Long before there was an AirBnB, there was an Untour. Created in 1975 by Pennsylvania college professor Hal Taussig, Untours created a method of living like an "untourist." Instead of staying in a hotel for two or three days per city when you went to Europe, you stayed instead for one or two weeks in a local apartment, an entire apartment, living like an actual resident, cooking some of your own meals, interacting with your local neighbors, all as part of a package that also included round-trip airfare and the services of a local representative with whom you might speak if you got into trouble.
Untours, for un-tourists, became like a cult. Participants stayed in touch with one another, eagerly perused a magazine published by Untours that alerted them to new apartment destinations, regarded themselves as a better sort of traveler who didn't move about on the standard conveyor belt of organized tourism, but struck out on their own -- as an untourist.
All this, of course, was before the idea of directly renting a European apartment took hold among multitudes of American tourists. Untours was before the days of AirBnB, Homeaway, Rentalo, VRBO, Endless Vacation Rentals, and the like, and you would think that the arrival of those many, trendy, apartment-supplying websites would have made Untours obsolete.
But that hasn't happened. Untours (tel. 888/868-6871; www.untours.com) remains alive, well, and tremendously active in sending its members to one- or two-week apartment stays in Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Prague, Budapest -- and most recently, Buenos Aires and Quebec City. And Untours has made a particular splash with its recent announcement that it is now operating one-week and two-week packages to Istanbul.
A glance at the services offered by Untours to their Istanbul-bound clients shows why it remains a success. In addition to putting you up in an Istanbul apartment that the agency's inspectors have thoroughly vetted and approved, Untours also provides you with all the following:
Round-trip airfare to Istanbul
The services of a local representative, who stays in touch with you, throughout the stay
An airport transfer to your apartment on arrival, in a private car with driver
An "Istanbul card" permitting you to enjoy 20 rides on the city's transportation system (streetcars and buses)
A refrigerator already packed with groceries, in your apartment on arrival
A local cellphone, with your own number!
An orientation lecture; and
A group activity, at some point in your stay, with other Untour participants who may also be living in Instanbul during your time there
Perusing the Untours website will give you a complete view of all the many vacations this dynamic organization provides to its "un-tourists." I have met and spoken with a number of Untours employees, and can confirm that they are a unique group of dedicated individuals, who have superbly sustained a travel organization for nearly forty years.
With admission to the Vatican increasingly expensive and difficult, visitors to Rome will be looking for alternate routes, in that city, for experiencing the awesome culture and artwork of Italy. I found such a guide in Katie Parla, a resident of Rome who was in New York recently to appear at the New York Times Travel Show and on the weekly radio program that my daughter and I present on wor710.com. Parla, who was an art history major at Yale, and has a Master's Degree from a university in Rome, is a growing force in tourism journalism dealing with Italy. If you will look her up in any search engine, you'll find a growing number of websites and publications for which she is responsible.
Her advice is not for the casual tourist, but for the person intensely determined to get underneath the surface of things in the main Italian cities. She mentioned, for instance, that without paying an admission charge at all, one could gaze upon great masterworks of art in the secondary churches of Rome, of which there are dozens. Superb works by Caravaggio, for instance, are found in scattered religious structures where you can appreciate them at length and without disturbance from others. And you find the names and addresses of such churches in a website maintained by the City of Rome under the unusual address of 060608.it/en. At that address you'll also be able to input requests for information on "hop on hop off" sightseeing buses, free days of admission to museums, and numerous other important items of touristic information. That web address deserves study by visitors to Rome.
The best for last. Though I failed to get the address, I was told by Katie Parla of an extraordinary restaurant known to the smart young people of Rome, called Lazio Duro. There, she swears, you can have a complete meal -- including wine! -- for 12 euros ($15.60). I'm passing along the tip, in the hope that you can find it among the thousands of restaurants in Rome. And if any of our readers already has that information, we'd all be grateful if it could be passed along to us.
Short days before we are scheduled to embark on a tropical vacation, my wife suddenly got cold feet when she read a comment on a user-generated website dealing with the place we had chosen.
The background: We have made reservations to stay in an apartment-with-terrace-balcony on the fifth floor of a guesthouse overlooking the sea on that island. In commenting on that guesthouse, a member of the public had stated (in a website read by my wife) that the atmosphere a block away was "like Times Square, rowdy and loud."
"You've booked us into a place like Times Square!" my wife accused me. "How could you?!"
A day later, I received a wholly coincidental e-mail from a travel-writer friend of mine, a person who has devoted three decades to traveling in the tropics and writing guidebooks about the experience. Learning where we were booked to stay, he passed on his congratulations over the choice, using these exact words (I am eliminating only the name of the guesthouse and its address):
"I've stayed there [he names the guesthouse] -- it's great! Nice little neighborhood -- not big and bustling like [he names the area a mile away], but more intimate."
So whom to believe? A self-appointed, amateur, one-time critic who has been once in his life to the place in question? Or a professional author of travel guides? And isn't it probable that this reference to Times Square was a momentary lapse of judgment, a bit of anger having nothing to do with the actual character of the neighborhood in which we are staying, but probably provoked by a totally unrelated incident or observation?
I have carefully read and considered all the condemnations of my skeptical reaction to user-generated websites. And I'm sorry, I've just experienced another real-life problem with those sites. And I will be reporting to you, on my return, from what seems to me to be an idyllic, quiet, spacious and comfortable beachside location for a 10-day stay starting just a few days from now. What's more, I will be reporting on my return with the actual name of the establishment that is supposedly situated in an area "like Times Square."
On her stay in Chicago last weekend prior to delivering a talk at the heavily-attended Chicago Travel and Adventure Show, my daughter Pauline stayed in a comfortable bedroom of a centrally-located Chicago apartment, for $65 a night (including the right to raid the refrigerator for snacks or breakfast). She had made the arrangements through AirBnB.com, and enjoyed a visit that she found greatly superior to any comparable hotel, and certainly at a substantial saving in price.
The world of economics and finance is keeping a close eye on the fortunes of AirBnB.com, as evidenced by a lead, cover article on that internet service in the current issue of Forbes magazine. Forbes finds AirBnB.com to be the most striking example of a larger trend that finds Americans renting the partial use of their assets -- like their cars, their bicycles, their parking spaces, their camping equipment and RVs -- as a means of supplementing their incomes in these tough economic times. The Forbes profile of AirBnB.com is titled, "AirBnB and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy."
According to Forbes, AirBnB is currently seeking to expand its reach by attracting new capital of 150 million dollars, which would give AirBnB.com a valuation of $2.5 billion dollars. Each of the founders of AirBnB (two college roommates) would then be worth 400 million dollars apiece. Last New Year's Eve, 141,000 people worldwide stayed in accommodations booked through AirBnB.com -- more than stayed that night on the entire Strip in Las Vegas.
AirBnB.com still faces problems, especially in cities like New York and San Francisco where the practice of renting short-term stays in whole apartments has been made illegal. (My daughter carefully ascertained, before she embarked on a search for a Chicago room in AirBnB.com, that Chicago had no such legislation.) In the sharply-critical comments I received from dozens of readers when, in a recent blog, I approved the short-term rentals of apartment bedrooms, I also saw that a great many apartment dwellers are fiercely opposed to what AirBnB.com is doing. They clearly don't want strangers staying down the hall. And the hotel industry, of course, is out to stop AirBnB at any cost.
But thus far, in the overwhelming percentage of touristic cities (and in 300,000 apartments), AirBnB.com can legally enable you to save a great deal of money. And if the organization continues to receive the funding it needs to build an even more powerful network of apartment-seeking, AirBnB.com will become a mammoth source of accommodations, perhaps rivaling the hotel industry of numerous cities in size.
I have now received such good comments on the remarkable walking tours conducted by Context Travel that I need to concentrate on it in this separate treatment.
Context Travel is deliberately snobbish in its appeal -- but only in an intellectual sense. It operates walking tours conducted by what it calls "expert level docents" who are occasionally PhDs and almost always M.A.s. It frankly states that its tours are for intellectually curious people. They do not consist of the memorized, joke-ridden spiels of self-appointed experts in the life of a particular city, but are conducted by recognized experts in various aspects of those cities. And they are not canned lectures, but are geared to the knowledge already possessed by members of each tour group (limited to six persons on each tour). When my daughter recently signed on for a Context tour in the parks of Paris, it was conducted by an administrative official of the Louvre whose offices are in the Louvre. When she signed on for a "children's tour" of the Vatican with her then-12-year-old and 8-year-old daughters, it was conducted by an art-history doctoral student in a university of Rome.
This past weekend, in the Sunday travel section of The New York Times, Context Travel was cited for its operation of an unusual tour of Parisian restaurants and cooking schools, featuring new trends (which include the application of "molecular gastronomy" in top establishments of the French capital). In New York, one of several Context tours features the art galleries of the Chelsea district. Another is called "Birth of the Cocktail," and deals with the development of those drinks. Context tours are available in four U.S. cities (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.), in 15 European cities (all the major capitals and touristic favorites), and in Beijing and Shanghai.
Context's tours are not cheap -- they seem to average about $65 per person -- but they last for three to four hours, which is much longer than the duration of the standard walking tour conducted by an amateur historians. They are scheduled for particular dates, but require that you make advance reservations. And to do that, you really need to spend a half-hour navigating their website and examining their offerings. You go to www.contexttravel.com, and the rewards of doing so will be major ones -- a claim I can make because of the many enthusiastic comments I've received, from people I trust, about this unusual travel facility.
Stupefied by the experience of venturing outdoors into temperatures of 15°F my wife and I decided last winter that we would treat ourselves to a week in the tropics during the early days of March. And after we'd discovered that such quick-stays were already sold out in various locations in Florida, we hit upon a better solution: We'd go to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where it was reliably hot. We would rent a comfortable condo for that week.
Out came the laptop and on came the listings in VRBO.com, Homeaway.com, and Rentalo.com. But what a buzzing and blooming confusion! We were confronted with literally scores of possible rentals, all of them seeming alike, all of them profusely illustrated with photos of bedrooms indistinguishable from each other, all of them supported by breathless descriptions composed by the owners of each flat. As for those famous user-generated recommendations, these were equally impossible to decipher. Seventy-eight persons found each condo to be fine, 59 persons found them to be "terrible." Whom to believe?
And then a thought occurred. We'd go to a guidebook. And what a relief. There, in the relevant pages, was a calm appraisal of several leading properties in the Condado Beach area and Isla Verde, of which it was obvious that the experienced author was enamored of three in particular. The choice became easier, the selection was made, and in the early days of March, 2012, we flew off with confidence to the sands of San Juan.
Call me prejudiced, call me stubborn, but I will remain enamored of travel guidebooks for the rest of my life. I will enjoy relying on the judgment of a skilled journalist who is writing the third or fourth yearly edition of a guide that bears his or her name and on which they'd placed their personal stamp of approval. I will depend on the obvious self-interest of a publisher who wants the readers of that guide to be pleased with its results, so that they'll buy another such guide to another destination at some time in the future.
Does that made me a Luddite, a stick-in-the-mud? I'd claim otherwise. And I'll leave it to you to decide.
I am writing not about realistic, near-term travel planning, but about a far-more-vague desire for a future trip. And my decision to do so is prompted by the news that Haiti has just opened a tourist office in Tampa, Florida (where the current head of that office is the aptly-named Davidson Toussaint). What's more, I'm told that Transat, the Canadian vacation airline, has just successfully operated its first group tour to that suffering country and is apparently scheduling more. All this is written in the context of the fact that Haiti's president, the popular Michel Martelly, a former singing star known as "Sweet Micky," has declared tourism to be a key priority of his administration.
Haiti certainly has all the natural ingredients of a top touristic destination, including a guidebook published by my colleagues in the Bradt organization. Its beaches and waters are pristine, its snorkeling/diving spectacular (healthy, undamaged reefs), its cuisine quite tasty, its robust arts scene produces some of the world's most distinctive paintings, and its people are friendly to a fault. Several airlines now service the island (and are met by shuttle transportation going to a few small beachside resorts), and there is even a chic new four-star hotel called the Royal Oasis (designed, admittedly, for business travelers and not vacationers) that recently opened in Port-au-Prince, with fifteen other hotels reportedly in the pipeline. But although most of the debris from 2010's 7.0 earthquake has been cleared away, the country remains desperately poor, and most standard tourists would be hesitant to go there.
Nevertheless, as my own contribution to a people who deserve our aid, I'm writing now that adventuresome tourism has returned to Haiti. And we all hope, certainly, that a thriving touristic industry will eventually emerge to assist the economy of that much-deserving nation. If you'd like to know more, there's information at www.haititourisminc.com (it lists, pictures and describes a half-dozen attractive coastal resorts and hotels in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel), and a major travel agency in Port-au-Prince that you can contact at www.agencecitadelle.com. Last but not least, the former Club Med in Haiti is now back in operation (my information is based on hearsay, to be sure) as the Hotel Indigo.
Although I have recently dealt with one aspect of the discounted airfares often available from aggregators, the subject is so important that it deserves lengthier treatment.
Though very few members of the public ever use the word "aggregator" to describe the search engines that scan and compare the fares offered by the world's airlines, an increasing percentage of the public are making use of them. This could even be called the "era of the aggregator," as wealthy private equity firms and other wealthy companies compete with one another to offer a billion dollars and more to acquire some of the aggregators. So it may be helpful to remind you of them.
Kayak.com, which was recently bought for 1.65 billion dollars by Priceline.com, is among the biggest of the aggregators, and you'd be well advised to search it when you're in the market for a cheap airfare. Snapping at its heels, like an aggressive terrier, is the much smaller Hipmunk.com, which has recently created all sorts of innovative ways to display special deals in airfares; it's fun to use. A third U.S.-based aggregator is Mobissimo.com, favored by many.
Overseas (though selling tickets for flights within the U.S. as well as abroad), the Copenhagen-based Momondo.com is an effective firm that frequently presents you with the cheapest fare, as does its Iceland-located competitor, Do-Hop.com, and the Edinburgh-headquartered SkyScanner.net.
The aggregators don't actually sell you the air tickets whose bargain price they've discovered; they simply relay that information to you and depend on the airline itself to actually sell you the ticket. Nevertheless, the airlines incur a small commission expense when an aggregator directs you to the airline's site, and therefore all the airlines are busily engaged in creating all sorts of advantages (priority boarding, increased frequent flyer mileage, advance seat reservations, reduced cancellation fees) designed to bring you directly to the airline's website without first consulting an aggregator.
The airlines are even more determined to avoid selling their tickets through one of the so-called Online Ticket Agencies (OTAs), whose names are Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity; they need to pay a heftier commission to Expedia et al., and therefore they're working hard to persuade the public not to go that route.
What's the lesson to heed from this dizzying array of sources? It is to go first to one of the aggregators, then to one of the OTAs, and finally to check what all of them are offering against the fares offered directly by the airline, by going to the airline's site. Though this may require a half-hour or so of searching at your computer, the savings more than merit the time, especially if you are two or more persons traveling together. And if you are really in need of a cheap fare, above all other considerations, you will also go to the airfare "consolidators," the companies that supposedly take blocs of seats from the airlines, which they are obligated to pay for whether or not they are used. I'm skeptical about that assertion, but it's the claim made by such companies as 1800flyeurope.com, dfwtours.com (airfares from Dallas), www.picassotravel.net (airfares from Los Angeles in particular, but offices in other U.S. cities as well), and www.economytravel.com (tel. 888/222-2110 for the best fares, and especially fares for religious or adoption travelers, from Atlanta).
The New York Times Travel Show, at which my daughter and I spoke this past weekend, was quite an event. Attendance -- which apparently set a record for the ten years of that show -- was so massive that it clearly proved that the travel industry has come back, just as the American economy as a whole is apparently recovering.
At the show, people thronged the booths of the most exotic travel destinations and types of travel. I don't remember a single question put to us during our participation that dealt with the prosaic aspects of travel, or with Orlando or Las Vegas. Instead, one person after another talked about Thailand and Myanmar, about Romania, Buenos Aires, and the Aurora Borealis. They purchased travel guides dealing with Alaska and Brazil, with Croatia and Bali, with Ecuador and India, and asked Pauline and myself to autograph them. It was obvious that a large number of Americans are planning to spend a great deal of money on international travel and are freely and enthusiastically planning to visit the most unusual places.
This coming Saturday, Pauline will be following up her appearance at Manhattan's travel show with a morning speech delivered in Chicago, at the Chicago Travel and Adventure Show. On Saturday February 9, she will be speaking at the Boston Globe Travel Show in Beantown, and on Saturday morning February 23, I will be speaking at the Los Angeles Times Travel Show in the Los Angeles Convention Center. And we'll be making further appearances in other cities in March.
That's not to say that everyone at last Saturday'sshow was uncritical of the travel industry. A great many people came up to me at the booth where we were autographing Frommer's travel guides (a record number of them were sold by the bookstore operating that booth, the famous Books & Books chain of Miami fame) to follow up on my complaint, delivered in the course of my earlier speech, about the increasing commercialization of the airline and cruiseline industries.
One person told of going for breakfast in the main dining room of the Nieuw Amsterdam of Holland America Cruises, where she asked for a cappuccino in place of a normal cup of coffee. "That will be $1.75 extra," responded the waiter, creating one unhappy cruise passenger. Others cited example after example of this nickel-and-diming of the passenger (through unexpected fees and penalties) that is so prevalent at today's airports and on cruiseships. Others reported on the unexpected fees and extra charges encountered at hotels. Their ire is so evident that there will obviously be heavy pressure exerted on various regulatory agencies to make airline pricing and hotel pricing more transparent, without surprises. And there is obviously a movement on to reward those companies which continue to make their prices all-inclusive, without extra charges for baggage; I'm talking about JetBlue and Southwest.
The New York Times Travel Show was also the occasion for re-appearances or debuts of various travel companies that, for one reason or another, had faded from sight in earlier months. The Women's Travel Group is an example. Operated for many years by the vigorous Phyllis Stoller, Women's Travel Group runs small-group tours to colorful international destinations, limited in participation to women. It is a welcome travel alternative for women who want to travel only with other women. But Women's Travel Group has recently had the misfortune of using Club ABC (which recently went out of business, at least temporarily) for its bookings and other logistical support.
At the show, Women's Travel Group announced it was now allied with the major SITA World Travel organization (a member of USTOA, with strong financial backing). And henceforth, bookings for these women-only departures can be made with SITA at 800/421-5643 or by e-mailing maryb@sitatours.com. In 2013, Women's Travel Group will be operating interesting tours to Yunnan and Shanghai, China (in August) and to Northern India and the Pushkar Camel Show (in November). They go to South Africa in February of 2014.
Another interesting presence at the show was by a company offering discounts off business class and first class airfares. For many years, a Manhattan travel agency called CookTravel.net has seemed to have a lock on that segment of airfare sales. But in last weekend's travel show, a competitor emerged at a well-staffed booth: Regal Wings (tel. 888/734-2594; www.regalwings.com). While the latter seems to sell only international business class and first class tickets, that appears to be the only limitation on its savings and its successes; and this seems a rather powerful new entrant into the discount-airfares scene.
Although it had no booth, nevertheless Booking.com (the subsidiary of Priceline.com, which makes its hotel offers openly, without the guesswork involved in Priceline) was a strong presence at the show. I have never been able to figure out the difference between Booking.com and other hotel search engines like Hotels.com or GetARoom.com -- and there probably isn't any. But Booking.com, supported by a heavy advertising campaign, will now be a more frequently-used alternative to the better-known hotel websites; it has previously been far more active in Europe, but will now be making a major splash in the US. And it claims to offer all sorts of unbeatable hotel prices in various US cities.
Among the many speakers at the show, I enjoyed hearing Brian Kelly, "the points guy," an expert on the use of frequent flyer mileage, who emphasized what he considered to be the three most useful credit card programs: Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Awards, and Starwood Points. These were especially helpful programs, he said, because they all permitted the broadest possible transfer of the points or miles you earn to dozens of airlines and other firms. I will perhaps be discussing other presentations at this past week's travel show, in future appearances of this blog.
You would think that virtually all would-be, cost-conscious travelers would be familiar by now with such names as CouchSurfing, Hospitality Exchange, and other companies that assist economical people to find free-of-charge lodgings both in the U.S. and abroad. And yet I receive repeated inquiries from readers asking for reminders of the specific firms that perform the task of eliminating housing costs from your vacation plans.
In the world of free hospitality -- namely, the willingness of gregarious, warm-hearted, people to take strangers into their homes for a free night or two of lodgings -- CouchSurfing.org has reached giant size (several million members), and now claims to supply its members with the names and addresses of people in nearly every conceivable location who are willing to offer a free crashpad. Its chief competitor is GlobalFreeLoaders.com, which appears second in size although quite large (and which requires that members be willing to host other members and not simply receive hospitality). Both of them are now much larger than the 60-year-old pioneer in the field, which is USServas.org, which began as early as 1948 to make hospitality free to persons joining the Servas group (and which claims to carefully screen applicants before they are accepted as members). It's believed that people making use of Servas are older in age, in general, than the youthful types who patronize CouchSurfing and GlobalFreeLoaders. Servas claims to offer 15,000 homes in 125 countries, and charges a one-time fee of $85 for members who plan to be travelers as opposed to hosts.
A free hospitality service for women is the 35-year-old WomenWelcomeWomen.org.uk (membership fee of $50), whose members often -- but not always -- offer a free overnight stay or two in their residence to other female members (but some confine their hospitality to simply meeting a member passing through and having them over for a drink). First-time women travelers should look into this one. And finally, a smaller but quite effective source of free overnights in the United States and Canada (it's primarily designed for domestic trips, but does have some overseas members) is the long-in-existence Hospitality Exchange (www.hospex.net) that prides itself on the permanent friendships that often result from encounters between hosts and their guests.
(A hospitality exchange for people over 50, the reputable Evergreenclub.org, isn't included in my list because it imposes a small fee of about $25 per couple per night, as a means of reimbursing hosts for the cost of the copious breakfast they serve to guests and other incidental expenses of housing them.)
