Last weekend, I made a trip to the Rockaways, the several-mile-long stretch of flat, sandy, coastline along the borough of Queens in New York City. It was here that, several weeks ago, a 14-foot surge of the Atlantic Ocean propelled by Hurricane Sandy caused a devastating torrent of water to demolish hundreds and hundreds of homes, to wreck a several-mile-long boardwalk, and to render uninhabitable many thousands of other residences. Although much restoration has been done, piles of debris remain, thousands of people are still without decent places to live, and numerous commercial establishments have not yet re-opened. I visited there a cousin of my wife, who had just moved back into her apartment after living like a nomad elsewhere (including in a temporary place we found for her in Manhattan) for seven weeks.
Though it was somewhat encouraging to see the massive projects of restoration that both private, state and federal agencies have undertaken in the Rockaways, it was discouraging to learn that no one has any real plans to prevent such devastation from occurring again. Apart from an intention to replace the wooden boardwalk with one made of concrete, no one is proposing that anyone spend the hundreds of millions of dollars that could erect a 15-foot-high "berm" of rock, sand and concrete along the entire length of the beach that would hold back any further surge from a future repeat of a hurricane that is bound to re-occur.
Now what has this to do with travel? The lessons of travel reveal to the traveler that other people at other times have made the public investments that prevent such tragedies.
In a book called Surprising Amsterdam that I wrote in 1965, I described the project devised in 1891 by a Dutch engineer called Cornelis Lely to wall off the ZuiderZee in Holland from the North Sea. (The ZuiderZee was a giant bay of the coastline of that nation, at the northern top of which was a 19-mile stretch of roaring ocean.) It took him 27 years to persuade the national authorities that this should be done, and work began on creating this 19-mile dike made of clay, sand and rocks, in a width that later permitted a two-lane highway to be built atop it.
The project required a huge investment by the Dutch government at that time, on a wall created directly in the sea, whose completion was always in doubt. As the two ends of the dike approached each other, the resulting torrent of water in the remaining gap became so fierce as to wash away the rocks being dumped into it before they could form a stable barrier. Appeals went out to the entire population of The Netherlands to bring whatever boats they possessed -- even the smallest -- to carry and dump rocks into the narrowing gap. And so many thousands of people responded, converging on the dike and dumping whatever rocks their small boats could hold, that on May 28, 1932, a radio announcer could shout to an anxious nation that "The dike has been closed!"
The raging ZuiderZee had become a peaceful inland lake. A memorial was placed displaying the words, "A nation that lives, builds for the future."
As I wrote in Surprising Amsterdam:
On a night in February 1963, when disastrous floods swept over large portions of western Holland, the Enclosure Dike prevented the Zuider Zee from rising to engulf Amsterdam -- and perhaps Rotterdam as well. The next morning, a citizen of Amsterdam was heard to remark, "Lely's dike paid for itself in one night."
Today you can drive along the entire 19-mile length of the Enclosure Dike ("Afsluitdijk" in Dutch), as I and my wife did two years ago, and as I have done on many occasions. You witness a construction feat that slices through a raging part of the North Sea.
Remembering those outings -- and no one should ever visit The Netherlands without making the same trip -- you may feel, as I now do, to wit:
Don't tell me that we are unable to protect our shoreline from extremes of weather. Don't tell me that the United States hasn't the wherewithal to make such investments for the common good. Don't tell me that government is incapable of improving the lives and commerce of our nation. Travel teaches you an entirely different lesson. We can afford what we have to do, just as the Dutch determined in 1932.
In the three weeks commencing around January 4th, when everyone has returned from Christmas travels and gone back to work, travel prices slump to almost everywhere in the tropics. A great many smart travelers choose to enjoy a short winter vacation at that time because they know the prices will never be cheaper.
An example is provided in the air-and-land packages offered in early January by the large Apple Vacations (www.applevacations.com). If you will book a flight from Miami to Cancun on Apple, and stay, once there, not for seven nights but for a longer eight nights at the low-rise, four-story-high, 220-room, beachfront Flamingo Cancun Resort in the heart of the "hotel zone" of that popular resort, you'll pay only $759 per person for your round-trip airfare, your round-trip airport-to-hotel transfers, and the hotel for eight nights. This will not include meals, but since you're only a short walk from cafes and restaurants, you can keep food costs to a very small sum.
The package I've cited is for departure on Sunday, January 10, a return flight on Monday January 18. Leave a week later, on January 17, and the price will go up to a still-moderate $848 for an eight-night vacation. That's from Miami, of course; it you leave, say, from New York, you'll pay about $200 more, still keeping your costs below or at $1,000.
Around the same time, but this time from New York and for only a five-night stay in Cancun, you'll pay $979 per person at the higher-quality, beachfront, Grand Parnassus Resort & Spa, this time for all-inclusive arrangements (three meals a day and unlimited drinks) as well as roundtrip airfare and roundtrip airport-to-hotel transfers. And there are numerous other, similarly-priced choices.
So what are you waiting for? If you have about $900 to spend on a winter vacation, and live in most parts of the U.S., the decision to schedule the trip for between January 5 and January 25 will result in your finding numerous bargains for a beachfront interlude of swimming and snoozing in a comfortable hotel.
When all is said and done, five basic methods of vacationing are among the top travel bargains for the coming winter months. lthough some involve travel to areas of chilly weather, their appeal is such that you will want to overlook the temperature to focus on the excitement of their locations.
The marked-down Mediterranean: $61-to-72 a day for 8-to-13-night cruises of the Mediterranean in January and February.
To the surprise of many, three major cruiselines (Norwegian, MSC and Costa Cruises) continue sailing the Mediterranean in the deep-winter months. And although the weather then is not ideal, it isn't frigid either; and the proper warm clothing will enable you to comfortably enjoy all the highlights of this area -- especially its colorful port cities. Go to www.vacationstogo.com, click on "Mediterranean," then on 8-to-13-night cruises, and you'll find that numerous cruise prices for these European waters in January and February (on the three companies listed above) have plummeted to the per-day levels I have also listed. While you'll need to pay at least $1,100 for trans-Atlantic airfare to ports of embarkation, the combined price is nevertheless a resounding vacation bargain.
China Cheaply: $899 to $959 for six nights in Beijing, including air.
The source of this amazing bargain is China Spree (tel. 866/652-5656; www.chinaspree.com), charging $899 to $959 for round-trip air between San Francisco and Beijing, six nights (with full breakfast daily) at a first class hotel in Beijing, three lunches, transfers, and 3 days of escorted sightseeing, leaving you free to wander all other times. Departure dates are in January (from $899), in February (from $929 to $949), and in early March ($959). Departures from New York cost only $100 more.
A tale of two Chinese cities: $999 to $1059 for 7 nights in Beijing and Shanghai, including air from San Francisco.
This is a neighbor to ChinaSpree's one-week tour to Beijing only, spending three nights in Beijing and four nights in Shanghai, and flying you between the two in addition to flying you round-trip from San Francisco. You get full-day tours in both cities. Dates of departure are late January (from $999), February (from $1,029) and early March (from $1,059). New York departures cost only $100 more.
New York: Religious digs in a costly city: $125 per twin room at Manhattan's Leo House.
In a town where hotels routinely charge from $300 to $400 a night per double room, the centrally-located, large Leo House is a life-saving (financial, that is) religious guesthouse/hospice operated by nuns, that asks no religious questions of its guests. Rooms have private toilets and wash basins but no showers (which are found "down the hall"). Go to leohousenyc.com for details of location and reservations procedures.
San Francisco: A cheap standout in a costly town: $95 to $129 per double room at HI International.
Those rates (the latter for a room with private bath) also include free breakfast every morning and a free daily sightseeing tour. Though technically a hostel, the newly renovated hotel is just one block off Union Square at 312 Mason Street, has more private rooms (57) than dorm rooms, and is open to all ages. Go to www.hihostels.com or phone 415/788-5604.
I have been reminded by a number of readers that I failed to include U.S. Servas (www.usservas.org) among the organizations that enable travelers to stay for free in the homes or apartments of other generous people in America and around the world (those include Couchsurfing.org and GlobalFreeLoaders.com). Servas was founded in 1948 by two Danish peace activists who felt that these visits encouraged world peace. Because it is the oldest of the free-of-charge-overnight organizations, it tends to have an older clientele (middle-aged, in particular), whereas Couchsurfing and GlobalFreeLoaders tend to attract much younger types. You might very well want to consider using one of them for your next trip.
I have also been remiss in failing to list the names of those travel agencies that specialize in arranging voyages on passenger-carrying freighters, costing about $110 to $135 a day per person. These are booked mainly by middle-aged and elderly retired persons (because they are long, leisurely trips for people without definite work schedules), who discover the freighter opportunities through at least 15 organizations. The oldest of these in the United States is the well-regarded TravLTips.com (which also sells traditional cruises on ocean liners), while StrandTravel.co.uk is a major British organization selling freighter trips, and Freightervoyages.eu does the same for people on the continent (although it will deal with anyone resident anywhere).
Americans planning a foreign trip, and expecting to make use of ATM machines for their cash needs, should be sensitively aware that almost all those machines respond only to four-digit PIN codes. If your pin number has more than four, you will definitely need to have it changed to a four-digit version before you leave. It's surprising that so many embark on a trip without making that necessary change. And although most U.S. banks now automatically work only with four-digit numbers, some don't.
As long as we're dealing with the number four, you might also keep in mind the major savings you can usually enjoy on a cruise by arranging to sail in the company of three other persons who will make use of a four-passenger cabin. Almost all cruiselines have four-passenger cabins (utilizing two extra bunks that swing down from overhead) and the savings can be considerable for families or groups of four.
Some observers claim that Las Vegas is about to receive a record-breaking number of 40 million tourists in 2012. But it is also clear that those recession-affected visitors are spending far less than they used to -- far less on gambling, far less on rooms, meals, and entertainment. And the reaction of Las Vegas' merchants -- according to Anthony Curtis of LasVegasAdvisor.com, whom we interviewed on last Sunday's broadcast of The Travel Show -- is to reduce the price of a stay in Las Vegas to levels never before seen, in a situation of cut-throat competition.
Hotel rates in Las Vegas, according to Curtis, are less than half as high as in any other popular major city. This December, the super-deluxe Vdara Hotel in the City Center on the Strip, is charging mid-week rates as low as $86 a night for a glamorous suite -- and that's per suite, not per person. Cheaper hotels go down to as little as $26 a room per night. All-you-can-eat buffets at the various "Station" Hotels, like the Palace Station, are priced as low as $7.99 for breakfast, $9.99 for dinner.
And if you sign up for membership in the slot club at Harrah's Hotel, where the comedian/magician Mac King performs to great acclaim (he's outstanding), you can get tickets for his show for the amazing price of $10. Other shows in Las Vegas have increased their published rate for the specific purpose of enabling tickets to be sold at dramatic percentage discounts. The smart tourist will stay on the alert to obtain those discounts (from various vendors and booths around town) for their own evening entertainment.
The most effective way to save money in Las Vegas, according to Curtis? Scan the various Las Vegas websites for their news about incoming conventions. If any convention is predicted to enjoy attendance by 40,000 persons or more, then stay away from Las Vegas during the week it's in town. When meetings are forecast to enjoy fewer than that number, you can safely come ahead to a city that now has many more than 100,000 hotel rooms to fill each night -- and that does so by offering major discounts.
It's been a busy week in travel, with several developments that will affect your travel life.
First, the pilots of American Airlines have ratified their new contract with the famous carrier, and have therefore ceased the work stoppages and sick-call-ins that delayed or forced cancellation of so many AA flights. This means you can now book American with confidence, and without fearing that your flight will be delayed or cancelled. American, it appears, is now operating with the same reliability (of the sort we now expect) as all the other big passenger airlines.
The next big thing in passenger air transportation? It's the possibility that you will be asked to affix luggage tags to your suitcases, instead of bringing them to an attendant to do the task. Apparently, Alaska Airlines out of Seattle, Delta in Atlanta and Las Vegas, and American in Austin, Orlando, and several other cities, have installed kiosks in which passengers obtain their own luggage tags and can then affix them to their baggage. (You still have to bring that luggage to a drop-off position where your I.D. will be checked by a live attendant). All this follows the widespread adoption of kiosks where passengers obtain their own boarding passes, and thus the day is hastened when the entire check-in procedure will be virtually free of airline staff. And who knows? Eventually we may be asked to bring that baggage to the airplane itself and place it in a freight compartment, just as people do (depositing them on a nearby cart) who fly on smaller planes.
Is your name Joseph? Is your name Mary? If that's the case, and you are also married, you can obtain a free, Christmas-season room for one night at Travelodge hotels in Britain. The low-cost hotel chain has thought up this publicity device for the current holiday period, and will extend the offer to Josephs and Marys who book the room prior to December 17. The reason for the offer? It's to assuage the guilt of the hotel industry, says the hotel chain, for failing to find a room at the inn for the famous couple. Only citizens of the U.K. may take advantage of the gimmick, and they must also agree to participate in publicity interviews after enjoying their free hotel room.
Crooks have apparently discovered a means for opening the doors of hotel rooms that normally respond to a plastic card in place of a metal key. After a computer expert had publicly announced the ease with which such locked doors could be opened, a young man actually went on a burglary spree, but then was caught when he sought to pawn a laptop he had lifted from one such room. Within the hotel industry, worried executives are now talking about the costly necessity of replacing the locks (the ones opened by inserting a plastic card) for hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms across the country. To the rest of us, it's a reminder that we should be extra careful not to leave valuables in our hotel rooms when we are not in residence.
A side note: the current violence on the streets of Cairo seems to confirm the view expressed in this blog several weeks ago that Egypt was not yet safe to visit. I came to that conclusion only reluctantly and despite the comments from several readers that this land of the pyramids and sphinx was acceptably secure. It clearly isn't yet.
Two and three years ago, the era of the cheap, intercity bus seemed to pause a bit. No longer were the two giants in the field -- Megabusand BoltBus-- offering new services on virtually a weekly basis. Both companies seemed to concentrate on their northeastern routes -- the Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington, D.C. itinerary that was first developed many years ago by the so-called "Chinatown buses." Both companies stressed the size and financial reliability of their parents: Megabus is a subsidiary of Greyhound, and BoltBus is the U.S. child of a major British bus company.
Now that pause seems to have ended. All within the past several weeks both companies have offered major new routes elsewhere in the United States and $1-a-seat fares to publicize the new itineraries. BoltBus even went so far as to offer a dozen departures a day from communities in New York's Long Island to points on the east side of Manhattan. The same company increased departures on its popular Seattle-to-Portland-to-Vancouver service, and even began offering $1 fares to the first people to book a ride from Seattle to Vancouver. The giant Megabus increased its activity between various stops in California and Las Vegas. It inaugurated service between Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose, California, again offering $1 seats to the first several people to board each departure.
If you will go to the Megabus website and click on its route map, you'll be astonished to see how widespread is that company's current services in the United States. It actually now goes between 120 cities, including those in Texas and Florida (like Orlando to Atlanta). There are now so many opportunities for cheap intercity bus service within the United States that it would be pointless to point out a few representative samples. You simply have to go to the map.
But you should take a look. To publicize their offerings, both companies are offering a great many $1 fares for the remainder of December, and especially in the early winter period, like from early January to mid-March. And both companies are emphasizing their comfort and the availability of free Wi-Fi on almost all buses. The expansion of cheap bus service within the United States is one of the big stories in travel, and something with which all of us should become familiar.
Two important commercial watchdogs -- one in the United States, the other in Britain -- have now taken action to thwart some of the more egregious forms of deception in the advertising of hotel rooms and airline flights. Here at home, the Federal Trade Commission has issued a stern warning to the hotel industry, accusing its members of deliberately omitting mandatory fees in their citation of hotel prices. In Britain, the prestigious Advertising Standards Board has announced that it will not accept the unsupported claims of user-generated content (UGC) websites that they are able to spot the imposters who write reviews of airline services.
It's about time. The way in which both industries have skirted issues of honesty in advertising is alarming. Hotels tell you that you will pay $180 a night for a hotel room. But when you check out, you discover that your bill has been increased by a resort fee of $20 per day. Or that you are being charged for various services made available to you but which you never used. Or that hotel charges need to be increased to cover increased energy costs -- or some such invented expense.
Of all these unadvertised charges, the most frequent is the resort fee that has become almost universal in places like Las Vegas. There are, indeed, but a handful of Las Vegas hotels that don't charge added resort fees, and there is scarcely any Las Vegas hotel that warns you at the time of booking that your overnight charge will be increased by these hefty penalties. In too many other cities as well, resort fees can cost as much as $25 per person added to the room charge that you were quoted when you made the reservation.
Although the FTC hasn't yet said exactly what it will do about hotels that fail to include resort fees and other unexpected charges in their advertised prices, they have indicated that serious remedial action is anticipated. And they have issued what I described as a stern warning that regulations are about to be promulgated on the matter. Hotels should clean up their act, they imply, before drastic action is undertaken by the government agency.
In Britain, the nation's Advertising Standard Board has acted with considerable anger to the claims by UGC sites that they are able to filter out phonie comments from the legitimate ones. Almost every UGC site claims with great solemnity that they are able to detect comments that have been submitted by friends or relatives of the establishment being rated, or by competitors of sites being rated, or by people who have never actually stayed at the places being rated or actually sampled their meals. And yet none of these sites has ever, so far as I know, actually specified in detail what they do to identify those fakes and eliminate them. I suspect that they really do nothing. And the reason for my suspicion is that I believe it is impossible for most UGC sites to filter out phony comments from real ones. How can you tell that a rave review of a restaurant meal wasn't submitted by that restaurant? How can you tell that the enthusiast for a particular hotel hasn't actually stayed there? Or that an angry comment about an establishment hasn't been conjured up by a competitor? You usually can't, and it is disingenuous to claim that you can.
In Britain, one particular user-generated site prints comments from the public about the services rendered by various airlines. And it claims that it is able to insure that these are real, honest comments, and not phony ones composed for the occasion. Yet when the Advertising Standards Authority of England asked to see the actual proof that various comments were genuine ones by people who had actually flown on the airline they are describing, the Internet site responded that all the paperwork of checking was destroyed or eliminated from archives within a few days after being received.
The Advertising Standards Authority refused to accept such unsupported protestations of careful checking. Naming the particular Internet site, they forbade it from making any such claims of careful checking in the future. And they probably, by so doing, put the site out of business or gravely damaged it.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone in the United States were able to require that various user-generated reviews of hotels or restaurants prove the honesty of the reviews they publish? If they could require proof that the persons whose comments were published were independent critics without a special interest in the matter, or people who had actually stayed at the hotels in question or eaten the meals of the restaurants in question?
Recently, several commercial organizations (admittedly those which have an interest in debunking the UGC sites) have claimed that as many as 40% of the comments in such sites are phony ones by people having an interest in either lauding or attacking a particular establishment. I find myself growing increasingly dubious about the validity of many of the user-generated comments.
Travel journalists are beginning to draw attention to a problem with the short-term rental of apartments to transient visitors: the fact that some cities claim the practice to be illegal. The New York Times recently told the harrowing story of a young man who did that in New York City. He was immediately citied for violation of the New York State law forbidding the short-term rental of apartments, made to appear before a court, threatened with eviction by his landlord, and told he might have to pay a fine of $40,000. Only an administrative slip-up by the prosecutor -- failure to make out the correct paper work -- caused the proceeding against him to be dismissed.
Now it's true that the laws applicable to several big cities -- New York, San Francisco, and Paris, among them -- make certain rentals of your apartment for a few days illegal. The law, of course, is only spottily enforced, and the great majority of all apartment owners are never cited for doing so. They run afoul of the law, usually, only if a grouchy neighbor or the landlord or the board of directors (in the case of condos and coops) objects. In Paris, to my knowledge, this rarely happens, and several major real estate brokers thrive on the rental of such apartments and maintain major websites encouraging the practice.
But New York is another matter, and the hotel industry places big pressure on various law officials to enforce the ban. Therefore, it's important at the very outset to emphasize a big exception to the prohibition:
If you, the apartment owner, remain in residence throughout the rental, sleeping in one bedroom while your tenant uses another, you do not violate the law. The ban applies only to the rental of an entire apartment or home to a transient visitor, by an apartment or home owners who themselves vacate the apartment during the period of the rental. It does not apply to the rental of a spare room or a spare cot, provided the owner remains in residence.
I'm surprised that AirBnB and other rental websites do not emphasize -- or even prominently mention -- this exception. It would go far towards maintaining the viability of such important means of permitting tourists to avoid ruinous hotel costs. Publicity given to the prosecution of apartment owners would be offset by practical advice on how to stay within the law.
As long as the short-term rental websites fail to list the major cities in which there might be a problem, and also list the exceptions that permit you to continue renting rooms in that city, their future is threatened. Such heavily-publicized events as the recent prosecution in New York might be placed in context.
And in the meantime, shouldn't the rest of us agitate for a revision in these short-sighted laws? They are defended (by the hotel industry) on the grounds that certain mal-doers are attempting to create unlicensed and unregulated hotels by renting out whole buildings to short-stay tourists. As long as the prohibition of such a practice is the narrow focus of the law, none of us would oppose it. But too many such laws are too broadly worded, and impose unwarranted penalties on persons who simply augment their income while renting out a spare room while remaining in residence.
Halting such rentals of spare rooms does major harm to the ability of cost-conscious tourists to visit cities where hotel rates have gone through the roof. If New York, for instance, wishes to maintain its current unprecedented level of incoming tourism (nearly 50 million a year, far exceeding the ability of the city's hotel industry to house them), it must stop preventing such wholly innocent steps on the part of persons who have no remote intention of creating unlicensed hotels.
We return again to list-making, continuing our discussion of the most popular travel places for the year ahead. And though you may be dismayed by the choice, you have to include a trip with Mickey Mouse that will be booked down to the last cabin on the last late summer date.
Mickey? He's leading the summer crush. When Disney cruise line schedules its most famous ship, the Disney Magic, to make extensive 7-night and 12-night cruises of the Mediterranean in summer of 2013, you can bet that European cruises have become a fully-recognized hot travel item for the months ahead. Though my own list of the most popular travel destinations for 2013 is otherwise made up of cities and countries, it has to be augmented by one watery place that is neither a town nor a region. With the number of Mediterranean-stationed cruiseships reaching record numbers for the year ahead, the choice of the Med for that list can't be questioned.
The reason for that undoubted popularity has a great deal to do with the fear of the American public for the prices of current-day Europe. The desire to visit Europe remains strong, but the conditions for doing so on a land tour are felt by many to be unfavorable. And so a vacation on the sea takes the place of the Grand Tour. On a Mediterranean cruise, one pays a high air fare to get to Barcelona, Rome, Athens or Venice (the starting point for most Mediterranean cruises), but thereafter you simply pay normal cruiseline prices for your accommodations -- and all food is included at no extra charge. In fact, there's hardly an opportunity to eat other than on the ship. Almost all Mediterranean cruises stop in various historic ports from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and therefore passengers have breakfast aboard, a quick, inexpensive lunch on shore, and dinner is had for no extra charge back on the ship. You rush back in mid-afternoon, after the shortest bount of urban sightseeing.
This, of course, is not the way to see Europe. Persons wanting a classic experience of the Old World must necessarily travel on land, and not by cruiseship. On a cruise of the Mediterranean, your encounter with Europe is a highly-artificial glimpse of various port cities, involving no real contact with the European people and no real immersion in European culture. But if you're frightened by the high value of the Euro, and the resulting cost of land arrangements, you opt instead for a cruise. Better book soon -- the ships are filling fast, and the current prices may be lower than the last-minute ones.
