Tag Archives: Amtrak

Traffic, San Diego style

“America’s Finest City” is both cruise port and destination in one.

As you can see, our traffic jams are not like your traffic jams. Especially down along the Embarcadero, San Diego’s waterfront on San Diego Bay.

I was reminded of that recently when three cruise ships — the Zuiderdam from Holland America, the Celebrity Solstice and the Oceania Regatta — all tied up here on the same morning.

The pier can handle as many as four at a time. I haven’t seen that yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

By today’s standards, both the Zuiderdam and Celebrity Solstice would be considered mid-sized cruise ships, but these are two big, hulking mothers when viewed up close, especially 2,850-passenger Solstice, which looks as if it could swallow Regatta and her 600 passengers whole…and ask for seconds.

But what Regatta lacks in size, she more than makes up in 5-star luxury. A cruise on this baby, even in one of her cheapest inside cabins, will set you back thousands of dollars.

Where other debarking cruise tourists have to make their way past industrial-grunge docks and warehouses, when you leave the ship in San Diego, you get to stroll by hotels, a couple of high-end restaurants…and the Maritime Museum of San Diego.

This museum isn’t overlooking the water; it’s on the water, a collection of historic and replica vessels from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, everything from sailing ships to submarines.

But it’s not about novelty as much as it is about convenience. Cruise ships dock at the Broadway Pier, so named because it’s at the foot of Broadway, downtown San Diego’s main drag.

In other cities that welcome cruise ships, you may need a taxi or shuttle bus to take you from the pier to your hotel. Here, you can just cross the street.

Like its airport, Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s cruise ship terminal is practically downtown. The moment you arrive, you’ve arrived.

The Santa Fe train station, from which Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner train takes passengers between San Diego and Los Angeles, is a one-block walk from the pier. You could fly into LAX, take a comfortable, scenic two-hour train ride down to SAN, then hop on your cruise ship.

It’s all good for cruise travelers in a place like San Diego, which is not only a major jump-off point for cruise vacations, but a destination in its own right.

It means that, if you time and plan it right, you can enjoy two vacations more or less for the price of one. Arrive a day or two before your San Diego cruise departs, or stay a day or two after it returns. The ocean. The mountains. The desert. Sea World, Seaport Village, the Gaslamp Quarter, Horton Plaza. Catch a baseball game at Petco Park.

When you add it all up, San Diego is really value-added vacationing at its best.

TRAINS: Twelve lovely hours

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One of an occasional series.

The view from a Superliner Roomette on the Amtrak Coast Starlight.

A day’s ride down the California coast aboard the Amtrak Coast Starlight proves the perfect antidote to two weeks of stress.

I had flown up from San Diego to Oakland to deal with medical emergencies in my family. Now, after two weeks, it was time to go home. This time, however, I wouldn’t be flying. In more ways than one, I needed a break.

Which was why, at precisely 8:50 on a drizzly Oakland morning, I was aboard the Amtrak Coast Starlight as it gently edged away from Jack London Square Station, heading south to start the second of its two-day run from Seattle.

Behind me were two weeks of hospital visits, doctor conferences,bedside vigils, rehab centers, dialysis clinics.

Ahead were 12 hours aboard the Coast Starlight, a double-deck Superliner train.

I’d made this run before — first as a kid with my mother, more recently with IBIT guest columnist Walt Baranger from LA to Oakland.

This time, instead of sitting in a Coach seat, I’d be holed up in one of Amtrak’s Superliner Roomettes, the smallest and cheapest of its sleeping compartments. Two comfortable facing seats which convert at night into the bottom bunk, with a fold-out table between them to share by day and space beneath to store small luggage.

Let me be clear here: traveling by Coach on an Amtrak train is infinitely better than flying in Coach. A normal-sized human can travel in actual comfort. No Sardine Class on the rails. What’s more, even at top speed, passenger trains are amazingly quiet, much more than airliners with their noisy jet engines.

Still, if you’ve never done it, a train trip in your own compartment — or “sleeper,” as it’s still often called — truly takes rail travel to that proverbial “next level.”

First, there’s the “chill factor.”

In every passenger car on a train, people are constantly in the aisle — going to and from the bathroom, the lounge car, the dining car, the luggage rack. In your own compartment, you have only to shut your door and draw the curtains to create your own quiet, climate-controlled little world. Put on your headphones to listen to your favorite tunes and watch the world glide past your window.

Come nightfall, while Coach passengers are reclining nicely in their seats to go to sleep, you are curling up in your own bunk bed.

Another important difference shows up in the dining car, where Amtrak has worked hard over the last several years to raise the quality of its food. The cost of your compartments covers all your meals aboard the train. As long as you don’t order wine or beer with your meals, you can eat your way across America without once taking out your wallet.

You also get first dibs on meal reservations.

On the Coast Starlight, however, Amtrak goes a major step further with the Pacific Parlour Car, reserved for sleeper passengers and found exclusively on the Coast Starlight.

The upper deck is split into two sections. One is a lounge area, with comfy swivel chairs, along with couches positioned for sightseeing and small tables for your laptop or tablet computer, with plenty electric outlets and — drum roll, please — free wi-fi. The rest of the upper deck is a small dining area plus stand-up bar.

Downstairs is laid out as a rolling movie theater, complete with a big screen.

As a compartment passenger, you have the option of taking your meals in the dining car or the Pacific Parlour Car. It’s a tradeoff. The dining car menu is more extensive. The parlour car is calmer and quieter.

The Pacific Parlour Car also offers an afternoon wine tasting just before dinner — again, included in the cost of your sleeper ticket.

Actually, I might have spent the whole trip in the parlour car were it not for the 1950s oldies being played non-stop via Sirius XM radio, which pretty much guaranteed that I would spend as much time as possible in my comfy little roomette.

SOUNDS ON RAILS
For a lot of travelers, music is a big part of the experience. The airlines provide their own wide-ranging audio selections on long international flights, but the railroads are “there” yet. Not to worry; computers and digital audio/video players make it possible for every travelers to literally bring a library of tunes along with them.

When I’m on a train, I’m usually looking to chill, and the iTunes playlist I create generally reflects that. This is a sample of the playlist I created for my Amtrak Coast Starlight trip:

“French Dream,” Marc Antoine, from the album ‘Classical Soul’
“Big Girls,” Kenny Barron Quintet, from ‘The Kenny Barron Quintet: Quickstep’
“Dansa Negra,” Yo-Yo Ma & Kathryn Stott, from the album ‘Obrigado Brazil’
“When Love Comes Around,” the Braxton Brothers, from the album ‘Steppin’ Out’
“Dreamin’,” the Heath Brothers, from the album ‘Expressions of Life/In Motion’
“Just Gets Better with Time,” The Whispers, from the same album
“Keep Looking,” Sade, from the album ‘Stronger than Pride’
“Last Train Home,” Pat Metheny, from the album ‘Still Life (Talking)’

What would you play on a long train trip

All this self-pampering set me back $206 — $88 for the base fare and $138 for the roomette — or almost $40 less it had cost me to fly to Oakland in Coach.

It gets better. Every passenger pays the basic Coach fare no matter what, but the extra charge for a sleeper compartment is per trip, not per person. Friends or couples who can share the cost of a compartment can score both serious creature comforts and major savings.

There are some minor drawbacks to a Superliner Roomette. When I say it’s just big enough for two people, I do mean just. If you’re larger than a typical fourth grader, you may find the bunk beds more than a little cramped. Also, you don’t get your own wash basin, toilet or shower in a roomette. Amtrak reserves en suite bathrooms for its larger and more expensive bedrooms. For you, those are downstairs.

And none of the seats in sleepers recline.

Funny thing, though. Once you’re rolling in your roomette, with your tunes in your ears, sipping on a tasty beverage and gazing out the window as you watch the scene across the horizon change every second, none of that seems to matter.

You can take pics along the way and share them with your Facebook and Twitter friends (which I did). You can break out the laptop and get some serious work done (which I did not). Or you can exhale and do nothing at all (of which I did a great deal).

By the time you’ve covered your first 50 miles, you can almost feel your blood pressure dialing itself down.

Somewhere between the bottled water, the Martinelli’s sparkling cider and the Sierra Nevada pale ale, between the Cabernet, the riesling and the pinot grigio, between the salad of cherry tomatoes and strawberries sprinkled with grated Parmesan and the chicken hiding under a liquid blanket of red wine and beer sauce, the condos of Jack London Square and the backlots and backyards of East Oakland and San Leandro turn into the salt ponds of Hayward and Fremont.

Further on, sprawling suburbia fades seamlessly into farm country, where the vegetables of future dining car salads and the grapes that will star in future wine tastings still thrive in the ground, arrayed in precise rows that fan past your window like long fingers when the train is at speed.

Hills still green from winter rains briefly give way to rolling terrain so bare and brown that it lacks only a few craters to qualify as a moonscape. You almost expect to see a green, lizardlike Gorn from Star Trek, chasing a gimpy William Shatner in slow-motion through the narrow draws.

Not long after you clear Paso Robles and its quaint little station, the sand dunes in the distance signal that the sea is near. And when the Pacific Ocean suddenly spreads out before you, with the sun shining its own enormous spotlight down through the clouds on the waters that seem to fill the lower half of your window, you know why some passengers spend hours staking out seats in the lounge cars of this train.

The LA night skyline greets you as you pull into Union Station, the end of the line for the Coast Starlight. Ahead for me are two more hours aboard a different Amtrak train, the Pacific Surfliner, before San Diego and home.

By then, however, I was already de-stressed.

The Coast Starlight had done its job, in twelve lovely hours.

the IBIT Travel Digest 1.27.13

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The good, the bad and the bizarre in the world of travel

DANCING THROUGH CUSTOMS
One of the fringe benefits of writing a travel blog is that you can make some great friends doing great work. One such friend of mine is Renee King, who publishes A View to a Thrill.

In her most recent installment, she gives us the 4-1-1 on of the US government’s trusted traveler programs that can seriously speed you through the Customs process upon your return to the United States. It’s called “Global Entry” and here’s what Renee had to say about it:

“Originally created to target frequent international travelers, the U.S. Global Entry program has been a virtual god-send for travelers who want a fast and secure way of skipping the lines altogether when re-entering the United States.”

To pick up all the details on “Global Entry,” check out Renee’s article here. And then bookmark it. You’ll want to keep this one handy.

Anyone who doesn’t “get” the importance of this program has never walked/stumbled/staggered off a jumbo jet with about 300 other exhausted souls after a transoceanic flight lasting 12 hours or longer, only to queue up in a Customs line…with the passengers of two, three or four other jumbo jets, all doing the same thing you are.

I have. I don’t recommend it.

If such a trip is a one-in-a-lifetime deal for you, then you may not need this program, especially when it costs $100. You’ll also have to make an appointment to be interviewed, electronically fingerprinted and see if you qualify for the program — and frankly, not everyone will.

But when you walk off that plane in a jet-lagged fog and breeze by all those folks suffering in line, you’ll swear it was the best time and money you ever spent on travel.

And if you make more than, say, three or four globe-girdling flights per year, you need this.

To apply for the Global Entry program, start here.

ALL ABOARD…THE NIGHT TRAIN
If it’s true that, in the words of the old Amtrak commercial, “there’s something about a train, then there’s something even more captivating about an overnight “sleeper” train.

Watching the sun set from the privacy of your own compartment, then bedding down for the night with a window full of stars and awaking the next morning in a different city — or a different country — is unforgettable.

It’s also practical. A sleeper train combines transportation and lodging in one. Instead of losing a day traveling between points, you arrive at your destination early the next morning.

It’s not cheap, but a private compartment often includes all your on-board meals, as well as other perks unavailable to Coach passengers, all of which makes the sleeper experience worth considering.

London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper has considered it at length, and compiled a slideshow of what they consider to be the top ten overnight sleeper train runs in Europe, including one between Europe (London) and Africa (Marrakech, Morocco).

Paris-Barcelona? Paris-Berlin? London-Penzance? Yeah, I could happily do any of those.

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AFRICAN FASHION MADE EASY
Not many folks on this side of the Atlantic are aware of it, but Africa has developed quite the fashion scene. We’re talking high-end threads for men and women from high-profile designers from the length and breadth of the Mother Continent.

Until a few years ago, your best shot at checking out this vibrant and growing fashion world was to fly to one or more of perhaps seven African cities:

Lagos, Nigeria

Nairobi, Kenya

Cape Town, South Africa

Johannesburg, South Africa

Dakar, Senegal

Luanda, Angola

And if you want to get a feel for the sources of inspiration that drive these African fashions, that still might be the best idea.

However, you do have alternatives. Lots of them, in fact.

New York City, Los Angeles and Dallas both annually hosts African Fashion Weeks. But if you feel like giving your fashion trip some international flavor — with a bit less expense and a lot less flight time — there’s the Black Fashion Week in Paris and the Africa Fashion Week London, now in its third year.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Business Insider via Yahoo
A Germany-based air safety monitoring group lists the world’s ten most dangerous airlines over the last 30 years. Read with some large grains of salt.

from eTurbo News
An Indonesian airline adopts new Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliners from Russia. The reason: They can operate from the country’s short runways.

from NBC News
Southwest Airlines is betting that you’ll be willing to pay $40 extra to board their planes early. Would you?

from eTurbo News
Ethiopian Airlines cuts flights from Addis Ababa to Europe.

LAND

from Travel Weekly
A heavy late-December snowfall has the skiing looking good at America’s ski resorts.

from The Telegraph (London UK)
What do you get when you take an Amtrak train between Toronto and New York? A 12-hour rail cruise through US history and some of North America’s most gorgeous scenery.

from Forbes via Yahoo
Can you measure a country’s happiness? The Legatum Institute of London says it can, and it’s produced a list of the world’s ten happiest nations. And no, the United States is nowhere in the top ten.

from Time
Has snowboarding lost its mojo?

SEA
from Cruise Industry News
More evidence of the cruise industry’s growing tilt toward Asia: Princess Cruises to homeport a second cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, in Japan.

from Cruise Critic
For those of you dying to escape the frigid winter, there are six cruise ships sailing in warm waters that nearly always have cabins offered at a discount.

from Cruise Industry News
The upscale cruise line Silversea plans to offer shorter (and thus cheaper) cruises in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean.

from Cruise Industry News
As cruises go, this one’s the ultimate icebreaker. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises is planning an August cruise of the Northwest Passage fron Greenland to Alaska on one of its expedition ships, the Hanseatic. You don’t often see the words “expedition” and “5-star” in the same sentence.

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AFRICA
from Reuters
You might want to hold off on that Cairo vacation a little longer. Things are getting hectic — and deadly — again in Egypt.

from al Jazeera
Museum in Mali trying to protect some of the country’s historic artifacts from the threat of destruction by radical Muslim insurgents.

from eTurbo News
British Airways pulls out of Tanzania, and Emirates is the first airline to step into the void.

from The Telegraph (London UK)
Tourism officials in Egypt report that foreign visits are up, but not as much as expected.

from eTurbo News
Ethiopia turning to China, India and Russia as potential new tourism markets.

AMERICAS
from the Huffington Post
George Hobica says Albuquerque NM has been overshadowed by Santa Fe, but it deserves a closer look. Especially if you’re a fan of beer, road trips and under-the-radar cool.

from Travel Weekly
Want a shot at some warm winter weather and a whiff of that new hotel smell? Start saving your coins and circle Dec. 2014 on your calendar. That’s the the 1,000-room $1 billion Baha Mar casino resort is set to open its doors.

from the Chicago Tribune
If you’re a baseball junkie, a visit to Chicago’s historic Wrigley Field is something close to a religious pilgrimage. Now, the Sheraton hotel chain is planning to put up a boutique hotel directly across the street from the old ballpark. Think they’ll pt bleachers on the roof?

from Reuters via NBCNews
More flights and a weaker dollar have combined to create record-setting tourism in Hawaii.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from BootsnAll
Southeast Asia is a great destination for rail travel.

from China Daily
The dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku (or if you’re Chinese, Diaoyu) Islands is throwing cold water on tourism between the two countries.

from SFGate.com
Walking in the path of samurai. Scenic medieval walkways in Japan.

from The Guardian (London UK)
What would you see on a 40-mile walk across a city of 30 million souls? Marcel Theroux gives us his answers from his trek across Tokyo, the first of a series of walks across the largest cities on Earth.

EUROPE
from ABC News via Yahoo
Welcome to County Kerry in southwest Ireland, where drunk driving is legal. And no, that’s not a typo.

from eTurbo News
Ukraine’s largest airline, AeroSvit, goes belly up, stranding hundreds of passengers in the process.

from The Guardian (London UK)
It wasn’t that long ago that the term “luxury hostel” might have been the ultimate oxymoron in travel especially in Europe. It’s fair to say that things have changed. A lot. SLIDESHOW

the IBIT Travel Digest 1.20.13

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The good, the bad and the bizarre in the world of travel

American Airlines' new livery on their new Boeing 777-300ER airliners.

American Airlines’ new livery on their flagship Boeing 777s. What do you think? | Image courtesy of American Airlines

A NATION AFLOAT
Bangladesh — poor, low-lying and frequently flooded — is not on many people’s travel wish list. And maybe that’s our loss.

Because if we went, we’d see people using their own ingenuity to deal with the floodwaters threatening to gradually drown nearly 20 percent of their country…permanently.

In Bangladesh, climate change is not a theory. Melting Himalayan glaciers combine with annual monsoon rains and cyclones (what we call hurricanes) to inundate a country built on marshy delta. But the Bangladeshi people are finding ingenious ways to cope.

When major floods hit, the kids don’t go to school. It comes to them, on hand-built wooden boats — about the size of the vaporetti water buses that you’ll on the Grand Canal in Venice. Floating schools, floating health clinics, even floating libraries. There also are waterborne shelters for families displaced by floods.

But as you’ll see on the Fast Co.Design site, they’re going beyond adapting boats. They’re actually creating floating solar-powered farms producing vegetables, ducks and fish.

I would love to see all this in action. The Bangladeshis just might be more adapted to living with floodwaters than any other people on Earth.

On the other hand, that old “the monsoon ate my homework” excuse just won’t fly anymore. Sorry, kids.

BOEING’S BAD DAYS
To say it’s been a rough week for Boeing and its new 787 Dreamliner is an understatement.

By now, you know the story. A series of problems with the new jet, especially problems related to its Japanese-made lithium-ion batteries, led one airline after another to ground their 787s for safety inspections until the inevitable finally happened.

Not only have Dreamliners been grounded worldwide, but Boeing has halted deliveries of new ones until the problems can be tracked down and fixed.

Lots of writers, including IBIT, have pointed out that all new airplanes go through a certain amount of technical hiccups when they first come on-line. But when you’ve got batteries that leak enough corrosive fluid to burn holes through the floor and start taking out avionics, that’s no minor glitch.

Can/will the Dreamliner’s problems be fixed? Yes, and for the simple reason that London’s The Guardian newspaper points out: They have to be.

Both Boeing and the world’s airlines are all-in on this airplane. A Dreamliner demise would hit them like a financial tsunami.

All, perhaps, except Boeing’s European nemesis, Airbus, which has a rival to the Dreamliner, the A350 XWB, months away from its first flight.

IBIT will be introducing you to the A350 XWB in the coming days.

Meanwhile, should we be concerned that the same Japanese firm that makes the Dreamliner batteries also provides lithium-ion batteries aboard the International Space Station?

Oh dear…

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OLD SHIPS, NEW ROLES
The crew at CNN Travel have come across a pair of venerable vessels destined for new duties in travel. One invokes a famous legacy and a tragic past. The other, you just won’t believe.

The first involves the Queen Elizabeth 2 of Britain’s Cunard line. Known simply as “the QE2,” she spent some 40 years as an ocean liner in the grand Cunard style, making the trans-Atlantic crossing between Southampton, England and New York City.

In 2008, she was sold to an investment firm in Dubai and has been floating in limbo ever since. The word now is that she’s to be set up somewhere in Asia as a floating luxury hotel, like the old Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.

The exact destination hasn’t been disclosed, but the betting so far is on Hong Kong. That would be supremely ironic, because that’s where the QE2′s predecessor met her end.

When Cunard retired the original Queen Elizabeth in 1969 after 30 years of service, she was brought to Hong Kong to be turned into a floating university. Cool idea, right? But while being converted, she caught fire under suspicious circumstances and had to be scrapped.

If indeed QE2 is bound for Hong Kong, let’s hope she meets with better luck.

Meanwhile, China already has a floating hotel in Tianjin. But they aren’t using an old ocean liner or retired cruise ship.

No, their floating hotel is the Kiev, a retired Soviet aircraft carrier from the equally defunct Soviet Navy. She’s now known as the Binhai Aircraft Hotel, which her owners describe as “high-end.”

And in this CNN Travel slideshow, she certainly looks the part.

No gym. No swimming pool. But does boast three presidential suites among her 148 rooms, and is probably the only upscale hotel in the world with gun turrets, missile launchers and a flight deck big enough to launch and land jump jets.

The Chinese have another Kiev-class carrier in Shenzen. They turned that one into a theme park.

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RANT: AFRICA’S SELF-INFLICTED TRAVEL WOUNDS
I have a friend whom we’ll call Lisa, an American expat living in a West African country. She was looking forward to attending a major social media event next month in nearby Nigeria. But Lisa won’t be there.

Why? Because the country in which she now resides won’t give her visa to travel directly to Nigeria and back. the immigration office insists that she first fly all the way to the United States, obtain a visa there, and then come all the way back.

This is but one example of the inexplicable bureaucracy that has hamstrung regional African travel since the end of colonial days, and it’s not reserved for expats. Africans trying to travel within the Mother Continent have had to deal with nonsense like this — and worse than this — for decades.

It’s a simple equation, really. The harder and more expensive you make it for travelers to visit your country, the more likely they are to go elsewhere — and take their money with them. That’s what makes the United Nations’ recent warning on immigration rules so timely.

You’ll see that in the AFRICA section below.

Africa is poised to explode as an international travel destination, with billions of needed dollars pouring into national economies up and down the continent. But it won’t happen until its governments stop shooting themselves in the foot.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from the from the Washington Post
Why you shouldn’t fly within a month after having surgery. Two words: blood clots.

from NBC News
American Airlines is changing its look (see above). What do you think of this new livery?

LAND
from Forbes
A rare bit of good news from your friends at the TSA: Those overly revealing full-body scanners installed a few years ago at US airports are going bye-bye.

Budget Travel via Yahoo
Top ten budget travel destinations for 2013.

from the Washington Post
The must-have items for your travel health kit.

from the New York Times
Amtrak adding awards incentives for frequent riders of their best trains. (The kid in the pic could’ve been me on my first cross-country train trip.)

SEA
from Cruise Critic
How to pick the right cruise ship for your at-sea vacation.
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AFRICA
from CNN
The violence in Mali has placed the historic treasures of Timbuktu under threat.

from the Zimbabwe Independent via allAfrica.com
The UN’s global tourism body has a blunt message for Zimbabwe (and by extension, the rest of Africa): Ease up on your visa restrictions or lose out on tourism.

from the Tanzania Daily News via allAfrica.com
How the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer are putting American eyes on Tanzania, and boosting that country’s tourism in the process.

from This Day (Nigeria) via allAfrica.com
A feature film meant to raise the international profile of Nigeria’s prolific film is also raising awareness of one of its biggest tourist attractions — Cross River state.

from Associated Press via Yahoo
In South Africa, veterinarians are joining the struggle to save endangered animals from the poaching epidemic.

AMERICAS
from the New York Times
If all you know of Medellin, Colombia is the memory of the late and largely unlamented Pablo Escobar, then you really don’t know Medellin. And it might be worth your while to get acquainted.

from CNN
Costa Rica. It’s not just for backpackers anymore. Livin’ large in the rainforest. SLIDESHOW

ASIA/PACIFIC
from CNN Travel
Officially, Beijing smog is not the worst in the world. But your eyes, throat and lungs all may have a very different opinion. Is a major world capital and travel destination on the verge of becoming unlivable? SLIDESHOW

from CNN
A local’s guide to Singapore. The operative word is “change.”

EUROPE
from BBC Travel
Meetups at the movies in Paris. Want some popcorn to go with that wine?

from The Guardian (London UK)
You can travel from London to Paris by air, by train, by barge and even bus. Now, if you’re up for a few days of challenging, lovely riding, you can do it by bike.

from the New York Times
Reykjavik. Capital of Iceland. Hard to spell, hard to pronounce. But easy to love during its spectacular winters.

from The Guardian (London UK)
Hiking the Scottish Highlands. Cycling in Malta. Healthy vacations don’t have to be about suffering for the sake of exercise.

the IBIT Travel Digest 12.2.12

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

Sunset off Catalina Island | ©IBIT/G. Gross

ALL ABOARD — WORLDWIDE
If you love rail travel — or just loathe air travel — The Guardian newspaper in London has one of the best resources for planning a fantastic rail vacation.

It’s created its own Web page dedicated to great rail journeys around the world.

Stories about terrific train trips on almost every continent, planning advice, suggestions from readers, photo galleries, it’s all there.

One such trip that’s definitely on my list is aboard The Canadian, a train that travels across virtually the breadth of Canada, from Toronto in the east to Vancouver on the Pacific coast.

It’s not a high-speed train, but given the beauty of the land, including the Rocky Mountains, you won’t want to go that fast, anyway.

Even if you don’t actually use it to plan a train trip, you’ll probably learn some interesting things from it.

For example, thanks to the English Channel tunnel, it’s now possible to travel not merely from London to Moscow, but from London all the way across Europe, Russia and Siberia to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean — crossing ten time zones and nearly 8,000 miles — without ever stepping onto an airplane.

Not that you’d actually want to, but you could.

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STRETCHING OUT ON AMERICAN
There’s a truism in the fashion world that says if you wait long enough, everything comes back in style. That may be the case among the airlines, as well.

About a decade ago, I joined my first airline mileage program. The airline of choice was American. The reason? Back then, American touting the fact that it was removing seats from its aircraft to create more legroom between rows. When you stand 6’3,” you pay attention to things like that.

Sure enough, a few years later, the airline decided it needed the money, so it put all those seats back into all those planes. Bummer.

Fast-forward to November 2012. An email from American Airlines pops up in my inbox:

“Good things do come to those who wait.

Earlier this year, we mentioned that extra legroom in the Main Cabin was coming. We’re happy to tell you that Main Cabin Extra seats have arrived. You’ll enjoy the following benefits when you purchase a Main Cabin Extra seat:

• Extra space to stretch out
• Group 1 boarding to settle in early
• Seats near the front of the plane so you can get on and off the plane faster”

Legroom is back. Cue the Kool and the Gang music. “Ce-le-brate good times, come on!”

Well, not entirely. There are a couple of differences this time around.

A decade ago, the extra legroom was spread through the entire cabin. This time, it’s being limited to the Main Cabin Extra section at the front of a selected group of new jets.

The other difference is one you’ve probably come to expect by now. If you want a seat in Main Cabin Extra, and you don’t have elite status with American, you’ll have to pay for it, anywhere from $8 to $118 per flight, according to American’s Web site.

On the other hand, you won’t be paying hundreds or thousands of dollars extra for a First or Business Class seat.

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AFRICAN VISA
If I had a dollar for every unsolicited credit card application that turned up in my mailbox in the last five years (and went straight to the shredder), I could probably fly someplace nice… in Business Class. But here’s one Visa card I wouldn’t mind having.

It’s called the KQ Msafiri Visa credit card. It’s result of a joint venture between Barclay’s Bank of Kenya and Kenya Airways.

Not only do your purchases with the card earn miles toward free Kenya Airways flights, but you also get priority check-in and boarding, and up to $56,500 in travel insurance, free.

Cool. But what I’d really love to see would be for outfits like Kenya Airways, South African Airways, Ethiopian Airlines or Arik Air to partner up with some American banks — preferably some black-owned American banks — to create a credit card whose purchases would build miles toward travel to Africa.

That’s one credit card application I wouldn’t shred.

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AND FINALLY…
This last item sounds like a punchline, or maybe something from the satirical news Web site, The Onion…but it’s neither.

Starting this weekend on selected international flights, Japan Air Lines will be serving its passengers in-flight meals featuring…Kentucky Fried Chicken.

That’s right, JAL is hooking up with KFC. According to the JAL press release, it’s to be called “Air Kentucky.”

Greasy fried chicken at 35,000 feet? Neither I nor my bowels know quite what to make of this. Believe it or not, however, it does make a certain amount of sense, although perhaps not for the reason you’d expect.

It would be logical to presume that JAL is doing this to placate those Western passengers whose faces turn unnatural colors at the very thought of eating sushi. But you would be mistaken.

According to the press release, “KFC is widely popular in Japan, particularly during the Christmas season.” And according to CNN, it ties in with a JAL gimmick of partnering with restaurtant chains popular in Japan, such as “MOS Burgers, Yoshinoya beef bowls and Edosei pork buns.”

And there you have it. Pass me the sushi, please.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Smarter Travel
A holiday gift from your friends at ST, the ten airlines that give you the best legroom in Coach — or as I like to call it, Sardine Class. SLIDESHOW

from Travel Weekly
Flying to the Caribbean from anywhere in the world? No problem, mon. Flying among the Caribbean islands on regional airlines? Big problem, mon.

from Travel Weekly
Delta to begin flying between Seattle and Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport, which is closer to the city than its other airport, Narita. But Seattle’s gain will be Detroit’s loss.

LAND
from Smarter Travel
The ST crew highlights the cold-and-flu season by pointing out the 10 Germiest Places You Encounter While Traveling. Their title, not mine. Never mind that, just take their advice and stay healthy going into the New Year. SLIDESHOW

from CNN
First, the bad news. Hotels are now going the way of the airlines and hitting their guests with hidden “resort fees.” The good news? The feds have taken notice.

from Smarter Travel
Five off-season travel destinations that are really cool, and not just because it’s winter. SLIDESHOW

from Travel Weekly
Ridership isn’t the only thing growing at Amtrak. Look for a larger number of Amtrak Vacations packages in 2013.

SEA
from Travel Weekly
Houston has had a gleaming new cruise ship terminal since 2009, but no cruise ships ever made port calls there. Starting next November, that will change.

from Travel Weekly
More life preservers, better tie-downs for heavy equipment aboard ship and standardized procedures for bridge officers are among the safety changes being proposed within the cruise ship industry as a result of the Costa Concordia disaster.

from CNN
How do you “undiscover” an island?

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AFRICA
from Travel Weekly
British travelers recently declared Cape Town, South Africa to be their favorite city in the world — and it looks as if Europe’s international airlines are getting the message.

from the South African Government News Agency via allAfrica.com
A cultural, historical and anti-poverty industrial center dedicated to the memory of anti-apartheid martyr Steve Biko opens in South Africa. The Steve Biko Heritage Centre is expected to become a major tourist attraction.

from The Star (Kenya) va allAfrica.com
With foreign tourism starting to dry up, mainly over security fears as Kenyan forces tangle with Al Qaeda-aligned terrorists from neighboring Somalia, the government tries to boost domestic tourism to compensate.

AMERICAS
from CNN
The ravages of Superstorm Sandy are not preventing holiday visitors from pouring into New York City.

from CNN
Take a look at Detroit through the eyes of its mayor, former NBA superstar Dave Bing.

from SFGate.com
Up in the Napa Valley, you can find restaurants that design menus around the finest local wines. Not down in Monterey. This beautiful seaside-scenic town, a two-hour drive south from San Francisco, has gone nuts over local craft beers — so much so that several local restos now feature entire dinners built around local brews.

from the Los Angeles Times
Memories of the California gold rush live on in Yreka.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from China Daily
Have you ever seen any of those ancient Chinese paintings depicting incredibly beautiful landscapes, towering bullet-shaped limestone mountains that couldn’t possibly be real? Well, they’re real, all right, and Guilin is the place that inspired a lot of those paintings.

Travel Weekly
With cruise sales leveling off here and sailing over their own “fiscal cliff” in Europe, the cruise lines are turning to Asia to pick up the slack. Singapore has already built a new ocean terminal large enough to dock the world’s biggest liners, and more are coming.

from CNNgo
Paris? New York? San Francisco? Madrid? You can all sit down. The Michelin Guide to the world’s great restaurants has crowned the gourmet capital of the world — and it’s Tokyo…still.

from Travel Weekly
Canada’s Four Seasons becomes the latest luxury hotel chain to plant its flag in China with a new 313-room luxury tower in Beijing.

EUROPE
from The New Yorker
Paris, that gastronomic capital of haute cuisine, is going ga-ga over its newest craze. Brace yourself: It’s American hamburgers. We’re not talking Mickey D’s, either.

from Cisco
The next time you find yourself in one of those classic London cabs, whip out your smartphone or your iPad and see if its wifi is working. Cyberspace is coming to the hackney carriage.

from Reuters
It’s no big deal anymore to find a Muslim mosque in Paris. A gay-friendly Muslim mosque in Paris? That’s a very big deal.

Edited by P.A.Rice

the IBIT Travel Digest 11.25.12

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

Shopping for Christmas lights, Strasbourg, France | @copy;IBIT/G. Gross

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UNEASY MIDEAST
The so-called “Arab Spring” may have brought political change to North Africa and the Middle East, but it’s bringing little good cheer to the travel industry. The ongoing turmoil in that part of the world continues to make it — justly or unjustly — a no-go zone in the eyes of many travelers.

Travel Weekly reports that between now and next April, Norwegian Cruise Line is dropping Egypt from its 10- and 11-day cruises, scheduling port calls in Istanbul, Crete and Naples in its place.

And NCL came to that decision before Egypt’s new president got involved in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and then tangled with his own nation’s judiciary over sweeping new powers he claimed…for himself.

Bottom line: Many of the countries now being avoided by travelers and travel companies alike may be perfectly safe to visit, but it may be a good while yet before the traveling public perceives them that way.

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AMTRAK RIDING HIGH
Anyone who tells you Americans don’t take trains hasn’t been to a train station lately. IBIT has and I can tell you, they’re busy.

Amtrak’s business year officially closed out on Sept. 30, and it closed on all high notes, starting with this one: 31.2 million passengers for fiscal 2012.

Two things make that number important. First, it’s the highest ridership for Amtrak since it came into being in 1971. Second, it’s the ninth year in a row that Amtrak has set a new ridership mark.

While you’re at it, smoke this over: Between 2000 and 2012, Amtrak ridership has risen by 49 percent.

You’ll find the rest of Amtrak’s glowing figures in the corporation’s press release here.

A lot of airline CEOs would kill for numbers like these. Then again, the misery that is present-day air travel in the United States is a big reason why more people are turning to trains in the first place.

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AND FINALLY
You know those customer-satisfaction surveys by J.D. Power & Associates, the ones that companies always tout in TV commercials to show how wonderful they are? Here’s one you won’t be seeing anytime soon, from anybody.

With hotel business picking up, J.D. Power decided to survey hotel guests. Those guests put the hotel industry on blast. Low-end, high-end, no one was spared:

“Satisfaction with check-in/check-out; food and beverage; hotel services; and hotel facilities are at new lows since the 2006 study and satisfaction with guest room has declined within one point of its lowest level in the past seven years.”

If I’m that guy at Motel 6 and I hear that, I’m leaving the light on because I can’t sleep. How did this happen?

Here’s a clue, courtesy of Travel Weekly’s Arnie Weissmann: Most of the top hotels in the country aren’t owned by real “hotel people” anymore.

They’re owned by private equity companies, which specialize in boosting profits by cutting costs — mainly by cutting staff and lowering service levels — before selling off the business to someone else.

That may be necessary when you’ve got hotels full of empty rooms at the height of a recession, but to keep doing it after your customers start coming back? Not smart, as J.D. Power vice-president Stuart Greif gently points out:

“Hoteliers need to get back to the fundamentals and improve the overall guest experience. Charging guests more and providing less is not a winning combination.”

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Travel Weekly
Qatar Airways joins oneworld, the world’s number two airline alliance. QA joins Malaysia Airlines and SriLankan Airlines as members-elect. It’s a big deal for Asian air travel and a big boost for oneworld, but the announcement is overshadowed by the ongoing beef between American Airines and its pilots.

from Travel Weekly
The Middle East may still be too hot politically for some travelers, but that’s not stopping three major Persian Gulf airlines from building alliances with European carriers.

from Travel Weekly
Southwest Airlines will start flying this spring from Florida to Puerto Rico. Officially, it’s a simple takeover of existing service from AirTran, which Southwest bought. But as its first air service outside the continental United States, it’s a big step.

LAND
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pickpockets in Spain, gypsy cabs in Rome and other avoidadable travel scams.

from Travel Weekly
JW Marriott opens the world’s tallest hotel in Dubai. How tall? About eight stories shorter than the Empire State Building in New York. Yep, that’s tall, all right.

from Independent Traveler.com
Lots of folks have tips on how best to travel with kids — but what about traveling with grandkids?

from NBC News
Honeymoons…with friends? Really? Yes, really.

SEA
from Cruise Critic
Cruising for grown-ups. Seven options for sailing without the kids.

from Travel Weekly
Norwegian Cruise Line is going all Grinch on Hawai’i. Seeing strong demand for its Hawaiian cruises, NCL is raising its Hawai’i cruise prices 10 percent starting Jan 1, 2013. Merry Christmas…

from Gadling
Travel insurance is one purchase a lot of cruise travelers try to do without. Don’t. But have a clear understanding of what travel insurance will and won’t do for you.

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AFRICA
from the Ethiopian Press Agency via allAfrica.com
Addis Ababa starting to become a destination for conference travel.

from The Herald (Zimbabwe) via allAfrica.com
The justly famed Victoria Falls are starting to get some serious competition as a tourist attraction from the Mana Pools. Chinese tourists in particular just love this spot.

from allAfrica.com
Citizen of Vietnam caught in Mozambique with a half-dozen rhino horns in his possession. Wonder how to say “You in a heap ‘a trouble, boy!” in Vietnamese?

from Inform Africa
An African looks at our Thanksgiving tradition, and wonders why African-Americans find anything to celebrate.

AMERICAS
from Travel Weekly
If you’re used to paying $51 in airport fees when flying into and out of Antigua, get ready to go a little deeper into your wallet from now on.

from the Los Angeles Times
The Hotel Chimayo de Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM walks a fine line between respecting an impoverished local culture and providing a successful escape for its visitors.

from USA Today
If you’ve been frightened away from Mexico over the last several years, you can at least think about returning now. The most recent State Department travelers warning about Mexico exempts most of that country’s traditional tourist destinations.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from the New York Times
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city, is obsessed with good food. For a traveler, that could be a very good thing, indeed.

from the New York Times
A short but worthwhile visit in the city we used to know as Calcutta. Nowadays, it goes by Kolkata.

from The Guardian (London UK)
With a sleek new mountain eco-resort not far from Shanghai in Zhejiang province, China hopes to lure environmentally conscious tourists — and perhaps simultaneously clean up its international image as one of the world’s major polluters.

from France 24
Are the people of Singapore real-world Vulcans a la Star Trek, utterly lacking in emotions (as well as pointy ears)? A US Gallup poll says yes. Even worse, a fair number of Singaporeans seem to agree. It seems they’re too busy making a living to have a life.

EUROPE
from The Guardian (London UK)
A look at the town of Vicenza, one of northern Italy’s under-appreciated jewels, and the creation of one of its most famous architects. A UN World Heritage Site that still manages to slip below the tourist radar.

Edited by P.A.Rice

the IBIT DIGEST 10-28-12

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

©IBIT/G. Gross

HIT THE COFFEE ROAD
In addition to wildlife safaris, history and heritage, you now have a new reason to visit East Africa: coffee. An outfit called ET African Journeys is offering a 14-day tour next month called Ethiopia & the Birth of Coffee.

Don’t expect a lot of “down” time on this trip. The package includes visits to a coffee cooperative and at least three different local tribes — the Erbore, Kanso and Woito peoples. You’ll also head into the Great Rift Valley for 4×4 drives and boat rides on valley lakes, as well as the Blue Nile Falls. You’ll also be seeing two different UN World Heritage sites, the castles of Gondar and the rock churches of Lalibela.

Lest you drop from sheer exhaustion and sensory overload, they’ve also worked a couple of resort and spa stays into those 14 days, as well.

Ethiopia is where coffee was born and there are those of you who will swear it’s the best in the world. It spread east into the Arab world and then to Europe before finally making its way to the Americas and the rest of the planet.

I’ve never been a big coffee drinker, but after getting my first taste of it during San Diego’s African Restaurant Week, I can tell you this: Ethiopian coffee is the only coffee I’ve ever had that I would willingly drink black. It’s smooth, it’s flavorful and it won’t bite your tongue off.

I’ll make my apologies to Juan Valdez later.

The tour departs Washington DC’s Dulles airport on Nov. 30 aboard a long-range Boeing 777 jumbo jet from Ethiopian Airlines. For more information, go to the ET African Journeys site here.

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TRAINING FOR VACATION
These days, Amtrak has jumped with both rails into the package vacation business.

Amtrak Rail Journeys last from seven to 13 days and combine multiple destinations. Some feature famous sites like the Grand Canyon. Some are regionally focused — the Northeast, the Deep South, the West Coast, the Canadian Rockies. At least two combine rail trips with cruises.

Costing from about $1,000 to $4,000 per person, none could really be called cheap, but considering that your transportation, lodging, meals aand tours are all included in the one price — not to mention the experience of train travel itself — you may find it offers real value for the money.

Amtrak also offers much shorter (and much cheaper) Rail Getaways to individual cities in the United States and Canada, as well as national parks and attractions like Hearst Castle in California and several national parks. These tend to last no more than three days and run from about $300 to $600 per person.

If the idea of a vacation on rails gets your blood racing, check out the Amtrak Vacations page.

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AMERICAN DELIVERS…SORT OF
Think of this as a kind of pre-emptive strike from American Airlines.

We all know how much travelers resent those airline baggage fees. We also know that travelers are starting to turn toward air freight companies and luggage shipping services to get their bags picked up and delivered, thumbing their noses at the airlines in the process.

Well, before too many more folks opt out of letting the airlines handle their bags, American has decided to partner up with one of those services to offer its own baggage delivery. For a fee, you can now bypass the luggage carousel and let American deliver your bags to your home or hotel.

You can read about it here at Travel Weekly.

Sounds like a great idea, and a pretty slick move by American…until you learn that you pay for this extra service on top of the airline’s checked bag fees. That, I suspect, will be a deal-breaker for a lot of travelers.

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AIR ALTERNATIVE TO PARIS
OpenSkies is a small upscale subsidiary of British Airways that flies trans-Atlantic routes with smaller Boeing 757 narrow-body jets set up to be more comfortable for travelers willing to pay for a pricier ticket.

In addition to offering more legroom, nicer meals and seats that don’t leave you feeling you’ve spent six hours in a vise, the airline is now offering flights from New York into Paris’ other major airport, Orly.

Most international travelers, especially from North America, usually fly into Paris via the massive, chaotic and perpetually packed Charles de Gaulle international airport. If you’ve experienced CDG in the past — and would do anything to avoid a repeat of it — this may be your chance.

And now, here’s the Digest:

AIR
from SmarterTravel
You know those controversial airport X-ray body scanners? The TSA is quietly replacing them with scanners believed to be less potentially harmful. But the old machines aren’t going away, just being moved to smaller airports.

from Yahoo Travel
Coming soon to an airline near you — personalized airfares. Individual airfares based on your personal profile data and travel history. Good deal or something sinister? Read and decide.

from Smarter Travel
Eight foods and beverages to avoid when you fly. Some, like beans and garlic, are no-brainers. Others, like alcohol, are no surprise. But sugar-free gum?

from Travel Weekly
With Orbitz, you may not always know: the federal government fines the online travel agency $25,000 for failing to properly disclose airline baggage fees.

from USA Today
Feel like living dangerously? North Korea’s Air Koryo, judged by aviation experts around the globe as the world’s worst airline, launches a Web site. Apparently, the site is about as functional as the airline it represents. Pyongyang, anyone?

LAND
from the Travel+Lesure via the BBC
The five best neighborhoods in America for authentic ethnic food — and you won’t see a lot of “the usual suspects” on the list. If you have dissenting opinions, list your own nominees in the Comments section. SLIDESHOW

from SmarterTravel
Was it something you said? Five phrases never found on the lips of a good traveler. SLIDESHOW

from Travel Weekly
There’s a little less competition in the rental car business these days. Hertz is buying up Dollar Thrifty. Good news for Hertz. For the traveling consumer, probably not so much. But the feds still have to bless this merger, and there’s no guarantee that they will.

from the United Nations
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, adds 26 new locations to its list of world Heritage Sites. Meanwhile, the crew at SmarterTravel picks its ten favorites. Your bucket list may need a bigger bucket.

from USA Today
Few visitors to New York City have reason to hit Staten Island, even with the lure of a free ferry ride from Manhattan. That could change by 2016 if plans go ahead to build the world’s biggest Ferris wheel in the Big Apple’s most ignored borough.

SEA
from Travel Weekly
This from Carnival Cruise Lines: No more saving deck chair for someone who’s not on deck.

from Travel Weekly
For those who plan ahead: The Cunard line has already set its world cruise itineraries for 2014 The cruises can last three months — but Cunard will let you buy much shorter segments, as short as eight days.

AFRICA
from CNN Travel
If unique wildlife is your thing, then Tanzania may be your place. Who’s up for a safari?

from Bulawayo 24 via Travel Comments
Ahead of next year’s big general assembly of the UN World Tourism Organization in Zimbabwe, three African airlines are adding more flights to Victoria Falls. You don’t have to be a UNWTO attendee to take advantage.

from Gadling
Forget trick-or-treat. If you want to see something truly spooky, check out the annual migration of 8 million African bats. Relax, they only eat fruit.

AMERICAS
from the BBC
New entry fees and visa requirements going into effect in Argentina and other South American countries. If you’re planning a trip to South America, don’t wait until departure day to get yourself up to speed on the new requirements. If you do, you may never get out of the airport.

from Agence France Presse via France 24
You know all that stuff you’ve been hearing about how the Mayan calendar forecasts the end of the world in 2012? Well, the Mayans say it’s all bogus and they have one word for all the folks out there pushing this myth: STOP.

from the New York Times
Want to really go New Age in Santa Fe, NM — and get healthier at the same time? Explore it by bike.

from The Guardian (London UK)
El Vilsito. Auto mechanics by day, wonderfully fixed up tacos al pastor by night. Only in Mexico City.

ASIA
from Xinhua News Agency via CNNgo
China is taking not quite $1 million to turn its first atomic bomb test center into…a theme park? Swords into plowshares is one thing but, uhh…wow. This is one new tourist hotspot that could be just that.

from China Daily
For decades, travelers from around the world have descended on Hong Kong in search of bargains. Now, te Chinese are doing it, too.

from The Province (Vancouver, BC, CANADA)
There’s a lot to see and do in Hong Kong. There’s even more to see and do outside one of the world’s most densely crowded cities. Venture out.

EUROPE
from The Guardian (London UK)
There are lots of good reasons these days to visit the Czech Republic. Here’s one you may not have heard about — good skiing, incredibly cheap.

from the BBC
In Paris, the Seine is getting a 35 million euro makeover that will make the riverbanks more pedestrian friendly and even more attractive to locals and visitors alike. It comes at the expense of daily commuting motorists, who are less than thrilled.

from CNN Travel
Ten cool and free things to enjoy in Paris, including your own guided tour with a local. Did I mention that it’s all free?

TRAINS: Bring back the North American Rail Pass

2 Replies

A month-long pass for rail travel between the United States and Canada? It seemed like a great idea. So why did Amtrak decide to kill it?

Anyone who’s even explored the possibility of traveling in Europe has probably heard of the Eurailpass, which lets you travel between a certain number of European countries in a month, or allows you a certain number of train travel days per month.

It’s a great, economical way to see Europe, with the comfort and convenience of train travel as a bonus. And as an absolute fan of rail travel, I sure wish we had something like that here in North America.

So it came as a somewhat unpleasant surprise to learn that, until relatively recently, we did. It was a cooperative venture between our Amtrak and Via Rail of Canada. For one set fee of $423, you could travel for 30 days in both countries.

It was called the North American Rail Pass and it was a great idea. Until 2008, when Amtrak unilaterally discontinued it.

You can get a USA Rail Pass good for 15, 30 or 45 days of rail travel, or a California Rail Pass good for 21 days up and down the state, but those obviously are good only in the United States.

Likewise, you can get a Canrailpass from Via Rail good for coast-to-coast travel across Canada, but only Canada.

The idea of a rail pass that allows travel between the two neighboring North American giants, with all their beautiful scenery and great cities? Gone. Dead.

It wasn’t Via Rail’s idea to kill it off. Amtrak did that. I just don’t know why.

To make it easier for U.S. and Canadian rail passengers to travel between the two countries by train made so much sense for both sides.

Canadians could do a lovely little loop from Toronto south through Chicago and Memphis to New Orleans, then back north via Atlanta and Washington DC aboard the Amtrak Crescent before crossing back into Canada and hitting Quebec City and Montreal on the return.

Americans, meanwhile, could head north from Los Angeles aboard the Coast Starlight up to Vancouver, BC, where they could head east across the Rockies and the great plains, then past the Great Lakes to Toronto before heading south to New Orleans, only this time swinging west aboard the Sunset Limited back to LAX.

So far, I haven’t found anything that gives a clear explanation for why Amtrak decided to do away with this. What was Amtrak afraid of?

If it wants to emphasize USA Rail Passes, fine, but why not offer both? Rail travelers who wished to confine themselves to the US or Canada would simply buy one of the national rail passes in either of those countries, while travelers who wanted to ride the trains on both sides of the border would still be able to do so for a great price. Everybody wins.

Or they did…until four years ago.

Especially in this era when so many people find air travel to be such a miserable experience, wouldn’t it make sense for Amtrak to seize on every opportunity it can find to encourage travel by train, even if it meant sharing some of the proceeds with its northern neighbor?

If I ever find out what Amtrak’s rationale was behind killing the North American Rail Pass, I’ll be sure to share it with you. Meanwhile, we fans of rail travel can hope that sanity one day returns — and brings back the North American Rail Pass along with it.

ADDENDUM
I’ve reached out to Amtrak’s public affairs people to see if anyone will tell me why Amtrak chose to unilaterally do away with the North American Rail Pass. When I get an answer, IBIT will publish it.

Edited by P.A.Rice

AMTRAK: How to lose friends and discourage people

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America’s underfunded national railroad needs all the goodwill it can get. Crazy computerized routing is not the way to get it.

So I’m plotting a big trip in mid-June to the Deep South — Atlanta and New Orleans — and looking for ways to save money, when I get a flash of inspiration.

Why not make the return trip by train?

Specifically, a one-way ride from the NOLA back to Southern California on the Sunset Limited.

When I was five, I traveled with my mother from New Orleans to Los Angeles via the Sunset Limited, back when rail travel in the United States was nearing the end of its heyday.

It was her first trip to California. It was my first big trip anywhere. That was the trip that kindled my life-long love of travel — and my life-long love of trains.

Now, I could re-live those childhood days, and see how today’s Sunset Limited compared with the one that still flies in my memory across the American Southwest.

I eagerly logged onto the Amtrak reservation site on the Web, entered my travel information and waited to see what I could get.

What I got was a route that eventually brought me back to California aboard three different trains, not one of which was the Sunset Limited:

New Orleans to Washington DC aboard the Crescent.
Washington DC to Chicago aboard the Capitol Limited.
Chicago to Los Angeles aboard the Southwest Chief.

The Amtrak reservation page gave me three different prices for the same routing.

Only after scrolling down more than half the page of reservations did I come to the routing specifically for the Sunset Limited — and when I did, I found that it was cheaper to fly, anyway.

I’d already “told” the Amtrak reservation computer that I was looking for a one-way trip west from Louisiana to California. Why then would it first show me three routings going east and then north in a great transcontinental circle that would take five days instead of the Sunset Limited’s two?

Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts? Who’s programming Amtrak’s reservation system these days, Elmer Fudd?

I may be wrong, but I highly doubt that this kind of absurdity would happen while making a one-way reservation for the TGV in France or the Shinkansen in Japan, or even on one of China’s high-speed trains.

From its inception, Amtrak has had to fight for its existence, bowing and begging for funds from a Congress that has been bent on doing away with the service almost from the day it was founded. It needs all the friends it can get, both among the traveling public and on Capitol Hill.

This is not the way to get them.

AIRLINES: Delta rolls its own

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Delta is taking a novel approach to cutting its fuel costs. The airline is going to produce its own fuel in its own refinery. For sheer corporate swagger, you can’t beat it.

Show me an airline in the United States and I’ll show you a bunch of executives ready to jump out of an office window over the price of fueling their airplanes.

Yeah, I know, the airlines only pay half per gallon of what you and I pay at the pump. But you and I aren’t burning through billions — that’s right, billions — of gallons of fuel every year.

Fuel costs now take a bigger bite out of airline profits than wages and benefits. And the airlines all are desperate to do something about it, from replacing older airplanes and their gas-guzzling engines to tacking on one absurd add-on passenger fee after another.

Over in Europe, Ryanair is giving passengers thinner magazines to read on board and putting fewer ice cubes in their drinks. That’s how ridiculous things have become.

Comes now Delta Air Lines with a stunningly different approach. The company is buying its own oil refinery.

The first time I heard that Delta’s corporate heads in Atlanta were thinking about this, I thought it was a joke. It isn’t. By year’s end, Delta will be rolling its own.

Fuel trucks, that is.

This would be roughly equivalent to trucking companies buying up a chain of gas stations, or Amtrak buying a steel mill to lay down its own rails (which, in Amtrak’s case, might not be a bad idea).

You can find more details on this highly unconventional move in this Associated Press story via Yahoo! here.

For sheer corporate swagger, you’d have a hard time topping this one. Or you could take the glass-is-half-empty view and say that Delta is desperate. Either way, the airline is coloring way outside the lines.

Conventional wisdom says “stick to what you know.” Any time a business jumps with both feet into a venture totally outside its area of expertise, it’s taking a frightful risk.

Some of us are old enough to remember when PSA, the once highly successful Pacific Southwest Airlines, decided to branch off into the hotel business, one of several ill-advised moves that contributed to its demise.

And let’s be real: Delta knows as much about refining crude oil as I know about flying jumbo jets.

But if they hire the right people to run it, who knows?

Only time will tell whether this approach actually makes deep cuts into Delta’s fuel bill, but you can bet the rent that every one of its airline competitors will be watching with keen interest.

And if it shows any sign of making Delta seriously more profitable, we could see an Oklahoma-style land rush on oil refineries, courtesy of the airline industry.

What would really be cool would be for Delta to save so much money on fuel that it could afford to drop their airfares, and still be profitable.

Yeah, I know…in my dreams, right?

Whether this gambit ultimately succeeds or fails, you have to give props to Delta for thinking outside the box — or in this case, off the tarmac.

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"Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer." — Unknown

Tag Archives: Amtrak

Traffic, San Diego style

TRAINS: Twelve lovely hours

the IBIT Travel Digest 1.27.13

the IBIT Travel Digest 1.20.13

the IBIT Travel Digest 12.2.12

the IBIT Travel Digest 11.25.12

the IBIT DIGEST 10-28-12

TRAINS: Bring back the North American Rail Pass

AMTRAK: How to lose friends and discourage people

AIRLINES: Delta rolls its own

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