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.
On a 14-hour flight to Manila, Phil Lockwood tracked every piece of waste his family of five left behind: 17 plastic cups, five half-eaten sandwiches, five amenity kits. Every untouched item, he says, is a cost baked into the fare.
November travel is a trap. Freezing when your Uber arrives at 5 a.m., then 70 degrees by check-in. So you pack everything: the shell, the backup blazer, the just-in-case shoes. But knowing what to leave home saves the most room.
The travel industry is quietly redefining what refundable means, and you are not going to like it. It used to mean you got your money back. Now it can mean some of it, minus fees you were never told about.
For most travelers the middle seat is a contact sport, and winter coats make the squeeze worse. One pilot says your brain reads it as confinement and flips on fight-or-flight for the whole flight. There are ways to win anyway.
At baggage claim in Melbourne, Virgin Australia delivered everything but my son’s purple rollaboard. Its system showed the bag scanned at origin and destination, then it vanished. That is when I learned tracking a bag and delivering it are different.
Brian Clark budgeted for the long flight to New Zealand. He did not budget for the $70 he paid before booking a room, a visitor levy plus a travel authority. Governments treat the border as a place to collect money.
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.
