‘Crown Princess’ Turned Back Due to Sick Pax
Scores of ill passengers on second consecutive voyage scuttle Caribbean cruise “Have Cipro. Will Travel.” That would have been a good slogan for passengers embarking on one Caribbean cruise to follow. The nearly full, 3,080-passenger “Crown Princess,” a floating behemoth, was directed back to Fort Lauderdale for the cruise industry’s equivalent of deep cleaning — a really deep cleaning [...]
Tips on Using Cell Phones Overseas
Attention to details before departure can ease the cell phone transition Disclaimer: I’m a cell phone dummy. I don’t have a smartphone. I have what I call a stupidphone on which I make/receive phone calls when I’m on the road (it resides in my purse, out of earshot, when I am home). It receives text messages and could send [...]
Chris Elliott’s New How-To Travel Book Free
Christopher Elliott is an award-winning consumer advocate on behalf of travelers, writing magazine features, a syndicated newspaper column, a website and more. His new eBook series called The Travel Troubleshooter is currently “in beta,” a version that is unformatted and therefore unpretty But to me, content is king, and each one is chock full of advance to make [...]
‘Costa Concordia’ Catastrophe & Insurance
Thinking travel? Think travel insurance Costa Concordia’s’precariously perch. I am in Israel right now, and whenever I am in my room at el Aviv’s DAN Panorama Hotel, I turn on the television, I watch a news network — sometimes MSNBC, sometimes BBC, sometimes on a European channel broadcast in a language that I can understand. [...]
A Night at the Worst Eastern
I arrived at Newark International Airport (EWR) at 10:55 p.m. with a reservation at the Best Western Newark Airport West. Its website boasts that it is a “stunning Newark hotel .” Before I even reach the hotel, I dealt with incomplete airport signage at baggage claim and elsewhere in Terminal B (just named by frommers.com as [...]
New Rules Set to Reveal Hidden Fees
New regulation to require total ticket cost set for next month US airlines have reportedly collected $48 billion in add-on fees since 2007– yes that’s billion with a B. The checked-bag fees that most of the airlines now levy have gotten a lot of press, but other than those, passengers often aren’t aware of other extra [...]
ATM Alert: Don’t Count on Cash
US credit & debit cards don’t automatially unlock cash advances abroad No, this isn’t a warning about people spying on and stealing your PIN number, about robbers ready to pounce travelers and their newly obtained cash, or any other common travel warnings. It’s about how US credit cards are out of sync with the rest of [...]
Airlines’ Mileage Programs Compared
Blog research compares & contrasts ease of frequent flier mileage redemption Do frequent flier programs frustrate or even anger you? They do most of us. We rack up miles in order to get free flights or perhaps upgrades. And what happens when we try? We thought we’d be able to redeem 25,000 or 30,000 points [...]
Do Airlines Issue Refunds When Fares Drop?
The current “tax holiday” on federal airline taxes has again shown the spotlight on airlines that keep moneys that rightly belong to passengers, as recently posted here. But wait! There’s more! Air Fare Watchdog has been keeping an eye on another way that airlines keep revenues that they shouldn’t — namely, fares that dropped after pssengers [...]
FAA Stops Collecting Taxes But Most Airlines Pocket the Fees
The Federal Aviation Administration furloughed some 4,000 employees and began shutting down many functions, because Congress was too busy posturing and jockeying for political positions to renew funding for the FAA. Air controllers, being essential to public safety, are still on the job, but there’s no mechanism to collect millions of dollars of airline tax revenues that increase air fares up to 15 percent. Rather than giving passengers a price break, all but three airlines (Alaska, Spirit and Virgin America) kept air fares at their previous rate and pocketed the revenues that would otherwise have gone to the government.
