Travel Tips (Monday)

Category Archives for Travel Tips (Monday).

Know Your Tipping

There is a story (some say apocryphal) of my Great Aunt who embarked on a big trip in the 1950s. She being careful counted out every taxi fare and restaurant meal to the exact penny. When confronted by a burly taxi driver who said ” hey lady don’t they tip in your country, she turned on  her heel and said “no”. Tipping can be incredibly traumatic for travelers because customs and amounts vary greatly. On a tour in the USA, our Grand Canyon tour guide chastised loudly a group of Scandinavian tourists for hopping off the bus without…

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Check your hotel clock

it has happened to me a few times now. Stagger into bed after a late night flight only to be woken by the hotel room alarm clock at 3am or having promised oneself a long overdue sleep in to have that reality disturbed at 5am by the hotel room alarm clock Sometimes guests manage to leave and forget the alarm clock settings. It is worth saving a quick check to make sure you are not going to be woken at an ungodly hour

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Two Years of Travel Tips

One of the things I most enjoy doing is sharing my travel tips for better,  less stressful travel. Over the last two years I have shared about fifty tips for better travel. Feedback has been universally  positive. Thank you Here is the list of my travel tips for the last two years. I have grouped them into seven categories: Planning, Booking Travel, Accommodation, Trip Preparation, Packing, Travel Problems and En Route. 1. Planning Stop Wishing and Do it- Life’s Bucket List 20 Top Travel Tools Medical Tourism How far is it from? Great Tools   2. Booking Travel Be Date Flexible…

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Stop Wishing and Do it- Life’s Bucket List

Wherever I go I meet people who say “Australia. I wish I could go there” or “I want to go there” or “It is my dream“. Yet they never come. I have friends all over the world and they have never been to see me in Australia! 🙁 One of my goals is to visit 99 countries in my life. I am now up to 55 countries with the addition of Argentina and Turkey in 2012. If I add two more countries per year, then it will take me 22 more years. So in 2034,…

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My 20 Top Travel Tools

Got a new smartphone? Wondering what apps to download? I am not sure how I travelled before the internet and my smart phone? Today I travel with a lot more information and a lot less paper.  There are plenty of list of apps but they can be overwhelming. The first ten on my list are the apps and tools that I consider “essential” and the remaining  are “very useful”. 1. Kayak.com Free: Web, iPhone and Android This is my favourite fare and hotel search engine. My only niggle is that Kayak have evolved from just a travel site to a seller…

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Bundling

As noted last week, for the last decade. airlines have been “unbunding” their fares-  separating as many cost components as possible including  baggage, boarding, meals, miles and entertainment, and selling them apart from the basic fare. By buying all of these components, a passenger can end up paying more for a ticket than they originally planned. Now airlines are creating bundles which include a range of these add on services, within the total price of a fare.  For example: United Airlines have two bundles: Premier Travel and Premier Travel Plus which give faster security access, earlier boarding and…

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Main Airline Fees

Once upon a time, an airline ticket guaranteed you a seat, the ability to take a bag with you and to schlep one onto the plane. With the flight came a meal, drinks and some sort of entertainment. In the modern world, people want to pay as little as possible so airlines began stripping out some of the options they used to include in an effort to reduce the base fare we pay. Then airlines began selling back to us what we used to expect for free.   It seems to me there are six major types…

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Credit Card Compatibility Fails

In Washington DC, last week, I inserted my Visa card into a subway ticket machine to buy a metro card so I could ride the trains. The machine requested I type in my five digit zip code. I don’t have one as it is an Australian card. I entered the four digits of my Australian postal code. Not accepted. So I tried again but added a “0”at the start of the four digits. Believe it or not, this sometimes works in other machines! Not accepted, this time. I then entered 00000 which I have also successfully used in some other machines. I still could not use…

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Splitting Rail Journeys- Saving Money

This is a trick I have utilised in Australia, the Uk and USA. This weekend I needed to travel from Penzance in the south of England to Manchester in the North west. A distance of 639km / 397 miles. The cheapest ticket was 169 Pounds in Standard (Economy) Class. This is around $US269. So I split the journey up and booked three tickets: Penzance to Exeter ( 21a km / 13a miles). I found a fare for 12 pounds on First Great Western trains Exeter to Bristol (12s km / 76 miles) The cheapest ticket was 24 pounds in Economy but I…

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Negotiating US Security- an appeal and a guide

I have just spent three weeks out of the last five in the USA flying 21 times. This is a lot of checkins! Flying can be very frustrating at the best of times but people’s dilly dallying at airport security really raises my impatience levels. If a passenger “wastes” a minute at security, that can be a be an annoyance. If 15 people in a security line all “waste” one minute, this time delay adds up. For some people, this can mean missing a flight! In the book and movie “Up in the Air”, the…

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