10 Airports Where You’re Likely to Arrive Late
Eight of the 10 are in the Northeast including three in/around New York There’s an awful lot to like about the greater Denver area, and one of them is the (relative) ease of air travel. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics recently listed the 10 worst airports in the US for on-time arrivals in 2011, and I don’t imagine [...]
Travel Providers’ Lousy Contracts
Chris Elliott examines contracts travel industry forces upon customers For a service industry, travel providers are often more about being self-serving than actually serving, let alone catering, to the traveling public. Author, travel advocate and journalist Christopher Elliott tackles yet another topic on behalf of aggrieved travelers. In “Who Has the Worst Contract in Travel?”, [...]
Pamphleteering Pilots at Nine Airports Today
Disgruntled United pilots take complaints to flying public If you are passing through any of nine US airports today (Chicago O’Hare, Denver International Airport, Washington Dulles, Los Angeles International, Lexington Blue Grass Airport, NYC LaGuardia, Greater Rochester Airport, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and San Francisco International Airport), you’ll probably see United Airlines pilots in full uniform [...]
American Travelers’ Most Wanted: Free WiFi
Hotel managers alert: guest love free WiFi Hotels.com surveyed 415 travelers and, unsurprisingly, found that the most-desired hotel amenity is free WiFi. If I had been one of the surveyees, I would have specified high-speed Internet access easily usable without having to reconfigure a PC, sit in the lobby or be timed-out every half hour. [...]
‘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 [...]
