Host David Lytle is joined by travel and media guru, Pauline Frommer (yes, the daughter of Arthur Frommer) for a sneak peek at her new travel series, the Pauline Frommer Guides. Pauline gives us the inside scoop on her guides (and continuing the legacy of "travel for everyone") and how to travel like an adult without breaking the bank OR having to live on ramen noodles. She also offers listeners some expert suggestions for traveling "outside the box" and looking for alternative accommodations, finding original and unique experiences (building a gondola in Venice or indoor sky diving in Vegas), and invites listeners to get in touch for more travel chat! Listen in and get the goods on this exciting new series - in stores in August.
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Top Tips from This Podcast
See transcript below for links to more information.
- How to Save on Accommodation: Avoid hotels and stay in someone's apartment
- Where to Stay (in New York): Residents' apartments, art galleries, The House of the Redeemer
- Best Times to Book Airfare: Stay up until 2am - 3am
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
David Lytle: Welcome to the frommers.com travel podcast. For more information on planning your trip to any one of thousands of destinations, please visit www.frommers.com.
Hi. Welcome to the frommers.com podcast. Today we're talking with Pauline Frommer, a name probably familiar to all of you. She is the daughter of Arthur Frommer. Hi Pauline.
Pauline Frommer: Hi David.
David: It's good to talk to you again. You're doing something really exciting. You are launching your own brand of travel guides, called the Pauline Frommer's Guides.
Pauline: That's right. Yeah. They'll be in bookstores starting in August with the first three guides, New York, Hawaii, and Italy, and then many, many more after that point. We have authors all over the world right now, desperately scurrying around, looking at hotels, looking at restaurants. I, myself, was in Las Vegas for six weeks, seeing every long-running show, shooting machine guns, even doing indoor skydiving, all in the service of our readers, so it's going to be an exciting new series.
David: Really. You were shooting machine guns?
Pauline: Yes.
David: Where do you do that?
Pauline: Well, actually it's a big thing in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a big gun town, which I don't think should surprise anyone. Shooting machine guns is a real pastime there and something that's unique to Las Vegas. I had never even touched a gun before. They give you a choice of targets. You can shoot at Saddam Hussein. You can shoot at various al-Qaeda members. I just chose a faceless target because I had trouble shooting at anything with a face. But it was fascinating and really scary, actually.
David: Yeah. But an experience you probably had never had before.
Pauline: Oh, definitely an experience I've never had before, and that's something that...
David: Definitely finding the offbeat.
Pauline: Yes, and that's the focus of the Pauline Frommer's guides. The guides are going to be very much budget-oriented because that's always been the way I've traveled. It's the way my father taught me how to travel. They are going to go more deeply than other guidebooks into all of the industry secrets on how to save money.
Thanks to the Internet, there's really been a revolution in how you book travel. I think these guides are going to explore that more fully. Within the hotel chapters, we're not just going to tell you about hotels, we're going to tell you when it's better to simply buy an air-hotel package and which air-hotel packages to look at.
We're also going to go more deeply into alternative accommodations, because hotels are so darn expensive nowadays. They've gone up 20 percent in cost from last year, across the United States. And by avoiding hotels altogether, you can often have a more authentic, more fun experience.
Alternative accommodations can be many, many different things, really depending on the location. For example, if you're in Italy, why not stay at a monastery or a convent? When else would you have the opportunity to get a peep at that very secluded, very unusual form of life? And by doing this, you can spend as little as $25 a night.
In Hawaii there are all kinds of condos to stay in and very historic B&Bs. When I was researching the Big Island section of the Hawaii guide, I found B&Bs where the last queen of Hawaii used to come and visit and sit down playing the piano. She was a concert pianist while chomping on cigars. I found another B&B that had its own private waterfall in the backyard.
In New York City I found all kinds of home-stay opportunities. New York City is so expensive nowadays, that many people, including my stepsister, often rent out their apartments to strangers and either go away for a week, as my sister does, and stay with friends, or live in one room of the apartment while they rent it out.
Now this may seem like it's lacking in privacy, but the costs are tremendously low and you meet the most fascinating people, because it's often people in the arts who do this.
I visited a small SoHo art gallery, which has two bedrooms off the gallery itself, and so you eat your breakfast, surrounded by fabulous sculptures. The two French immigrants who run the place live in an apartment downstairs from the gallery. They supply you with breakfast, they'll often invite you down for dinner, and for as little as $95 a night.
I found all kinds of great places, all over New York for the New York Pauline Frommer's New York Guide, such as an apartment in Harlem, filled with African artifacts and pieces of art, where you stay for $110 a night. And you have your own kitchen to cook in and your own entrance into the apartment.
I found this place called The House of the Redeemer, which is actually a religious retreat. But it's nondenominational so they're not checking to see if you're praying. It's off Fifth Avenue. It's this antique-filled mansion that was once owned by the granddaughter of J. P. Morgan and it's $95 a night, to stay in the most expensive area of New York.
David: Wow.
Pauline: So simply by going off the beaten path and avoiding hotels, and we show you very, very carefully how to do this in the new Pauling Frommer's guides, you not only have a place to sleep, you have a really unique experience.
David: Absolutely. You're really getting a local flavor, which is a great way to travel.
Pauline: Yeah. You're staying in local neighborhoods. To take the New York book as another example, it's very difficult to stay in Greenwich Village because there aren't many hotels in that area. But really it's the place where everybody who lives in New York wants to live, because of its beautiful tree-lined streets filled with history, great boutique shopping, fabulous restaurants. And if you stick to hotels your choices are going to be very limited. But there are dozens of little, privately owned B&Bs or home-stays that you can do or apartment rentals in that area.
David: And do you list all of these in your guide?
Pauline: What we do is we really profile the companies that help you book these stays, and tell you how much you're going to spend. We also give you examples, just as I've been doing, of what you'll find by booking with these companies. Because a lot of these small, personal B&B owners don't want their landlords to know they're doing this, because sometimes it may be against the building's policies.
David: Right.
Pauline: It's not illegal because they actually do charge tax for this type of stay. It's something that's a little bit under the carpet.
David: That's really fantastic.
Pauline: One other thing with these alternative accommodations is they give you a chance to meet actual New Yorkers. I went to one B&B which is owned by a gourmet chef from one of the top restaurants in the city, so when you wake up in the morning you have roasted pineapple, and fresh-baked scones, and all of these other gourmet delights as part of the package of what you get.
David: Wow, I'm sure people will be clamoring to stay at that place now.
Pauline: Oh yeah, absolutely.
David: It's just really amazing that there are these alternatives out there too, that if people simply think outside of the box they can have a whole new vacation experience.
Pauline: Absolutely, and with the new Pauline Frommer's guides, it is not only alternative accommodations. We're also looking at alternative experiences. In each of the books, there's a chapter called "The Other." "The Other New York," "The Other O'ahu," "The Other Venice," which tells you about experiences that help you get off the beaten track. They also help you meet locals, which I always find is the most exciting part of any vacation I take. When I actually meet someone in the place and have a meaningful conversation with them, and make a friend. It's what I remember far more than the museums I visited or the top sights I've seen, although of course we cover those as well in the guidebooks.
So, for example, this might mean in Venice learning how to build a gondola for the day, or meeting a female gondolier and taking lessons in how to do that. Or, learning how to do the ancient art of paper marbling in Venice. We also have cooking classes across Italy.
In Hawaii, we have one-day volunteer activities where you can actually work with scientists who are studying endangered sea turtles. You meet these fascinating people, you get to see parts of Hawaii you never would have seen otherwise, and you learn a heck of a lot about sea turtles, which is fascinating.
David: What does it take, exactly, to find this? How do you find all these things?
Pauline: How do we as the authors find all these things?
David: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really interesting to listeners. What does it take for you to find, like, shooting machine guns in Las Vegas or marbling paper in Venice?
Pauline: Well, whenever possible we use local writers who are very much tapped into the local scene and know about these activities. And then we have a couple of what I'll call parachute divers, writers who are just so damn talented that they can really drop into any destination and quickly get to its heart.
I am not a local of Las Vegas, I wrote the New York book and I'm now working on Las Vegas. And so, what I did was talk to everyone and got their opinion on what are the part of Las Vegas that tourists don't see, and how do you get a peek behind the scenes in Las Vegas, because it's such a fake place. But there's a lot of artistry to how they put together this mirage in the desert. So, I found backstage tours of "Jubilee," and a tour that takes you into the giant aquariums at the Caesar's Palace shops, where you talk to these experts on fish and find out how the heck do you keep an aquarium that has stingrays and small sharks in it healthy? And these are tours that are open to the public that very few people know about and that very few guides cover.
David: Not that we want to put ourselves out of business, but it seems like people can also do this themselves too when they travel. They should be willing to ask the question: where can I go that's not typically visited by tourists?
Pauline: Sure, I think it's always important to speak to locals and find out what their favorite places are -- this is particularly important for restaurants -- and say to them, "I don't want where tourists should go, I want to know where you would go if you had your druthers."
David: Right, actually I was just in Portland doing a press tour, and I asked for a bar where all the locals hung out from the concierge. And I was very surprised when he sent me to just a very touristy brew pub.
Pauline: Oh, you never should ask the concierge. They get kickbacks, you know.
David: I know. So, I went in and walked around with a couple of other writers, and then I made a point of talking to him the next day and said, "you sent me exactly to the place that I did not want to go."
Pauline: You have to be careful about who you ask. Taxi drivers and concierges often get kickbacks from the companies that they send tourists to. So, you either look at an impartial source, like Frommer's, like the Pauline Frommer's guides, like the regular Frommer's guides, or you ask somebody who's not in the tourist industry. That's a big, important lesson you need to learn when you're asking for advice for traveling.
David: Right, exactly, it was a lesson learned on my part. These guides that you're doing, I see them as a handing off of the torch. I don't know if our listeners and readers know this yet, but really the Pauline Frommer's guides are being created to take the place of what was the original series of guides, the Dollar-a-Day guides. It's a fifty-year history, and how has travel and the traveler's experience changed since your dad started this from what you're doing now?
Pauline: When my father started this it really was only the wealthy classes that made it across the Atlantic to go to Europe. So, he really revolutionized travel in opening up the doors to average Joes who wanted to go to Europe on five dollars a day. In fact, when he first published the books, he couldn't find anybody to publish them because everyone said, "Who would want to go to Europe on five dollars a day? People want to blow it out and spend money when they travel." He proved them wrong.
These new guides go into all the standard experiences but I think that a lot of travelers are more sophisticated nowadays, and so we also do go into alternative experiences, as I've been discussing. We also tell about alternative accommodations, which is very important in terms of spending less money. And we go more deeply into ways to save money, ways to bargain for hotel rooms, ways to use air-hotel packages to save money on such extremely popular destinations as Las Vegas, London, and Paris where there's such a glut of rooms that need to be kept full year-round that often the big companies that book these rooms year-round get discounts that you and I as individuals could never match.
And so, sometimes, for the real budget traveler people want to save money but not stay in hostels, they have to turn to these alternative methods. I think that these are going to be the only guides out there, once the Dollar-a-Days are phased out, that really talk to the adult budget traveler. We're not telling people to stay in hostels and eat ramen noodles in order to afford traveling, although we do recommend some hostels because some of them are historic and wonderful and have private rooms where people can stay. But we're instead telling people, here are all the tricks of the trade, so that you can travel in a way that you would want to live, as a middle-aged person, but still save enough money so that you can travel more.
David: Right, absolutely. It's not just one trip a year necessarily. You can actually do a lot of traveling during the year.
Pauline: Yeah, that's the fabulous thing about budget travel: the more you save, the more you can travel.
David: Absolutely. So, you're saying that the books are going to have a lot of insider knowledge. Two questions, really. What are your favorite tips for saving money, in addition to looking at alternative accommodations? And the other question is, what were you surprised to learn to save money?
Pauline: Well, some of my favorite tips for saving money. If you're a night owl and you happen to be up at two or three in the morning, that's a very good time to book airfares, because airfares are based on a complex logarithm of supply and demand, and unpaid-for bookings get flushed out of the system at about midnight. So, it gets registered by about two or three in the morning and often they're much, much cheaper to buy at that time. Some of these call centers where the bookings are taken are in the Midwest, which is why I'm saying two or three in the morning, I guess Eastern.
Something I found surprising? Well, working on the London book, which I'm editing right now, it's written by a wonderful writer Jason Cochran, I've learned that sometimes it's best to avoid the web for hotel bookings if you want to stay in a hotel. Because a lot of these are family-owned hotels that aren't really hooked into the World Wide Web. It's funny to think of hotels as not being part of the system, but there are still pockets where it doesn't exist, and if you want to stay in one of these historic, wonderful old B&Bs, you'll do better by booking directly, by picking up the phone, which was a surprise for me. And that exists in London, not so much in other destinations.
David: I guess it does in a sense make me think about how the Internet has sort of opened up the world of travel and driven some costs down, but those small entities like a mom-and-pop B&B certainly wouldn't be tapped into any large pool of reservation systems. So, that does make sense.
Pauline: One of the things that I found very helpful in preparing these books was going to the frommers.com message boards, where I have a habit of going. I find it relaxing to go and answer questions there. And I found it really helpful to find out what the questions are from our readers, things that I hadn't thought about in preparing the New York guide, the nitty-gritty of transportation here, or people trying to balance sightseeing with dining. Answering and reading the questions and reading other travelers' responses on the frommers.com boards was extremely helpful for me. And quite honestly, I really enjoy it, so if you ever want to talk to me directly, go on to the frommers.com board and post a question. I patrol them all the time. I love answering questions, I love reading people's comments. I learned so much that way.
David: Our readers can find that simply by clicking Travel Talk at the top of any page on the site, that takes you into our message board section. I actually read your posts a lot. Some really interesting conversations get started in there.
Pauline: Right now I'm concentrating on Las Vegas since I'm writing that book right now. So, if anyone has any suggestions for me on Las Vegas, I'm dying to hear them. Beyond the message boards, both my father and I take questions over the radio every Sunday afternoon from noon to two. My father has a nationally syndicated radio show. I am on it about half the month, he's on every Sunday. It's a great way to contact us Frommers, because as I said before, we learn so much from our readers and we love talking with you.
As well I'm on CNN Headline News every Monday and Wednesday now, usually at 6:45 PM, and that keeps me tapped into the broader world of travel, as I have to cover all kinds of travel subjects that way. It's a lot of fun.
David: That's good to know. So really, we can get information from you personally, and people can get to the message boards, they can read your guidebooks when they come out in August, they can listen to you on the radio and talk to you.
[laughter]
Pauline: We're a full-service travel-writing entity here.
[laughter]
David: You're everywhere here, all at once.
Pauline: Well, I'm trying to be everywhere.
David: It's great. Really, to do the job that you obviously love, you really do have to stay connected with your readers to know what they want.
Pauline: I think it's very important to stay connected with the readers, and try to travel as much as I can. I'll be in London next week, I'll be in northern California at the end of the summer, I'll be in Chicago in the middle of the summer. I try to keep my feet on the ground.
I also am a mom. I have two small kids, ages three and seven, so I'm very tapped into the needs of family travelers. And I love talking with other travelers, especially other parents. Usually when I talk to other parents, the kids will start talking too, and they'll stop screaming and running around at the airport.
[laughter]
David: That's fantastic. OK, that's all the time we have for today. Pauline, I want to say thank you a lot, this has been really enjoyable.
[music starts]
Pauline: Thank you, I enjoyed it as well.
David: Hopefully we can do this again soon.
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Transcription by CastingWords