On Travel is a weekly consumer travel column that offers information and advice for people planning a business or leisure trip. The feature started in USA Today in 2013 and is now nationally syndicated.
Celia Dunlap paid $805 for travel insurance before her Southeast Asia tour. When the operator cut a 40-day itinerary to 10, she was left holding a nonrefundable $4,500 airline ticket. Her policy did not cover the cancellation. It was worthless.
Bob Gourley works with technology every day. But for a recent trip to Oman, he left the phone in his pocket and shot with a 35 mm film camera instead. Thirty-six frames. “I stopped more,” he says. “I observed more.”
Kishore Bitra thought he had found the perfect hotel. The reviews praised its upscale amenities and its attentive service. Then he checked in: broken air conditioner, dirty sheets, a property in disrepair. The reviews were all posted the same week.
The man in the Tokyo departure lounge looked prepared. Color-coded itinerary, screenshots of every boarding pass, the newest luggage. Then the Wi-Fi froze, a gate change hit the monitor, and he came apart. The passenger beside him just walked over.
You take your seat on the plane and realize you have not spoken to a single person since you arrived at the airport. Not at the kiosk. Not at security. Not at the gate. Travel is efficient, frictionless and silent.
You booked a first class seat expecting a hot meal. What arrives is a basket of lukewarm popcorn, because the airline quietly stopped serving meals on that route. Across travel, prices have held steady while the things they bought disappeared.
Welcome to August, the month travel goes to die. The system has been redlining for months and now it is starting to crack. Planes are filthy. Hotels look neglected. The staff is exhausted and they are done with you.
If you are packing for a vacation right now, here is what you need to know. You are buying a product the system cannot always deliver. The infrastructure is built for a short summer sprint, not a hundred day marathon, and by the middle of August the machinery starts to sputter. The seasonal workers who staff the resorts and restaurants are leaving for the school year while the tourists are still arriving and the weather is still perfect. The people who remain are running on fumes.
The travel industry has spent two summers selling the coolcation, the idea that the smart move as temperatures climb is to head north to Scandinavia, Alaska or Iceland. The reality can be a sweaty and expensive mess. One traveler followed the herd to Scandinavia last July expecting a quiet getaway, and found rooms had doubled in price and the ferry routes were fully booked. Then a heat wave hit Oslo, and his hotel had no air conditioning. People paced the hallways at midnight, unable to sleep. Another tried Iceland’s ring road, got lost after a mudslide, and asked a police officer for directions, only to be led half an hour out of town and left there. So while everyone else queues for a view of a glacier, a question worth asking is what is happening in all the places they abandoned.
Damien Zouaoui used to believe in living like a local. He hunted for authentic-looking apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods, shopped the local markets, and did his best to blend in. Then came Lisbon. The bakery on his street was gone. So was the barbershop, replaced by boutique rentals and brunch spots catering, as he puts it, to people like him. Then he watched his host get into a shouting match with a neighbor over yet another guest’s rolling suitcase clattering down the cobblestones, and something clicked. He was not a visitor. He was part of an invading force. For a decade now, the travel industry’s golden rule has been to shun the tourist traps, skip the hotels, and embed yourself in a residential neighborhood in search of something real. But there is a simple arithmetic problem buried in that advice, and it is starting to show up in the streets of the cities we say we love: when everyone insists on living like a local, who is left to actually be one?
On a recent flight from San Francisco to Paris, Dan Skilken was a no-show. It was not his fault. A weather delay scrambled his first leg, the airline rebooked him, and then someone pushed the wrong button, so the system decided he had missed his connection. He only found out when he tried to check his return reservation from France and discovered he had no tickets at all. Because that is how it works: miss one leg of a flight, and the airline quietly cancels the rest. Skilken knew the industry well enough to sort it out, but plenty of travelers do not, and lately there are more of them. Teresa McGee flew from Detroit to Charlotte on American Airlines without a hitch, then tried to fly home and was told she had no ticket. She had a boarding pass proving she had flown the outbound. The airline could not tell her why, only that it had labeled her a no-show and that a new ticket would cost her. Cases like these keep landing in my inbox, and they raise an uncomfortable question. When a company marks a paying customer a no-show and keeps the money, is that a clerical slip, or has the no-show become a quiet little revenue stream?
