

Costa has to refund the fares of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of travelers who had booked the Concordia for cruises this year, with a 30 percent discount on future Costa cruises. Ch-CHINGG, Ch-CHINGG!

But believe me, we’re just getting started here.

You just know that lawyers already are lining up on behalf of the Concordia’s passengers for what promises to be the mother of all maritime lawsuits.

That likelihood is only strengthened by the fact that Costa is owned by an American company with the deepest pockets in the industry, the Florida-based Carnival Cruise Lines.

Reports are now surfacing in the Italian press describing Schettino as a braggart and a tyrant with a track record of bad decisions, like leaving port in a 60-knot wind.

Between the damage and the damages, the losses could hit $1 billion before it’s over.

If you close your eyes and listen carefully, you can probably hear the wagons being circled in Miami even now.

But this episode has the potential to damage far more than just Carnival. Winter is the season that travelers usually start booking cruises for spring and summer. The fear is that people looking to book their first cruise ever will look at this incident and have second thoughts.

That’s a particularly painful prospect to the cruise industry, and not just for this year.

According to a Reuters’ report this week, the mega-corporations that drive this business see cruising as being in its infancy, since only 20 percent of American vacationers have ever taken a cruise.

The fear is that this incident will scare off a large chunk of the remaining 80 percent.

This incident will have folks examining the regulation of the cruise ship industry and its safety practices. Right now, there is no single maritime authority with the power to enforce safety rules globally, and punish those to violate them.

But honestly, I’m not sure anything could’ve been done to prevent this. I mean, really, how do you regulate stupid?

CAPTAINS’ COWARDICE
Francesco Schettino may be the most despised man in Italy, if not the entire maritime world, for deserting his mortally wounded ship and his passengers, but he’s hardly the first.

You can find records of such incidents going well back into the 1800s.

In one incident, the sinking of the French vessel Medusa in 1816, the captain fled in a lifeboat with a few crewmembers and First Class passengers. The steerage passengers he left behind ultimately resorted to murder and cannibalism to survive.

More recently, the captain of the cruise ship Yarmouth Castle in 1965 had to be browbeaten to return to his vessel after it caught fire in the Caribbean, 90 people eventually died.

No one was killed when a hull rupture doomed the Greek liner Oceanos in 1991 — but no thanks to its captain, who left his listing ship on the first available helicopter — pushing aside an elderly passenger in the process — as his ship was going down off South Africa in 1991.

Edited by P.A. Rice