Cruising with Norwalk
To this day, I don’t know how I got infected. Maybe I picked it up on our flight from Newark or on the layover in London. But by the time I boarded the riverboat in Mainz, Germany, I had a full-blown case of the Norwalk Virus: chills, diarrhea, nausea, and stomach cramps. Gastrointestinal viruses such as Norwalk are becoming increasingly common among cruise ship passengers. They’re caught by eating food or drinking liquids that are tainted, touching contaminated surfaces or objects and then putting your hand in your mouth or coming into direct contact with someone else who is sick. The cruise industry is quick to point out that infection can happen anywhere - in a plane, a restaurant, an airport terminal. And that may be true. Equally true, however, is that the reports of cruise ship passengers spending part of their voyage in the infirmary are on the rise. So whether they catch the stomach flu before they board - as I did - or on the journey is probably academic to most passengers.
No refund for my no-show
Q: On a recent trip with my family from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Boston, we encountered a problem with Hotels.com and the Hilton Boston Logan Airport.
When we arrived in San Francisco from Tokyo, we were told that our connection to Minneapolis on Northwest Airlines would be slightly late. As it turned out, we missed our [...]
When business class means second class
Listen to business travelers like Michael Kolsky, and you might be left with the impression that the travel industry has forgotten the basics of customer service. ”I check into a hotel, and I’m given the worst room,” said Mr. Kolsky, the president of Mikol Ltd., a beverage consulting company in Blaine, Wash. ”I board a plane, and the flight attendants ignore me. It used to happen occasionally. Now it happens constantly.”
Kicked out of my room
Q: I booked a room at the Castle Creek Inn Resort & Spa in Escondido, Calif., through Priceline. The reservation was for four nights at a total cost of over $200. When I arrived in the afternoon and tried to check in, I was told that I needed to pay an additional $70 per night [...]
Serving itself
Travel is still thought of as a service industry. But someone must have forgotten to tell Craig Kobayashi, the Hawaiian Airlines pilot who recently refused to fly his plane from Honolulu to San Francisco with Joshua Gotbaum on board. Kobayashi said he was “uncomfortable” having Gotbaum on his plane, even though he posed no security risk to the flight. It turns out the passenger, a court-appointed trustee overseeing the carrier’s bankruptcy reorganization, had tried to make changes to the pilots’ pension plan. Gotbaum ended up taking another flight.
Help is on the way
There’s probably no such thing as a perfect vacation.
That’s because travel rarely goes as you planned it. Your hotel bill is slipped under your door with a surprise surcharge. Your luggage is lost. Or your cruise is ruined when you’re infected by a painful gastrointestinal virus.
Believe me, I know.
Not only have I [...]
No excuse
Q: I made a reservation through Orbitz for a night at The Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago to celebrate my daughter’s birthday.
It ended up being quite possibly my worst hotel experience I’ve ever had in this country (there was one in Venezuela that will forever hold the spot of very worst ever hotel - [...]