I love sharing things that I find make my travel faster, easier, more enjoyable, safer and cheaper. My ultimate aim is to let my travel serve me not the other way around! In 2014, readers liked the following Travel Tips posts the most: Travel insurance Rocks! The Man in Seat 61 – the best guide to riding trains across the globe -ever Seven Things not to pack – which generated some controversy with heaps of comments! What to do with left over foreign coins? Some very helpful comments here Don’t carry a Money Belt-my other controversial…
Reviewing 2014-How do you measure your travel?
As I reflect on 2014, I pondered how do I measure my travel? 1. By Kilometres, miles or points? In 2014 I covered: 3000km (2000 miles) by train 4000km (2500 miles) by bus 12000km by rental car (7000 miles) 124,754 (77.5k) by air to or from 22 airports. I flew four new airlines bringing my total number of air carriers to 91 airlines! The new ones were: Burma’s Air KBZ, Bangkok Airways Finnair (review coming Tuesday) and Germania 2. The Goals I achieved? In 2014, I completed my first (and last) marathon in Berlin, Germany hiked across…
My Top Five Airlines of 2014
I feel this post is almost a repeat of the last two years! Not much has changed for me at the top of the airline pecking order! I did fly fewer times and far fewer kilometres than other years. I did a lot more surface travel through Asia and can certainly give you the best and worst bus companies and rail operators! I rate each flight I take for every factor from Booking to Check-in to deplaning. and keep a tally of my rating using Flightmemory.com. The scores averaged out give me the ranking…
My Essential Travel Apps for 2014
Twenty five years ago, I travelled with paper tickets, travellers cheques/checks and lots of real cash. We organised to meet people by letter and I sent postcards home. Now, a credit card and a smartphone are all I really need to organise my travel world. As I approach the end of the year, I am reflecting on what have been my essential travel tools. These are the ones I could not live without: Kayak and Skyscanner – Nothing beats these two fare and accommodation finding tools for getting the best deals. Their interfaces give me flexibility…
Ryanair US site – tips for flying
I have flown 90 airlines to all continents of the world (except for Antarctica) and one airline continues to dismay me: Ryanair. People keep flying Ryanair for one reason: cheap fares. I avoid them because of their seats, customer disdain, staff attitude, ethical concerns and their flying to random secondary airports nowhere near the city I am flying to. My experience of Ryanair is that they are like a bus. If you like bus travel, its fine. If something goes wrong, then you are on your own. The airline has made a concerted effort to improve…
Paris locks bridges down to stop love locks
“Paris is the capital of love, and we are all proud of that…But there are other, more beautiful ways of showing love than attaching padlocks.” I have said a few times in this blog how I hate people damaging the things they visit. Nothing riles me up as an example of this than the vandalism of Parisian bridges! What started as a romantic symbol on one bridge in 2008 has become a blight on bridges across Paris and seems to be spreading to other cities. After part of a bridge railing collapsed on the Pont…
Finnair Uses Frying Fat to fly
Finnair are experimenting with using biofuel, made of grease and fat recycled from restaurant kitchens to power their planes. They have been using it since 2011. Emitting less greenhouse gas than regular aviation fuel, it does not compete with food production or negatively impact biodiversity. The only drawback is that it costs twice what teh airline pays for aviation fuel. Finnair believes with increased demand and the development of supply chains will see the cost fall. (and no it is odourless, you wont smell French fries or hamburgers in the exhaust fumes).
Pin Trips
I often search in multiple websites for a fare or series of fares. When I am disciplined, I create a nice spreadsheet in which I enter airline, origin and destination cities, fares etc This seems to take effort and is frustrating. When I am not disciplined I write fares on post it notes which pile up next to me. After a while, I cannot read my scrawls or remember my abbreviations and get frustrated! Enter Pintrips. It only works in Google Chrome though as a free web app extension. Signing up was easy. Once set…
Conde Nast Traveller Top 100 places to stay
77 000 readers provided one million votes in the Conde 2014 Readers’ Choice Awards to identify the top 100 places to stay in the world. Reflecting the readership, the top 100 list includes a diverse range properties from across the globe. Is this the time to confess I have not stayed at any of the Top 100? Number one was Londolozi, Sabi Sands, in the Kruger National Park, South Africa which consists of five lodges located on 35,000 acres of protected bushland populated with wild animals: Rates start at $US1200 per person per night. Condé Nast Traveler magazine was…
This week’s nutty incident
I think everybody has been bemused this week at the news of the recent behaviour of the daughter of Korean Air‘s CEO on board Flight KE086 from New York‘s JFK to Seoul. Heather Cho was a senior vice-president at the airline and the airline’s head of cabin service. If you have missed what happened; Ms Cho was seated as a passenger in the first class section of the A380. She became angry at the way a junior flight attendant served her some macadamia nuts. Apparently, he failed to ask her if she wanted the nuts. To add insult to injury, he…
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