New Rules Transform New York City Into a Wonderful, Open-Air Bazaar
Posted on 10/28/2020, 3:00 PM
What's the top reason people visit New York City? If you guessed Broadway shows, museums, or even restaurants, you'd be wrong, wrong, and wrong. Year after year, shopping is cited as the main reason people plan a trip to the Big Apple— something I know well, as the author of Frommer's EasyGuide to New York City. As in the rest of the United States, the city's retail sector has been walloped by t...
Pauline Frommer: A Worthy Vacation Rental Search Aggregator Has Arrived
Posted on 10/27/2020, 12:00 PM
Fewer travelers may be hitting the road right now, but among those still traveling, the top accommodation choices have shifted dramatically from a year ago. As I wrote last week, more people are choosing vacation rentals over hotels. The change has made Airbnbs more expensive than hotels in most North American markets. We’ve also seen a huge uptick in the percentage of travelers choosing RVs, ten...
Dingle, Ireland's Beloved Dolphin, Fungie, Has Disappeared
Posted on 10/23/2020, 5:00 PM
Ireland may be the land of leprechauns, banshees, and merrows, but its most magical being was real, and it swam in the waters off County Kerry. In 1984, a lone, bottleneck dolphin was spotted in the bay of the town of Dingle, on Ireland's west coast, by a lighthouse keeper who was escorting fishing boats out to sea. The dolphin was still there when the keeper brought the boats back into the harbor...
In a Trial to Rescue Travel, Canada to Test International Arrivals at One Airport
Posted on 10/23/2020, 1:00 PM
The multibillion-dollar problem for the travel industry right now is how travel will get back to normal. For many, the solution could be summed up in three words: easily accessible testing. Since most scientists are expecting it to take a good eight months to a year before a vaccine can be approved and widely distributed, testing is a stopgap measure that allows governments to curb the spread of ...
Pauline Frommer: Thanks to 2020, Airbnb Isn't Always the Cheapest Option Anymore
Posted on 10/21/2020, 3:00 PM
The conventional wisdom used to be you’d save money by renting an Airbnb rather than booking a hotel room. That now needs to be revised in yet another reversal brought by the pandemic. A new study from Wanderu, a website usually devoted to comparing bus and train ticket prices, found that in most of North America, average Airbnb nightly rates are now higher than average hotel prices. Sometimes t...
Panama Is Reopening for Quarantine-Free Visits, So Is This the Winter to Finally Go?
Posted on 10/10/2020, 7:00 AM
As Frommer's Panama author Nicholas Gill writes, "Panama is home to a staggering array of natural landscapes, each beautiful in its own way." That includes lovely beaches, perfect spots for snorkeling and scuba diving, mile after mile of pristine rainforest, rugged mountains laced with top whitewater rivers, state-of-the-art golf courses, mangrove swamps, coffee plantations, dozing volcanoes, coas...
How to Find the Best Rates for Last-Minute Car Rentals
Posted on 10/07/2020, 7:00 AM
Save money when you rent a car—every time—using our time-tested, expert-approved tips
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The Department of Transportation Says It's Not There to Ensure Passenger Safety
Posted on 10/07/2020, 6:00 AM
In late July, members of 33 transportation unions—flight attendants, pilots, TSA inspectors, ferry workers, bus drivers, and others—filed an official petition with the Department of Transportation begging for a federal mask mandate on all commercial transportation. Such a move clearly would have made sense. Trains, planes, and buses cross state lines, so the only way to have consistent measures fo...
Rare Good News: Venice's Long-Awaited Flood Protection System Works!
Posted on 10/05/2020, 6:00 AM
Venice's answer to Watergate had involved actual water and actual gates. The city's MOSE Project (the name is an acronym of the Italian initials for "Experimental Electromechanical Module") is a system of mobile gates designed to protect the Venetian Lagoon from flooding. But the project had devolved into a major political scandal. Nine years late, €4 billion over budget, and with countless corru...
Luxury Rock Star Tour Buses Become A Travel Option in This Pandemic
Posted on 10/02/2020, 8:00 PM
There’s a certain flavor of fear that comes from trying to do something potentially dangerous that you are in no way competent to do. I experienced that intense mix of panic and embarrassment while trying to park a Class A motor home for the first time. Eventually, my husband had to slide into the sweat-soaked driver’s seat and finish the job. Piloting the mammoth vehicle was just one of many of t...
