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the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST 9.18.11

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A roundup of the good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

Liverpool | ©Greg Gross

COOL SAVINGS IN the NOLA
When it comes to travel, summer is the best of times and the worst of times for New Orleans.

A typical summer weather forecast calls for 99 degrees with 99 percent humidity, which will make it feel more like 109 — and you can just about set your watch by the pounding afternoon rain.

That’s the worst.

It seems to work some special hardships on the restaurant business in the NOLA, as this msnbc story points out.

But those same conditions that send rivers of sweat pouring down your face can bring tears of joy to the dedicated bargain hunter, because summer is when New Orleans starts lowering prices at hotels and restos.

The msnbc story makes mention of this, and a quick check of your favorite travel sites (you do have more than one, of course…right?) will lead you to still more bargains.

Meanwhile, how do you handle all that heat and humidity? Stay in the shade. Stay by the water, be it Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi River. Dress in cool, light colors.

And always keep some change handy for a big snowball, an ice-cold local soft drink — or an even colder hard one, like a frozen daiquiri.

You will survive, and your travel budget will thrive.

And as long as you’re there, you might as well check one of these daytrips, courtesy of CheapoAir.

PLANES v. TRAINS
A travel story in USA Today compares air travel against train travel for comfort, the check-in process, luggage and food.

The author tries to make it sound like it’s a contest. Those of you who’ve traveled on both already know:

It isn’t. It just isn’t.

At this point, the only thing the airlines really have going for them is speed over long distance — and the fact that American trains are literally a half-century behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to speed.

For anything short of a transcontinental trip, trains are easier, more convenient, more comfortable — and you don’t feel as if you’ve been abused with fuel surcharges and other add-on fees.

Train stations are even easier to use, more fun and classier than most airports. Often, they’re more beautiful than airports, as this BBC Travel slideshow suggests.

And you can enjoy the best ones, like New York’s Grand Central Terminal or Washington DC’s Union Station, without even taking a trip.

Trains v. planes? It’s not even close.

PASS/NO-PASS
And speaking of trains, Europe’s advanced network of high-speed trains and frequent local trains make getting around the continent almost sinfully easy.

Sooner or later, however, one question always comes up when you’re planning a European rail vacation:

“Should I get the Eurailpass or just buy point-to-point tickets for each leg of the trip?”

I’ve struggled with this more than a few times myself, believe me. The closest I could come to a definitive answer is: It depends on your budget and your itinerary.

Which basically is that the folks at Lonely Planet tell you. Only in much more clarity and detail, and with all your options neatly broken down.



And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

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AIR
from CNN
TSA fires 28 employees in Hawaii for failing to screen luggage for explosives. Let’s see: They’ll feel up women and search babies in their diapers, but can’t be bothered checking the BAGS? Oh, okay…

from CheapoAir
Meanwhle, TSA creates the first express security line in Pittsburgh’s airport.

LAND
from Frommers
Great locales for cooking vacations or to attend cooking schools, SLIDESHOW For my own take on the whole cooking travel thing, click here.

from Good Transportation
Three brothers are walking the route of California’s proposed high-speed passenger rail, from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

from Gadling
Your hotel safe may not be all that safe.

from Mallory on Travel
Travel insurance, yes or no? Iain Mallory breaks it down.

from The Urbane Urbanite
How to wine and dine during a power outage. If you live in hurricane country, tornado country — or anywhere within range of an Arizona electrical worker doing maintenance — you need this info!

SEA
from USA Today
How to pick your perfect cruise.

from Travel+Leisure
Are you one of those folks who turns up their nose at the mention of traveling on a ferry? This list will show you why you shouldn’t. SLIDESHOW

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AFRICA
from The New Vision (Uganda) via allAfrica.com
Northern Uganda ready to replace armies of insurgents with armies of tourists.

from the Maghreb Arabe Presse (Morocco) via allAfrica.com
Morocco is emerging as a medical tourism destination for Europeans.

from​ The Independent (Rwanda) via allAfrica.com
Another sign of Rwanda’s emergence as a serious travel destination: Marriott is building a 254-room, $55 million hotel in the capital city of Kigali.

from the ​Daily Nation (Kenya) via allAfrica.com
Fore…Africa! Plans announced to build a five-star hotel in Kenya’s capital city, Mombasa. The motivation: to encourage the growth of golf tourism in the country.

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AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN
from the Matador Network
Nine — count ‘em — cool and safe places to visit in Mexico.

from the Wall Street Journal via Zagat
Attention, foodies: Peruvian cuisine looks like it just might be the NBT — the Next Big Thing. Next stop, Lima? Road trip!

from the ​New York Times
Suriname — the most captivating South American destination you never heard of.

from the New York Times
The NYT’s Michelle Higgins says the folks who treat Quito, the capital of Ecuador, as just a jumping off point for the Galapagos Islands are missing something worthwhile.

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ASIA/PACIFIC
from Canada’s Adventure Couple
Cool things to do in Malaysian Borneo.

from Lonely Planet
A tour of China — one tastebud at a time. SLIDESHOW

from Velvet Escape
World traveler Keith Jenkins examines the other Thailand, the one all the tourist hordes haven’t ruined yet. Large. Poor. Beautiful. Endearing. Welcome to Isaan.

from The Guardian
Broome, western Australia. Once, this was where you came to find pearls. Now, Broome is the pearl. The part of the story that deals with Australia’s aborigines, as usual, is anything but pretty.

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EUROPE
​from The Daily Mail (London UK)
London hotels have the worst reputation in Europe? There’s a British-based travel site that says yes. Jolly good…NOT!
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from Bonjour Paris
The only thing I like more than farmers markets are farmers markets in Paris, and the 7th arrondissement has one of the best. Even if you don’t have access to a kitchen, it’s worth a visit.

from eTurbo News
Portugal is making a comeback as a European travel destination.

from eurotrips
A list of secret spots in Paris, compiled by a small group of former Parisians and mapped.

Airfares — Up, Up and Away!

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Southwest Airline Boeing 737

Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 landing in San Diego | © Greg Gross

Think of airfares as the Titanic and fuel costs as the iceberg. Only in this case, nothing is going down.

We already warned you that airfares would likely be going up this year, and that higher fuel costs, pushed by rising crude oil costs, were one of the major reasons why.

Every time the giant oil companies jack up the price of crude oil, the cost of everybody’s gas goes up, and the airlines are no exception.

Now, USA Today is reporting that the airlines just this week started raising fares by to $10 to $20 per round-trip flight. And it’s only going to get worse.

You can read the entire USA Today here.

This is the one area in which I actually feel some sympathy for the airlines. Being one of their biggest customers worldwide, you’d think the oil companies would cut them some slack on prices.

Not a chance.

Consider. Airlines track their fuel prices by the barrel. A barrel is 31 gallons.According to the International Air Transport Association, the going rate for Jet A this weeks is $112 a barrel.

The most numerous airliner flying today is the Boeing 737, seen above. A 737 typically holds just under 5,000 gallons of fuel. The newest models, called Next Generation 737s, hold just under 7,000 gallons.

So it takes 161 barrels of what they call Jet A fuel to fill up an older 737, and 225 barrels to gas up a new one.

Every time an older 737 pushes back from the gate, some oil company’s cash register rings up $18,000. For one of the NG737s, the tab will be more than $25,000.

Now consider an airline like Southwest, that flies more than 550 of those 737s, more than 350 of which are NGs.

That airline has to burn more than $12 million a day just to get its planes off the ground.

Feel free to wince.

And Southwest doesn’t even fly wide-body jumbo jets.

Have you ever felt sorry for the guy across from you at the gas station, the one filling up his Hummer or his RV? It’s the same with airlines. The bigger the airplane, the bigger the bill.

One of the world’s most popular wide-bodies, the Boeing 777-200ER, takes a max of just under 48,000 gallons of Jet A. That’s 1,548 barrels. So feeding that beast will set you back about $173,000 per plane.

American Airlines flies 47 of them, one of 11 different types of planes they fly. This is typical for major airlines around the world.

I’m guessing the beancounters who track fuel costs for AA periodically have all sharp objects removed from their desks.

Throw the salaries of flight crew and the cost of maintenance into the mix, and it means that every airliner that goes out less than full loses money. And you can bet the rent that the current jet fuel price will be higher this time next month than it is now.

This is one reason why you won’t see the airlines giving up their add-on fees anytime soon, if ever. It also explains why they deliberately oversell every flight. It’s how they’re keeping themselves profitable.

But they’re keeping themselves in the black by making your wallet see red, and it’s only likely to worsen as the year goes on.

This means you need to be more diligent than ever in stalking airfare bargains, by any means necessary.

Check the individual airlines sites, hassle though it may be.

Check the online travel agency sites like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz and the rest.

Check fare auction sites like Priceline.

Check the aggregators like Kayak, Momondo and CheapOAir.

Find a sharp travel agent who really knows where the bargains are buried.

Use sites like FareCompare.com, that track airfare prices and suggest when to buy and when to wait.

Do whatever you have to do, but do it. There’s no way to avoid paying more for airfares, but diligence on your part will ease the pain.

It also means you need to keep an eye on the efforts of airlines to limit your access to fare information online.

the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

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

Winter in San Diego

See above. This is winter. This is winter in San Diego. Don’t hate me ’cause my weather’s beautiful!

A MATTER OF TASTE
I have a good friend namedShay Olivarria, who travels a lot for her work as a motivational speaker. Her motto is “the world is Bigger Than Your Block,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Where Shay and I part company is on international eating habits.

She went through Europe happily bouncing from one Burger King to another. She recently rejoiced on Facebook at the discovery that Tokyo now home to the Los Panchos chain of taco shops.

“Now, I won’t starve!” she exulted online.

Can you hear me cringing?

I’m no Michelin-class foodie, but if you’re traveling to the homes of the world’s great food cultures, why confine yourself to food you can get at home, anyway, right?

The way that our mega-corporations seem hell-bent on world domination can also be pretty annoying. Seeing a McDonald’s on practically every other block in Buenos Aires was enough to make me want to declare my own culinary jihad on the Golden Arches.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to reconsider a bit (I sure hope this isn’t a sign of mellowing through old age).

Often, international versions of American fast-food joints offer some regional dishes you can’t get in the States, or even on the US mainland, like the saimin noodles Mickey D’s serves in Hawai’i — and which some folks actually rave about.

Still, you can go off the regular food road in your international destinations without going the fast-food route, and still come away with some great meals and good times.

All of which brings to Monique Y. Wells. If you want to learn about Paris, especially the black side of Paris, you really need to get to know this lady.

Recently, she did a guest post on the Paris Movie Walks site answering this question: Where can you get good non-French food in Paris?

Sounds a bit like culinary sacrilege, n’est-ce pas?

But Monique manages to answer the question and make you hungry at the same time.

Even more than that, her recommended restos take you into sections of Paris often paid scant attention or even ignored outright by tour groups. In more ways than one, Monique’s recommendations give you a special taste of the City of Light.

And not a chain in sight.

As for Los Panchos, no disrespect, but any San Diegan will tell you: When Roberto’s lands in Tokyo — or anywhere else — it’s over.

And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

AIR
from the New York Times
Travel agents. Remember them, those folks we pretty much forgot about when things like Priceline and Kayak and CheapoAir came along? The recent spate of tough winter weather suggests it may be time to rethink that.

from USA Today
Will the nightmare ever end for Boeing’s problematic Dreamliner? The airlines are getting ever more restless.

LAND
from the New York Times
The Times dishes its list of 41 cool destinations for 2011. Among them are cities on the comeback, old haunts with new attractions and rediscovered charm, and some that just flaty wouldn’t have occured to us this time last year.

from A View to a Thrill
So you’d love to see Europe, but the thought of European hotel rates sends your wallet into spasms? The Old World has some intriguing alternatives. one of which is a convent. That’s right, I said it: A convent, or even a monastery. Clean, comfortable and often incredibly cheap. May be as close to Heaven as some of us ever get.

from OffTrack Planet
Are subways actually hip? These guys think so, and they offer up their list of the ten coolest around the planet.

from San Francisco City Guides
The only thing better about walking tours in the world’s great cities, is great walking tours that are free of charge, led by knowledgeable locals who are passionate about their city. San Francisco City Guides has an extensive schedule of free walking tours every day.

SEA
from the Daily Mail (UK)
Life, or something like, aboard Royal Caribbean’s newest mega-ship, Allure of the Seas.

AFRICA
from Associated Press
The voting is over in South Sudan and the ballot count is underway. The results will decide whether Sudan remains intact or whether the Christian/animist south will secede from the Muslim north. And while it may be early yet, it looks very much as if Africa is about to acquire her 54th sovereign nation.

from the Independent Online (South Africa)
Wine is already South Africa’s biggest export, and wine tourism is now becoming a major importer — of international visitors.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to get a taste of black-owned wines in South Africa, check out Khari and Selena Cuffe, who are hooking up with black-run wine estates.

AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN
from msnbc travel
Let’s get this straight America. In New Orleans, Mardi Gras is a day, but Carnival is the season it falls in.This year, that means more than two months’ worth of parades, cotillions, second lines and good times rolling. And it’s already started.

from the New York Times
If places like Mexican Pacific beach resorts like Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo have grown to be a bit too big and overblown for you, the little town of Troncones might be the alternative you’re looking for.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from Wikitravel
An all-in-one glance at Singapore, which may have more and a greater variety of attractions into a smaller space than anyplace else on Earth. the city that is a country and a state of being, all at once.

from The Economist (UK)
Nagasaki, the city known as the “other” atomic bomb victim in World War 2, is now becoming known for something else, a brain drain of young talent that has left Nagasaki in decline and decay. In one neighborhood, trees grow through the roofs of abandoned homes. Who thought we’d ever see this in Japan?

EUROPE
from The Economist (UK)
There’s a new Web site for travelers who want to arrange homestays in London homes while the owners are away. The cost of hotel rooms in London these days is reason enough to consider this. Experiencing a slice of real London life is another.

from the New York Times
If you’re serious about beer, one of the best places in the world to go for it is Belgium.But be warned: You may never go back to Bud. In size, strength and quality, these brews don’t play.

AA to Orbitz: Drop dead!

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American Airlines Boeing 757 "on final" in San Diego

We told you they were going to do it. Now, they’ve done it. This latest breeze blowing through the airline industry could prove to be another ill wind for the traveling consumer.

Last month, we told you that American Airlines was seriously considering pulling its airfare information out of the Orbitz reservation system, and we told you why.

We told you how this followed in the jetstream of Southwest Airlines, which requires you to log onto their own Web site to find their fares and book their flights online.

There were those back then who speculated that it was all just a negotiating ploy between Orbitz and the airline, and that American wasn’t really serious about it.

Guess what? They were.

PULLING THE PLUG
As of Tuesday, airfares for American and American Eagle no longer show up on Orbitz. Attempts by Orbitz to block the move were rejected by a Chicago judge.

For details on this development, you can read this story from the Chicago Tribune here.

Nor is this an isolated act. As reported by George Hobica of Airfarewatchdog.com, another major U.S. air carrier, Delta, recently pulled their fares off CheapoAir and OneTravel. And the betting here says this is only the beginning.

What does this mean for you and your travel budget?

It seems fairly clear what’s happening. These days, knowledge is more than just power. It literally is money in your pocket. The more widely available airfare information is to you, the consumer, the better chance you have of finding the best possible deal and saving yourself some serious cash.

Is anyone really surprised that the airlines don’t like that?

HERDING YOU IN
The airline industry will spin this as doing the flying public a favor. They’re not. The more that individual airlines can control what fare information you can see, and where you can see it, the better they can herd you into paying the rates they would prefer you to pay.

This also, of course, will make it much harder and more time-consuming for people to search for airfare bargains. Which is exactly the area in which this airline industry gambit may come back to bite them.

We talked about that last month, too.

Meanwhile, expect more airlines to follow American’s lead on this — not just against Orbitz, but Kayak and all the rest.

The “FASTEN SEAT BELT” sign is flashing over your wallet. Expect turbulence.

Promo codes

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The secret to hefty travel savings is really no secret at all…once you know where to look!

Okay, you’re about half-finished booking some travel online when you see this little box labeled “promo code.” You figure it must offer you some sort of discounted fare — and you’re right. What’s more, if you’re lucky, the discount can be substantial. Only you can’t fill that box, because you don’t have the code, and you don’t know how to find it.

Until now.

Travel promotional codes are all over the Web. Some folks call them “promo codes.” Others call them “coupons.” Whatever you call them, they can knock some money off your travel fares — and they’re publicly accessible. You just have to search them out.

Take your favorite airline, or any airline. For this little demo, let’s say, JetBlue. Go to your favorite search engine and type in this string in the Search box:

“JetBlue promo codes”

Hit the Search button…and prepare to be amazed! You will be fairly bombarded with promotional codes — a virtual blizzard of travel offers. Airlines, cruise lines, hotels, resorts, luggage, travel accessories — if it has to do with travel, odds are somebody’s offering a coupon for it. If there are certain shops or restaurants in your travel destination, try it with them, too.

Use this string to search any site you use related to travel.

Not all travel vendors always have a promo code on offer right at the time you plan to travel. Furthermore, if a promotion becomes too popular too fast, the vendor may withdraw it without warning. So you need to keep tabs on the promos you’re looking for, well ahead of your actual travel dates, right up until the moment you book.

And as usual, there are websites out there to make that easier for you.

There are sites that list promo codes for multiple air carriers, cruise lines, hotels, everything. One-stop shopping. One such site is Coupon Craze, which offers promo codes on everything from arts and crafts to Web hosting (sure wish I’d known that when I was moving this blog to its new host!).

Under the category of “travel” alone, they claim to have codes for nearly 150 airlines, vacation package sellers, trains, buses, car rental agencies…the list is dizzying. Most of the companies listed are outfits with whom you’re well familiar and may have even used in the past. Others, you might never have known about had you not reviewed their list.

Sites like this one are a good way to discover new travel sites you might not have found otherwise — especially non-American sites which, in some cases, offer a wider range of choices or deeper discounts or both — with or without promo codes.

You won’t find everything you’re looking for on these sites, however.

Some airlines and other travel vendors make their coupons available only on their own sites — their way of getting you to ignore the Expedias and Kayaks and Cheapoairs out there, and deal strictly with them. There’s nothing wrong with that…IF it gives you a big enough discount. So by all means, do check out the sites for those individual companies for their promo codes.

But you might do better on sites that scans multiple airlines for the same flight, multiple hotels for the same stay, and so on — and still be able to use the individual brand’s promo code when you make your reservation!

So don’t handcuff yourself with online brand loyalty — unless that loyalty clearly works to your advantage. Shop around, compare…and keep those codes handy!