Agents vs. web
Jim Klein wouldn’t think of booking a trip without a travel agent.
Whenever he runs into trouble on the road, as he did on a recent flight from Philadelphia to Orlando, he remembers why he uses one.
“My travel agent really went to bat for me,” says the Mesa, Ariz., computer specialist. “My flight was canceled, but [...]
Sailing past cruise surcharges
The Collesi’s 50th anniversary cruise on Royal Caribbean’s “Enchantment of the Seas” was supposed to be a festive occasion surrounded by family and visiting charming Mexican ports like Cozumel and Costa Maya. And it was—until the bill for dinner arrived one evening. “They charged $1.45 per soda for each child,” remembers Roz Collesi, a Des Plaines, Ill., retiree. “They really nickeled and dimed us to death.”
9/11 saved business travel
Did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 kill business travel? Conventional wisdom suggests that the attacks inflicted massive damage on corporate travel, grounding frequent fliers such as Brooks Hurd. “If you fly on short business trips, your travel time is sometimes doubled by security checks,” says Hurd, a consultant for the San Luis Obispo, Calif., semiconductor industry. “Why bother?”
Up scale, down fee
For a long weekend in October that Juli Echols describes as a “getaway just for the girls,” the New Orleans attorney wanted to visit Manhattan with daughters Courtney, 15, and Ashley, 13. But rates were running $450 a night at the kind of upscale property she preferred - a tad rich for her taste.
Lost ticket in plane crash
Q: I recently ordered a ticket through Travelocity from Atlanta to Bangkok on Korean Air and had the ticket sent by Federal Express.
The ticket never showed up. After several calls to Travelocity and Federal Express, I was told that the ticket had been destroyed in a plane crash. Travelocity didn’t believe me at first, but [...]
Not another 9/11 retrospective
Tempted as I am to add my voice to the chorus of Sept. 11 retrospectives, I’d rather dwell on the present - and the future - for us road warriors.
Yes, the terrorist hijackings of 9/11 affected business travelers in ways that most people can’t understand. Maybe you have a favorite seat on the Boeing 757, [...]
Check out hotel surcharges
Local calls at the Marriott University Park in Tucson, Ariz., cost a dollar each. So why did Dean Kennedy have to pay $28 for his phone call? It turns out he’d left his laptop hooked up to the phone one night because he was expecting an important e-mail. “The clerk informed me that local calls were a dollar plus 10 cents per minute for calls over one hour,” remembers the Chandler, Ariz., accountant. “When I looked again at the placard, sure enough, some extremely fine print notified me of this charge.”
How does Visa’s exchange rate?
Q: I have a question about the charges for currency transactions on my credit card. Visa charges 1 percent for its foreign currency transactions, and issuing banks are now often adding another 2 percent.
But what I can’t figure out is what number this is based on. It’s a real mystery. For instance, I looked at [...]
Can’t have it both ways
We’ve got it so good.
Airfares are off about 40% since the government deregulated the airline industry more than two decades ago, according to research by the likes of Consumers Union and the National Center for Policy Analysis. The most dramatic drop in prices happened in the last two years. Ticket prices slid by 8.5% in [...]
Steer clear of car surcharges
Rich Swisshelm thought he’d found a bargain when he locked in a rate of $28 a day for a sport utility vehicle in San Jose, Costa Rica. But when he tried to pick the truck up from the Advantage Rent-A-Car counter, he discovered he’d thought wrong. “The agent informed me that I had to purchase liability insurance at $20 per day and personal accident insurance at $8 per day, which doubled the cost of the rental,” he remembers. “They said both insurances were mandatory, and I could not rent the car without purchasing the insurance.”
Thanks for nothing
Now that US Airways is bankrupt and United Airlines is following its vapor trail into the abyss of insolvency, here’s a question worth asking: What happened to all that money we gave the ailing airline industry after Sept. 11? Congress allocated $15 billion to save the carriers after the terrorist attacks, of which $5 billion were outright grants. Of that, US Airways pocketed $287 million and United took $724 million. Are these airlines going down and taking our tax dollars with them?
Is your PDA cleared for takeoff?
On a recent flight from Newark, N.J., to Orlando, Mike Corbo decided to check his e-mail. But instead of plugging into a $3.99-a-minute in-flight phone, he powered up his Palm VII and downloaded the messages wirelessly, at 35,000 feet.
Read the contract
Q: I read two of your recent articles regarding American Express Rewards points that were forfeited and I hope that you can help me recover the over 55,000 miles that I lost.
I have been a card member since 1989 and approximately a year-and-a-half ago I decided to cancel my American Express Membership Rewards Card and [...]
Are we lost yet?
It’s one thing to lose yourself on vacation. It’s quite another to get lost, as Jennifer Johannessen discovered on a road trip from New York to Boston. Dot-com directions and the atlas couldn’t keep up with the Big Dig, a $12.6 billion expressway project that’s turned Boston into an often confusing construction site. Trying to reach the USS Constitution in the city’s harbor, Johannessen found herself on a maddening 45-minute odyssey along Route 93. “None of the exits were clearly marked,” she remembers. Finally a ranger at the Bunker Hill Monument told her to follow the Freedom Trail - a red line linking 16 historic sites from there to the ship.
Procrastination can pay
If you can wait until the last minute to book an airline ticket, do it. You could land a real bargain.
That’s what Libbie Rice, a software marketing executive from San Francisco, did. She wanted to fly to Vail, Colo., with her fiancee for a weekend, but at $278 per ticket, the seats were too pricey. [...]