Tag Archives: Visa

the IBIT Travel Digest 12.2.12

2 Replies

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

Catalina sunset

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.

-0-

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.

-0-

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.

-0-

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.

-0-

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?

-0-

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

VISAS: The traveler’s hall pass

Leave a reply

Obtaining visas for international travel can be more of a pain than getting a passport, and you’ll do it a lot more often. Luckily, there are folks who will help you — for a fee, naturally.

The most important travel document you’ll ever own is your passport. Number Two may well be those visa stamps imprinted in it.

A visa is essentially your hall pass to enter someone else’s country, so it stands to reason that governments would be careful in issuing them, especially in a post-9/11 world. Still, obtaining visas in advance of a trip can be a time-consuming, expensive headache, especially when dealing directly with foreign embassies.

I’ve heard some real horror stories from travelers trying to obtain simple tourist visas.

There are passport agencies, usually government offices, that can help you get your passport within a matter of several weeks — or for an extra charge, even faster. There also are privately-run passport expediters which, for an additional fee, can get your passport for you in a week or even less.

But you only have to go through the hassle of obtaining a new passport every ten years. You could need two, three or more visas in a single year. Wouldn’t it be great if there were services to help you cut through the aggravation of acquiring a visa?

Well, I just discovered that there are. They’re known as visa service agencies, and there are scores of them, if not hundreds, across the United States. A few examples include:

(NOTE: I pulled these outfits at random as examples of what’s available. Their listing here in no way represents an endorsement by IBIT.)

Some agencies provide visas for virtually any country requiring one from US visitors. Others specialize in certain countries or regions of the world. Several offer to expedite your passport, as well as visas, some in as little as 24 hours.

They may offer other services, too, such as notary public and/or power of attorney services to authenticate documents for legal use in other countries. They also may translate your legal documents from English into other languages.

A few things to bear in mind:

  1. Due diligence is the watchword here. Check out these agencies with the Better Business Bureau, travel trade organizations with codes of ethics, such as the American Society of Travel Agents, the US Tour Operators Association, the Global Business Travel Association, and anyone else you can think of. You are entrusting important personal documents to the care of strangers, so it behooves you to make sure that the agency itself is trustworthy.
  2. Being private, for-profit enterprises, the visa service agencies will be charging you a fee on top of what the government charges for the visa itself. The faster the service, the higher the fee.
  3. Each agency has its own way of doing things. Once you’ve chosen an agency to help you with your visa, make yourself familiar with their procedures beforehand, preferably by talking to a live human being who can explain the steps.
  4. In terms of the documentation required, applying for a visa is almost identical to applying for a passport. You’ll need proof of identity, proof of citizenship, and a couple of passport-sized photos of yourself.
  5. Unless there’s an agency in your town, you will have to mail the agency your passport or other required personal documents for processing. This makes some folks nervous but there’s no way around it — and in truth, passports move this way all the time, almost without incident.

One last thing, which could end up saving you money as well as time.

If you’re taking a package tour to a country that requires a visa, your tour providers may offer to obtain your visa for you (for a fee, of course). Check with a visa service agency to see if they can do it cheaper.

Bear in mind that you’ll have to pay the agency fee, the mailing costs and the visa application fee charged by the country you plan to visit. Even so, if you act early enough, you just might find that going through the agency for your visa is cheaper than the tour operator.

Remember too that he who hesitates pays more. There may be emergencies that suddenly crop up that leave you no choice, but that’s not most of us, most of the time. Don’t let procrastination cost you money that you could’ve brought with you on your trip.

THE ENTRY FEE AMBUSH
Even with your prepaid visa affixed to your passport, you still may have to crack open your wallet one more time before being admitted into the country you want to visit.

Many countries around the world charge entry fees just to enter the airport as a foreign visitor. These fees can range from a few bucks to well in access of $100 — per person.

It’s retaliation, and it has everything to do with 9/11.

After the World Trade Center attacks, the US government needed ways to fund its newly created Department of Homeland Security. One was to start charging entry fees to a wide range of foreign visitors, most of them from countries with no history of terrorism against the United States.

Most of the countries whose citizens were stung by these new fees answered with entry fees of their own, strictly for Americans. And like seemingly everything else in life, they have been creeping upward ever since.

Edited by P.A. Rice

Passports: the Six Months Rule and the price of citizenship

Leave a reply

passport

Americans have one of the lowest percentages of passport ownership in the developed world — so quite naturally, the cost of getting one is going up. Nor is that all.

Every time I get within hailing distance of my backlog of blog posts, somebody makes more work for me, and nobody’s better at that than the United States government.

Their latest addition to my workload comes in the form of a small but highly annoying Associated Press story out of Washington DC:

“It’s…getting more expensive if you want to keep your U.S. citizenship and need a passport to prove it. The application fee for a passport is jumping by 27 percent, from $55 to $70 with a 100 percent increase, from $20 to $40, in the passport security surcharge.

“In addition to the increase in the application fee, the department will now charge $82 — up from nothing — to add new pages to a U.S. passport.”

All this is coming from the same State Department that wants you to know that March 12 is Passport Day, a day when any American who doesn’t now hold a valid U.S. passport should seriously think about applying for one.

The State Department headquarters is located in a section of Washington DC known as Foggy Bottom. I wonder sometimes if the man who decided to put it there was making a statement.

What makes this especially galling is knowing that Americans already have quite possibly the lowest percentage of passport-holding citizens in the developed world, around 30 percent.

All those who think these fee increases from the State Department are going to help raise that percentage, raise your hands — preferably while holding your checkbooks.

Even the cost of renouncing your U.S. citizenship, which was the original “lead” of the story, is going up, spectacularly — from being free to $450. In the view of the State Department, that’s what your U.S. citizenship is worth today — four Benjamin Franklins and one U.S. Grant.

Imagine that, $450 just to officially and legally say “I quit this bytch!”

You can read the entire AP story here.

Last fall, I did a six-day buzz tour of China with 30-plus other Americans and the Kobe Bryant of Chinese tour guides, David Li, who made a point to remind us to keep close tabs on our passports.

“A man without a passport,” he said more than once, “is a man without a country.”

PASSPORT TIPS FROM A MASTER TRAVELER
IBIT guest columnist and global traveler Walt Baranger says you can get around one of those new passport fees, one that will save you $82:

“…order the extra (visa) pages when you get a new passport. They’re free, (as) they are ordered at the same time as the passport.”

That’s especially good advice if you travel a lot internationally for business or leisure.

Walt also thinks you should spring for the U.S. passport card at the same time you apply for your passport. Passport cards let you cross our land borders with Canada and Mexico without having to bring your passport, but they have other uses, as well:

“…invaluable for saving passport pages, and the card helps a lot if you lose your passport overseas and must appear at a consulate to obtain a new one.”

Which brings me to another point.

If you do have a passport and you’re thinking about traveling outside the United States this year, check the expiration date on that passport. If it’s due to expire in less than six months, a lot of countries won’t issue you a visa.

You can usually count on travel agents to remind you of this, and many airlines, cruise lines and other online travel providers are diligent about this, as well. But if you forget and get tripped up by the deadline, all is not lost.

You can make use of passport expediters to renew your passport for a fresh ten years and get it delivered to you in a week or less, hopefully leaving you enough time to get your visa.

For a substantial fee, naturally.

There’s one sure way to avoid this hassle: Treat your passport as if it were good for only nine years instead of ten.

At the start of its last year, send it back to the State Department, along with an application for a new one, along with a fresh couple of passport pics and the inevitable renewal fee.

No need to spend extra money on an expediter, and you’re good to go anywhere for the next nine years and change, without deadline worries.

Meanwhile, if you’ve never had a passport, there are lots of good reasons to get one, and we’ll be looking at some of those periodically between now and March 12.

Edited by P.A. Rice

the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

Leave a reply

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

The view from Terminal 5, London Heathrow | ©Greg Gross

A gritty French port city remakes its image. A problematic airliner runs into more problems. The concept of couch surfing takes a hit. And an African airline sets out to create its own low-cost spinoff.

MARSEILLES — THE UN-PARIS
For years, this French Mediterranean port city had a three-pronged image problem in the eyes of would-be travelers:

  1. It was old and rundown.
  2. It was the gateway to the rest of Europe for illegal drugs from abroad, and
  3. It wasn’t Paris.

But as the New York Times is reporting, a wave of new hotels and restaurants, coupled with a revitalized waterfront and better public transit, coupled with great Mediterranean climate, great beaches and a lively ethnic mix, is prompting visitors to view Marseilles in a better light.

All of a sudden, not being Paris doesn’t seem like such a handicap.

DREAMLINER: THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUES
When a Boeing 787 Dreamliner arrived in Japan last month for a week of tests with All Nippon Airways, it looked as if the Dreamliner was finally ready to leave its history of problems behind.

Comes now word that Air India has been told by Boeing that it won’t be getting theirs until December, a delay of two months. The same report, from India’s DNA (Daily News & Analysis), says that even after the tests, ANA is still waiting on its first Dreamliner.

Two months is no big deal, right? Especially for a state-of-the-art new airliner that promises more comfort and fuel efficiency.

But Boeing is already more than three years late delivering the Dreamliner. In those three years, the cost of each airplane has gone up by more than half, to nearly $200 million.

The DNA story doesn’t really tell us how Air India officials reacted to this latest delay, but I’m guessing they’re not amused.

Meanwhile, Boeing’s main rival, Airbus, is building a new fuel-efficient competitor to the Dreamliner.

Will this fiasco ever end?

ALSO CHECK OUT:
Delta does Africa

BED AND BEWARE?
Since 2008, there’s been a growing buzz about Airbnb, an online service that has more or less institutionalized what’s known as “couch-surfing.”

Basically, Airbnb hooks up people looking for a cheap place to stay with people wanting (or needing) to rent out part of their home — all over the world. The owner makes a little money; the renter saves a ton over regular hotels. It’s made world travel affordable to more people — in some cases, for the first time in their lives.

It’s also made Airbnb into a billion-dollar enterprise.

Lately, however, we’ve seen another side of this arrangement.

As reported in Tech Crunch, one Airbnb host in San Francisco described coming home to her apartment to find it had been robbed and wrecked. And the initial response she got from Airbnb was less than sympathetic.

Much less.

Another came home to to find that his place not only had been vandalized, but that his Airbnb guests had left “meth pipes everywhere.”

Airbnb is now scrambling to make things right. Meanwhile, the cops are after the cretins who ruined the lady’s apartment. Hopefully, their next out-of-town guest lodging will have bars on it.

Still, the whole episode reminds us that it’s not just the buyer who needs to beware.

TONY x 2 — “THE LAYOVER” IS COMING
We told your earlier that Anthony Bourdain was producing a spinoff to his popular cable TV foodie/travel show “No Reservations” for the fast-approaching fall season. Well, we now have a launch date.

The folks at Eater.com has the particulars here.

VISA-FREE TRAVEL
When it comes to freedom to roam the world without visas — and without the accompanying visa fees — where you live matters. And on that score, our good old US of A is one of the best places on Earth from which to hold a passport.

But not the best.

According to the British financial magazine The Economist, the country whose passport will let you visit more of the world’s countries without a visa is Sweden, tops on a list of 20 nations.

Actually, they’re in a three-way tie with Finland and Denmark, with Germany and Japan close behind.

The United States? We’re sixth.

You can see the entire list in The Economist graphic here.



And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

-0-

AIR
from USA Today
Long flight delays that leave passengers sitting endlessly on the tarmac had been thought dead and gone thanks to tougher new federal aviation rules. Surprise: they’re making a comeback.

from Associated Press via Yahoo! Travel
All over the country, airlines operating small passenger planes to and from rural American airports are getting millions of dollars in federal subsidies, even if they aren’t carrying a single passenger.

from News.com.au (Australia)
Among the videos offered these days to passengers on flights of the Australian national airline Qantas is a documentary film entitled “The Female Orgasm Explained.” Uhhh…

LAND
from the New York Times
How to beat the high cost of roaming abroad. Not you, your cellphone.

from NewsLeader.com
Delaware is great cycling country.

from USA Today
Ten great places to explore urban neighborhoods in North America. What makes this list remarkable is that one of their top ten urban communities is in, of all places, Detroit.

Also from USA Today, ten of the best cities to explore by bike. And unlike the first list, most of these winners are west of the Mississippi.

from Fox News
A collection of ten common travel scams around the world. See, learn and avoid.

SEA
from Cruise Critic
Size is not the only way in which all cruise ship cabins are not created equal. Cruise Critic readers weigh in with their choices for the best lodging at sea.

-0-

AFRICA
from HowWeMadeItInAfrica.com
Getting in the air game: Kenya Airways putting together its own low-cost regional airline to serve East and Central Africa. The name: Jambo Jet, the word “jambo” meaning “hello” in Swahili. If they embrace and maintain high maintenance and safety standards, KA could launch a revolution in regional African air service.

from We Blog the World
A night in Dakar. The capital of Senegal may be called “the Paris of Africa” by some observers, but it’s decidedly more African than Parisian. And that can be both a good and a bad thing.

from The Guardian (London UK)
This definitely is not a good thing: Piracy of the sort that has terrorized fishing boats, freighters, oil tankers and even cruise ships off the coast of Somalia are now on the upswing off West Africa. Naval officers and maritime officials in Nigeria are meeting with the US Navy to plot countermoves.

from France 24
Speaking of Senegal, an historic bridge in the old colonial capital of Saint-Louis is getting a much needed makeover and safety refit.

-0-

AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN
from TravelingCanucks.com
Foodies’ delight: the Vancouver Summer Night Market.

from Airbnb
Spend your vacation in a treehouse. No? Not even if the trees in question happen to be the tallest and oldest living things on Earth?

-0-

ASIA/PACIFIC
from the New York Times
Five months after the disastrous earthquake/tsunami/nuclear emergency, travelers are still trying to figure out how to deal with Japan. Those who set their fears aside are finding bargains.

-0-

EUROPE
from Smarter Travel
Five cheap European travel destinations, four in Eastern Europe and the fifth being Turkey.

from The Spectrum
A cruise down the Mekong River reveals the breathtaking beauty and bitter history of Vietnam.

from EuropeBudgetGuide.com
The ST crew didn’t list Poland among their cheap Euro-spots, but they could have. Cheap eats in the city of Krakow, a burgeoning tourist destination in one of Europe’s cheaper destination countries.

​

TWO-FISTED PLASTIC

Leave a reply

ATM cards have pretty much rendered the traveler’s check obsolete. But the farther afield you go in traveling around the world, the more you may need more than one card.

One of my all-time favorite philosophy books is called “The Four Agreements” by don Miguel Ruiz. It’s a collection of wisdom based on the teachings of Mexico’s ancient Toltec people (whose facial features, seen in the sculptures they left behind, look remarkably African).

The Four Agreements are:

  1. Be impeccable with your word
  2. Don’t take anything personally
  3. Don’t assume anything
  4. Always do your best

Today’s travel tip concerns the third of those agreements: Don’t assume anything.

Which brings us to the subject of ATM machines, my upcoming trip to West Africa and my newest friend in the travel blogosphere.

For many travelers the world over, automated teller machines have pretty much supplanted the venerable traveler’s check as a means to get cash abroad. Quicker, reliable and so much less of a hassle.

However, all ATM cards are not created equal, something I didn’t realize until I started preparing for my upcoming trip to Senegal and the Gambia.

One line on a Web site about the Gambia stopped me in my tracks:

“ATM machines in the Gambia only accept cards from VISA, not Mastercard.”

In all my travels to date, this is the first time I’ve ever encountered this. I pulled out my wallet and looked at the back of my the ATM card issued by my credit union.

Sure enough, there they were, those two interlocked spheres labelled “Cirrus,” one of the other names that Mastercard goes by outside the United States.

I then turned to HSBC, a massive international bank chain with branches all over the world.

All over the world, it turns out, except in Africa. They’ve got some branches in Cairo. That’s it.

No matter, don’t mind, I told myself. I’ll just use their ATM card in the Gambian ATMs, and swallow my pride — along with the fees that come with using a “foreign” ATM machine.

Then I looked on the back of the ATM card from HSBC.

Two interlocking spheres.

I’d always assumed that all the world’s bank machines accepted all the world’s ATM cards. Being a believer in The Four Agreements, I really should’ve known better.

Greg to self: “We may have a problem here.”

Self to Greg: “Congratulations. Just figured that out, did ya?”

Enter Michael Hodson, an American expat living in Colombia who writes on travel for the Huffington Post. His advice: for international travel, bring one of each.

“Greg, to be safe, you really should carry two ATM cards everywhere — one VISA one and one Mastercard one. Don’t know about Gambia, but I have been caught on that in more than a few countries.”

Turns out he wasn’t the only one. From Kiratiana Freelon, editor of American Airlines’ Black Atlas site:

“I learned the hard way about having Mastercard versus a VISA…left me with no money in Guinea Conakry!!

I’ve resolved the issue. I won’t be out on the streets of Banjul with a sign reading “Will travel for food.” But if you travel internationally, or ever plan to, consider this near-disaster of mine a cautionary tale — and open another bank account.

Amtrak derails travelers checks

2 Replies

Pacific Surfliner locomotive, LA Union Station

From now on, it’s cash or plastic to ride America’s traIns.

In yet another sign that travelers checks are going the way of the dodo, Amtrak has stopped accepting travelers checks as form of payment as of Sept. 1, either in train stations or aboard trains.

The same applies to cashier’s checks, money orders or personal checks. They will make an exception on personal checks for group travel, but that has to be cleared with Amtrak in advance.

What does that leave? Cash or the following credit cards: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express.

POSTSCRIPT
Only days after I posted this, I saw a group of young Asian travelers get tripped up by this new rule at the Solana Beach station. They eventually made it onto the train to Los Angeles, but they clearly were taken aback. Hopefully, Amtrak is doing a better job of getting the word out on major policy changes like this one.