The last time I planned a trip, it went a little something like this:

Flight: Found a good deal on Travelocity, booked it, paid for it, the whole thing took about an hour, including research time and picking the perfect seat via Seatguru.

Hotel: Checked HotelChatter, Jaunted, and Concierge.com for cool hotels, then looked for a deal via Jetsetter, Tablet, Vacationist and Voyage Prive, and compared prices at Expedia, Travelocity, and Hotels.com. Finally booked it on Expedia. All in it took about two hours.

Everything else: Spent weeks canvassing friends; searching through Conde Nast Traveler, Wallpaper, NYT, and Travel + Leisure articles; and skimming through Yelp reviews. Made a list of finds. Eventually turned that list into a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet, people! I hate spreadsheets. Called to book a hiking tour, a farm tour, and a horse-riding tour. Tried to book restaurant reservations on OpenTable and managed with a couple of places. Called to book the others. Total time spent over the course of three weeks: At least 20 hours.

That last bit is where a new travel site, Peek comes in. Officially launching this summer, Peek will connect travelers with a variety of memorable experiences—everything from the more expected, must-do things like Alcatraz tours in San Francisco to more unique, top-shelf activities like a champagne breakfast and balloon ride followed by an olive oil tasting in Napa. The site will also allow travelers to browse through itineraries created by both travel writers and local experts. Peek will link various tours and sights with write-ups they’ve received in well-known travel pubs (no more checking T+L, Traveler, the New York Times, and National Geographic to cross-reference and see who’s covered what, hooray!), and will include a good number of lesser-known finds… the sorts of experiences that you only hear about from friends because the operator doesn’t have a website. The idea is to connect travelers with the stuff great travel memories are made of and to make it all easy to find and book online. It seems like such an obvious need, it’s almost hard to believe that no one’s built this site yet.

“When you go on a trip, even if you stay at the most amazing hotel and fly first class, it’s generally not the flight or the hotel you remember, it’s what you did with your time there,” says Peek CEO and co-founder Ruzwana Bashir. “My memories of paragliding over Rio, or exploring the favelas, are what come to mind when I think about my trip to Brazil, not the hotel I stayed in. And yet finding and booking these took several calls and hours of research, and every time I mention it to a friend who’s been to Rio they say they wished they had known about it before they went.”

Bashir previously worked at both Gilt Groupe and Art.sy, which helps to explain why a site that hasn’t even launched yet has already scored nods from the New York Times and Business Insider. So far it’s looking like it will actually live up to the hype.

Peek will launch on the West Coast first, with more domestic and international locations coming online soon. In the meantime, the site is coming out today with a sneak preview of the sorts of things it plans to offer, in the form of its Insider’s Tribeca Film Festival Experience (you’ll need to sign up here to get more details or to book it). Priced at $1,000 for two, the experience includes a private lunch at the legendary Per Se with Tribeca Film Festival co-founder Craig Hatkoff, tickets to the festival’s Filmmaker & Industry Party, passes to film screenings of your choice, and massages at decadent Shibui Spa at the Greenwich Hotel (owned by “the other” festival co-founder, Robert De Niro). Bashir says Peek will be rolling out more news and sneak peaks over the coming months, so it’s worth signing up, even if you’re not into the Tribeca thing.

The post Peek Delivers Travel Memories Without Headaches appeared first on The Faster Times.

This sounds like a story that should be running in the Onion. Logan Airport announced today that it will be rolling out a new security measure, a technique it says it picked up from Israeli security forces. It’s not a new type of X-ray machine or some sort of awesome Israeli sleeper hold, it’s something called a “chat down.” Basically, specially trained agents will chat with passengers to root out any bad apples.

The name of these special agents? Behavior Detection Officers, or BDOs as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is calling them. You can’t make this stuff up, people.

The funny thing to me … okay, it’s all funny, but the additional layer of chuckles comes from the fact that I think probably 20 years ago before all the new airport security measures, TSA agents probably routinely chatted with passengers. Sure they didn’t have a set script, but if they were doing the small talk routine with someone and that person was cagey and weird, they probably would have pulled them aside. Do we really need to be told by Israeli special ops that talking to people is a good way to determine whether or not they’re crazy?

Note: If you’re flying through Logan and want to put these BDOs to the test, the TSA has publicly said that looking nervous and avoiding eye contact are two behaviors they don’t consider to be giveaway signs. They are keeping those signs to themselves for the time being, but borrowed a page from “Lie to Me” in their explanation: “Security officers are screening travelers for involuntary physical and physiological reactions that people exhibit in response to a fear of being discovered.”

Despite some complaints that this technique is not scientifically validated (including from Congressman Bennie Thompson, a ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security), the program is launching at Logan this week and will run for 60 days.

The post Boston to Would-Be Terrorists: We Will Chat You Down appeared first on The Faster Times.

Yesterday morning I got an email from Airbnb in my inbox. Normally I delete emails from companies, but the first few lines of this one made me want to read on: “Last month, the home of a San Francisco host named EJ was tragically vandalized by a guest. The damage was so bad that her life was turned upside down. When we learned of this our hearts sank. We felt paralyzed, and over the last four weeks, we have really screwed things up.”

For those of you who haven’t yet heard the details, here’s a quick snapshot: The aforementioned EJ wrote a blog post in late June about having returned from a week-long business trip to find her apartment ransacked by what later turned out to be a 19-year-old meth addict, whom she had connected with through Airbnb. As that post began generating more and more buzz, Airbnb moved quickly to assert that it was doing everything it could to help EJ and to aid in the police investigation. EJ countered with another blog post in which she outed Airbnb for not only being slow to respond and not overly helpful, but also for contacting her with a request to pull down her initial post or at least “update the blog with a ‘twist’ of good news so as to ‘complete[s] the story,” and for complaining that her post could negatively impact the company’s image.

Holy shit! Every paranoid fear the whole social travel trend has ever sparked is coming true. And at a time when investors are dumping millions into the space (Air BnB announced $112 million in investments last week, while competitor Wimdu recently locked down $90 million). I knew renting my home out to a stranger, or trusting a stranger to put me up someplace decent sounded like a bad idea. You should never talk to strangers, much less share space with them, right? I bet those investors are kicking themselves.

Or maybe not. Here’s the thing: Air BnB, despite apparently mishandling this situation at the start, is now doing the right thing. They’ve got insurance in place now to cover hosts for up to $50,000 of damage, a policy they are extending to the poor San Francisco host who kicked this whole thing off. The company also launched a safety section on its site with tips, as well as several enhanced safety features, including 24-hour customer service and an in-house security task team charged with looking into reports of suspicious behavior. Unfortunately, most of that is not really going to help EJ, whose ordeal is still ongoing and who is stuck with a crappy situation regardless, but it does nonetheless bode well for current and future users of Airbnb. And here’s another thing: That mostly happened because the AirBnB community raised a ruckus in support of EJ and insisted that the company sort itself out.

That gets at what makes the social travel trend, or the peer-to-peer travel trend, depending on who you talk to, not only generally cool but also likely to stick around: It harnesses the power of communities to mostly positive ends.

This is also a new industry, and by addressing security concerns now, social travel companies will make it easier for the industry to grow. By baking security concerns into its road map at its launch (4 months ago), and providing 24-hour customer service and on-the-ground employees in the countries it serves, Air BnB competitor Wimdu hopes to curb bad behavior before it starts. The site also sends employees to stay at host properties to vet the spaces and the hosts first-hand, and will be rolling out its own insurance policy shortly to ease the concerns of hosts.

And the power of the communities created on these sites is still strong. “EJ seemed to be partially disappointed that the strength of the Air BnB community wasn’t enough to provide security, but the community aspect of social travel does provide a baseline level of checks and balances,” says Wimdu founder Russell Goldman. “If a site works well there’s enough users on the host side and the guest side that people are reviewing and being reviewed by each other, and so you do have some comfort there.”

That coupled with insurance policies and a decent process in place to handle the occasional reservation gone awry seems like enough to satisfy most travelers and would-be hosts. Despite the Airbnb shake-up, the social travel industry continues to grow exponentially larger and more profitable each month (Wimdu already has more than 400 employees, and spaces in over 200 cities). It’s likely to continue growing and by most accounts that’s a good thing. Whether they afford you the opportunity to feel like a local in San Francisco, a gypsy in France, or a millionaire on your own private island in Fiji, these services are offering new, fun travel experiences. They’re tapping into that desire many tourists have to get a local’s viewpoint of the places they visit, and they’re creating a feeling of community on multiple layers (within various geographic locations, as well as online, amongst members). And, like any community, they need policing.

The post The Airbnb Burglary Scandal: Should One Bad Apple Spoil Social Travel? appeared first on The Faster Times.

There is almost nothing the travel media loves more than a trend, but they (er, we) call attention to them so much it’s hard not to notice when something that has been earmarked as “new and trendy” or “up and coming” is actually neither of those things. Here are five recent examples, in list form since the only thing travel pubs love more than a trend is a list:

1. People in Amsterdam Love to Bike. Also, The Dutch Are Cooler than Us. - No shit. How many times are we really going to have to read this story as if it’s news?

2. This Indie Coffee Thing Is Really Taking Off! - Two things bother me on this one, first the very same magazine published an article about the burgeoning U.S. indy coffee scene back in 2005. That article was called “America’s Best Coffee.” This one is “America’s Best Coffee Cities.” Oy. Second: the intro talks about a visitor to San Francisco who insists on visiting Steps of Rome for an espresso whenever they’re in town. Um, Steps of Rome is where I used to hang out when I was 18 and thought the coked up Italian waiters were cool. Also, SF is second only to Seattle in its assortment of local coffee roasters–Ritual, Bicycle, Roast, hell even the ubiquitous Blue Bottle. Steps of Rome just fires up some Illy and serves it with an accent. Sure, it’s good, but it’s not really worth putting pen to paper about.

3. Scotland’s Highlands Make for Some Awesome Walks - I swear I read the same “walking the Scottish Highlands” story every year. And in each and every one there’s the lovely surprise of a whisky distillery along the way (has there ever been a travel story on Scotland that doesn’t mention whisky? I think definitely not in the American media) and a renewed appreciation for things like fresh air, nature and quaint B&Bs.

4. Hard Work on the Range Soothes Every City Slicker’s Soul - How long has the ranch vacation trend been going on now? I mean, the movie City Slickers was all about it, and that came out in 1991 so how are we still talking about this like it’s a new thing? Okay, this ranch is “sustainable” and that ranch really makes you work hard, yada yada. It’s all the same.

5. Craft Cocktail Lounges Are San Francisco’s New Wine Bars - The craft cocktail thing has been around long enough that there are books written about it. Here’s a little inside info on that for those of you not in publishing: books have a really long lead time, like at least a year, and that’s from the time that they get signed off on to the time they’re in print. So for a book on craft cocktails to have been published in 2002, you know this is an idea that’s been around awhile. Also, it is not in any way unique to San Francisco’.

The post Lame in the Scottish Highlands: Supposedly New Travel Trends [3.25.11] appeared first on The Faster Times.

Sometimes really interesting information is obscured by a ridiculous headline. I’m not just making a joke about this story’s title, but about the email that prompted it, sent from the Portuguese tourism board. Subject line: Cool Monasteries explore and even you can sleep in.

The same line is repeated at least four times in the email itself. But you know what? After chuckling to myself and repeating “even you can sleep in” in a Portuguese accent a few times, I read through this list of monasteries and it really did seem cool. Maybe the Portuguese tourism folks are brilliant marketing geniuses who got me right where they wanted me.

Here’s their list; I’ve kept it the way it was written apart from any major mistakes, because who am I to tamper with jokes about Visigoths or monastic architecture?

The post How to Hang with Monks in Portugal appeared first on The Faster Times.

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

What I loved most about this week’s travel sections was the constant surprise factor. You can see the art the Nazis stole at a museum in Paris? Wild. The grottoes that housed many of Italy’s poorest families during the 1940s have been turned into swanky hotels. Who knew? Roquefort is referred to as the “king of cheeses.” Really? Croatia, not Italy, is the new cool truffle-hunting spot. Hunh. And St. Andrews is closed to golfers on Sundays, but open to the public, who can tromp around the course (within reason) for free. Fantastic!

Of course, it wasn’t all surprises. The New York Times’ tales of stolen art in Paris and gentrified caves in Italy were balanced out by yet another story on Argentina’s wine country and the expats who are making Panama cool. I don’t know if American newspapers are read by anyone but the expats in Panama, but if I were Panamanian, I’d be getting pretty annoyed by now at the inference that my country sucked until a bunch of Euros and Yanks showed up.

That mix of stories made the section a great read, regardless. I loved how writer Gisela Williams told the story of the grottoes-turned-boutiqe hotels in Italy’s southern Basilicata region through the story of an elderly man she saw in the town of Matera, heading up the stairs at her swanky new hotel to see the grotto he was born in.

“Suite 10 had been transformed into a magical version of Plato’s Cave, glowing with golden artificial light that filtered in through small windows, and from recessed lighting in the walls,” she writes of the man’s birthplace. “The minimal space was simply decorated, with an artfully worn wooden desk, a large bed with a white crocheted cover, arched ceilings and a floor of packed earth and patinaed stone tiles.”

“‘I grew up here with my seven brothers and sisters,’ Mr. Di Cecce said, and pointed to the luxurious bathroom with an egg-shaped Philippe Starck bathtub. ‘And the animals lived back there.”

She paints a great picture, and I can’t deny that the idea of a new Coppola hotel in nearby Bernalda, where his grandfather was raised, is pretty appealing.

SCORE: 9/10 carry-ons

The LA Times section focused on France this week–geographically themed issues seem to be a new thing with the paper, and I’m actually digging it; with ever-diminishing column space devoted to travel coverage, it gives them a way to cover at least one region in-depth. Actually, to be more precise, this week’s section was focused on French food–Roquefort cheese, caviar, and chocolate to be exact.

A bleu cheese fan heading to Roquefort wouldn’t normally be a great story, but the fact that the U.S. has announced a tariff on the cheese gave the story a great hook. “My love affair with Roquefort possibly began in the womb,” writes Mary Ellen Monahan. “My mother loved all things French, especially pungent cheeses. So I panicked last year when I saw a newspaper headline declaring: ‘U.S. Punishes France With Roquefort Tariff.’ A small wedge would skyrocket from $20 a pound to $60 or even higher in a matter of weeks. Quelle horreur! Who would bother to sell? Bigfoot might soon be easier to find. My lifelong desire to visit became a mission to secure my stash at the source.”

Heidi Fuller-Love’s story on finding “ethical caviar” in France was equally appealing, and strangely also linked to a newspaper article. “‘Ethical caviar’ might sound like an oxymoron, but as a lover of ‘black pearls’ who hates that years of overfishing have seriously depleted the Caspian Sea’s sturgeon population, I was fascinated by a story in a local French newspaper,” she writes. “‘British Man Brings Politically Correct Caviar Back to France,’ said the headline, next to a photo of Alan Jones cradling what looked like an emaciated shark.”

When she investigates, Fuller-Love finds that Jones has a thriving caviar farm in the Gironde estuary, where he has become the largest producer of French caviar, which may not be as well-known as Russian or Iranian caviar, but is equally tasty and is also cheaper. The lingering question in my mind, which Fuller-Love didn’t investigate at all, is the environmental impact of Jones’s fish farms. Aquaculture isn’t generally known for its environmental sustainability, and I wonder how all those farms affect the estuary, what Jones feeds his sturgeon, how often they get out and affect the surrounding ecosystem, and what exactly he does about the poop problem. Nonetheless, I suppose “ethical” is a start.

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

The first thing I said when I opened up the Washington Post’s travel section this week was “Dammit!” I had been hoping to make it to Medellin before it got too much coverage, and now I’m worried time may have run out. Still, bravo to WaPo for showing Medellin some love, and with a subhed like “from drug violence to tourist destination,” run-of-the-mill tourists are still likely to stay away.

“Not long ago the mayhem on Medellin’s streets was controlled by notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar,” writes WaPo staffer Nancy Trejos. “In the 1980s and ’90s, Medellin was the largest cocaine producer in the world, and Escobar guarded his empire so ferociously that the city became one of the most dangerous in Latin America.”

“Escobar is long gone, brought down by police in a 1993 gun battle as dramatic as his life. In the past decade, new parks, museums, libraries and hotels have opened in Colombia’s second-largest city. Cable cars have been extended up to a mountain with a new nature preserve. Famed sculptor and painter Fernando Botero, a Medellin native, donated more than 1,000 of his works, plus pieces from his personal collection of contemporary art, to the Museo de Antioquia. Last year, Spirit Airlines launched nonstop flights from Fort Lauderdale to Medellin.”

The other feature in the section is equally unexpected: a story on learning to love truffles in Croatia. After a somewhat disturbing account of the lust inspired by eating a sweet tartufone in Istria (a potato dumpling filled with chocolate, covered with a bechamel-chocolate sauce and topped with shavings of fresh white truffle), writer Anja Mutic explains why one might want to venture to Croatia to try these earthy wonders.

“I’ve never cared for truffles, the smelly subterranean fungus that grows in the dark forests here,” she writes. “I just didn’t get what all those people have raved about for centuries, describing truffles as “black diamonds,” putting them on gastronomic pedestals, paying astronomical prices for a handful of these gnarly wrinkled tubers. Their taste left me cold. Until my first taste of tartufone, my moment of conversion.”

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

A little over a year ago my husband and I were in St. Andrews. We stayed at the hotel at the Old Course, but since there wasn’t a tee time available, he played at one of the many other great courses nearby. We had a great time, but left feeling a bit cheated for not having set foot on golf’s oldest course. Next time, thanks to the Detroit Free Press, I’m going on a Sunday. The Scots have a great law on the books called “the right to roam,” which essentially states that all land is a collective good. If someone’s walking on your property, and not causing any trouble, you can’t do anything about it. So it is that when St. Andrews closes to golfers on Sunday “to rest,” it opens to the public to gawk. “On a sunshiny fall afternoon, I even saw people lying down on the fairway, soaking in the brief Scotland sun as if they were on the beach,” writes Ellen Creager. Brilliant!

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The post Weekly Travel Scorecard [11.21.10] appeared first on The Faster Times.

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

This week’s travel stories illustrated an ongoing issue with travel narrative: How does one write a personal narrative and create a story that a reader can immerse him- or herself in at the same time? It’s not easy, and that’s why really good travel writing stands out. Judith Shulevitz’s story on exploring Ein Gedi–an Israeli oasis on the Dead Sea–with her children, for example, managed to pull both off splendidly. And I say that as someone that has a really hard time making it through most family travel stories. Not because I hate families, children or travel, but because such stories tend to be the ones that most often fail to balance the personal with the universal. Put another way, parents are often hard-pressed to see beyond their children’s noses, and travel writers who are parents are no exception. Which makes Shulevitz’s accomplishment all the more rare. “There are many reasons not to travel overseas with small children, and, as far as I can tell, only one reason to do so,” she starts off. “Unfortunately for my children, who’d probably be just as happy to stay home, that reason is what keeps me slogging through the less glamorous parts of motherhood. When you travel you get the chance to prove to your children that life is at least as interesting as their bedtime stories. And if you can get them to believe that, then you can believe it too, at least for the duration of the trip.”

Now, an example of the opposite type of travel writer, one for whom the first person becomes a way to alienate, rather than embrace, the reader. This is one of many such lines in the NYT piece on Batumi, which it heralds as a newly glamorous getaway in Georgia (the country, not the state). After leading off with the description of a building that could be a mosque, a library or a museum, the writer informs us readers: “But, as I discovered when I entered the marble-floored lobby this summer, the building was a much more unexpected cultural treasure: an $80 million, 203-room Sheraton hotel, which opened in June and became Batumi’s first international brand hotel.”

It’s hard to put oneself in the writer’s shoes at this point, much less care about where she will lead us readers next. The new NYT series “Getting Lost” has plenty of potential for combining both personal insight and universal appeal, provided columnist Matt Gross (formerly the paper’s Frugal Traveler) can steer clear of too much personal background. In the debut column, Gross goes a bit heavy on the “I”, but hey, he has to set up the purpose of the column and he can’t really do that without explaining that, as a frequent traveler, he misses the joy of being lost in a new place.

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

Like the New York Times, this week’s LA Times travel section was dominated, for the most part, by first-person narratives. And again, the struggle between the individual and the universal was on display, this time contained within each story. In a piece on eating one’s way around Charleston, for example, the writer starts out with a good blend of the personal–she and her husband shocking a waiter with the amount of food they’re ready to sample–with the universal–they’re just two of several tourists currently visiting the area for its food. But in some passages she delves perhaps a bit too far into her own experience. “But a quick tip: Before embarking on a venture of this kind, it is crucial to don comfortable shoes, so as to be able to walk off what you do to yourself,” she writes in one unnecessary paragraph. “This is not the time — believe me because I know — for the new sandals purchased at said thrift shop, no matter how cute they are.”

In a companion piece on Edisto Island, a short drive from Charleston (is the South Carolina tourism board advertising with the LA Times?), writer Madeline King Porter uses her personal connection with the place to draw readers in. She’s describing a place she’s been dozens of times, and her excitement for the spot is contagious. “I’ve driven this 17-mile stretch of narrow highway over decades — at the wheel, or in the back seat with my parents in front, or piled into a car with teenage friends — on the way to Edisto Island,” she writes. And later: “Of the many Edisto trails, my favorite leads to Botany Bay Beach, two miles of uninhabited oceanfront that can be reached only on foot or by bike.”

In this case the writer’s experience is important: It’s what clues us readers into the fact that she knows this place well and that we can depend on her advice. Similarly, Catherine Watson’s experience of other parts of Polynesia make her story on Samoa that much more interesting. Watson starts off transfixed by the open pavilions she sees driving through the streets of Samoa. They’re a sight she hasn’t seen in other Polynesian destinations, like Fiji or Tahiti, and Watson is intent on finding out what they’re for. “In some small ones, families were watching TV, as if the pavilions were open-air living rooms,” she writes. “In the largest ones, men were sitting as still as cross-legged statues, one at the base of each pillar. A church service, perhaps? But we were passing dozens of churches. A ceremony, then?”

Later she tells us readers that if her hunt to uncover the mystery behind the pavilions seems strange, the purpose of her visit is equally so. “Most tourists come to the Samoas in search of the picture-perfect South Seas paradise — green mountains sloping to white beaches, coconut palms framing deep-blue ocean, and friendly people with flowers in their hair. And all that is here,” she writes. “But I’d come for a house — an old house and a long-dead hero. I wanted to see Vailima, the carefully restored Victorian villa that was Robert Louis Stevenson’s last home.”

The introduction of another character, and his experiences, elevates the story to a truly great travel narrative.

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

Contributors to the Washington Post’s travel section consistently pull off excellent blends of personal and universally interesting narratives. Despite using one of the travel buzz words that makes me most likely to vomit on my keyboard–glamping–and using it about two years after it emerged on the scene, no less, the story on upscale camping in North Carolina’s mountains nonetheless maintained this tradition. “‘There’d better be a Four Seasons at the end of this road,’ said my friend Rebecca as our rented Kia struggled down a steep hill. (Mental note: Don’t take a Kia camping in the mountains.), ” WaPo staffer Nancy Trejos begins. “We’d been going in circles for an hour, taking the wrong exits and searching for signs to our campsite.”

After taking us readers along on her camping trip, Trejos pulls back and puts her story in the context of the larger upscale camping trend, and successfully switches between these modes throughout. Similarly, Anne Glusker’s piece on Montreal as a sort of ideal blend of North America and France benefits from her intro, in which she explains that she has recently moved back to the United States after living in France and is looking for a hit of la vie francaise without the pricey plane ticket. Voila. A great story on Montreal is made. “No place I visited in the city so perfectly encapsulated the melange of cultures as the Cochon Dingue in the Lower Town portion of Old Quebec,” Glusker writes. “Inside the atmospheric cafe (the name translates as “Crazy Pig”) you could almost think you’re in Paris. Coffee: strong and aromatic. Croissants: properly light and flaky. Newspaper-reading patrons: appropriate air of studied nonchalance. But one bite of the delicious, buttery toasted pain aux canneberges (cranberry bread), and you know you’re not anywhere near the Eiffel Tower. Cranberries just aren’t a French thing; they’re a North American crop.”

The piece on the new Sofitel in Philadelphia falls just short of using the first-person to good effect. The writer lingers just a bit too long on the similarities between her name and the hotel chain’s. “How could someone with a name like Zofia not adore a hotel chain with a name like Sofitel? I mean, it’s named after me!” she begins. And had the intro ended there it would have worked–a lot of personality, sure, but she pulls it off. Unfortunately, what follows is a paragraph-long explanation of the lede, and not one that benefits readers in any way: “Well, not really, but I’ve always thought that it sounded that way. (Just read that “z” at the start of my moniker as an “s” and you’ll get my drift.),” the passage starts. And there’s actually more. “In fact, when the luxury French chain started popping up a couple of decades ago, my first thought was that it must be Bulgarian,” the piece continues. “You know, as in the capital, Sofia. (I was wrong, thank goodness.)”

Look, it wasn’t that great of a joke to begin with, and we got it after the second line. I’d love to tell you that the piece gets better from there, and it probably does, but honestly, I couldn’t keep reading.

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

If the WaPo Philadelphia story leans a little too heavily on its first-person intro, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Molokai feature goes the opposite route. When the writer does insert herself in the narrative it’s about two-thirds of the way in and comes as somewhat of a shock. It’s a great story, regardless, an interesting blend of the island’s history and its ongoing struggles in recent years. There was a time there where it seemed like Molokai might lose its place as the slowest and most Hawaiian of the Islands to encroaching tourism–a luxury tour there, a high-end ranch here–but the drop-off in tourism in recent years has hit the island hard, and in the last year it has been hit with problems of both the man-made sort (rampant vandalism and theft) and the natural variety (fire, high winds and landslides). After introducing some of these more recent struggles, and describing the island’s history as a leper colony run by the now-sainted Father Damien, Jeanne Cooper takes us along on her hike to the former colony–currently the number-one tourist attraction on the island–Kalaupapa. “In Kalaupapa, among other sights, we view the grave of Mother Marianne Cope, a selfless nun who continued Father Damien’s mission; heart-rending photos of former patients and artistic tributes to Damien in the St. Francis parish hall; and, in the park service’s pocket-size museum and bookstore, spoons and other utensils modified by and for disabled patients,” Cooper writes. She later ends with this: “I don’t have the patience of a saint, but I quietly resolve not to whine so much on the hike back up.”

It’s a bit of a hokey ending, but her description of the experiences that precede it make it work.

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The post Weekly Travel Scorecard [09.12.10] appeared first on The Faster Times.

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

Perhaps this is more evidence of my self-absorption than anything else, but this week’s travel sections felt like they were written just for me. It reminded me of the plot line of Slumdog Millionaire, where a handful of random experiences all suddenly appeared linked together…except I didn’t get a million rupees at the end, just a few hours of quality reading.

The New York Times section, for example, included a story on Japanese whiskey and, more to the point, Japanese whiskey bars. I am married to a Scotsman who lived in Japan and is full of stories about how the Japanese feel about whiskey. It’s a fairly well-known fact by now that it’s easy to find good whiskey in Japan. The country was the first non Scottish or Irish country to win the annual World Whiskey Award, and has imported enough Scottish whiskey masters to support a busy schedule of Highland Games. According to the New York Times, though, while any Tokyo bar worth its overpriced beer will have decent scotch on offer, if you want to taste Japan’s best malts, you’ll need to do some digging.

Next up, a “36 Hours” story on Sonoma County, just a week after I wrote up a lengthy email full of recommendations for a friend planning a visit there. It’s less than an hour’s drive from my house, and I visit often. Hey NYT, stop assigning New York writers to cover West Coast destinations. Seriously. The whole “Sonoma is the lower key cousin to Napa” story is not only tired, it’s just not true anymore. The writer’s lede–”If you’re looking for a chocolate pinot noir sauce, keep driving”–is, in fact, misleading. You’re every bit as likely to find novelty Wine Country fare in Sonoma’s now-tony square as in Napa’s now-gentrified downtown.

The story on Germany’s hot springs–particularly those nearest to Berlin–on the other hand, was spot-on. I’ve been wanting to do a hot springs tour of Germany ever since reading a wildly surreal story about Toskana Therme, a spa resort there, built on natural salt-water mineral springs. Reading about Spreewald, a 105,000-acre nature preserve with mineral- and salt-infused hot springs bubbling underneath it, reignited that interest. “In a modern building tucked into the forest, nine pools from 64 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit cover 8,310 square feet, offering varying degrees of mineral and salt content,” writes Kimberley Bradley. “Guests pad around the extensive sauna zone in slippers and bathrobes between sauna sessions that include hourly steam infusions made with local herbs.”

Soaking in a hot springs pool in a massive nature preserve? Yes, please. And yet, the best piece by far in the section was not about Germany’s hot springs or Tokyo’s whiskey bars, but about America’s State Fairs. Taking a page from Phil Stong’s book, State Fair, Rick Lyman taps into the mix of whimsy and seedy underbelly that not only make the fairs a tourist draw but also provide an accurate portrait of this country’s weird personality. “Despite urbanization, suburban sprawl, the collapse of family farms and the rise of corporate agriculture, every year, regular as the seasons, the midways light up, the Tilt-a-Whirls clang to life and the judges study the ample rumps of the local livestock,” Lyman writes.

After traveling to three state fairs himself (the Delaware, Ohio, and Bangor state fairs), Lyman returns to Stong to pull together his conclusion:

At the end of Stong’s novel, Abel Frake, the protagonist and patriarch, has a small epiphany,” Lyman writes. During their three days at the fair: “The Frakes had stepped for a moment into a fantasy; now, unchanged, they were returning to that five hundred acres where only birth and death — not even marriage — had been the only changes for four generations.”

And that’s what a state fair is. Because they are transitory events and because they mix the familiar pleasures of a carnival with the homespun virtues of America’s farms, they seem to occupy a kind of magical space, where even cholesterol can be ignored.

But in the end, Stong said, it’s a temporary fantasy. That’s part of the appeal. After the fair, you go back home.

SCORE: 9/10 carry-ons

Scenes from my life continued to haunt me in the San Francisco Chronicle’s section, in the way of a story about New Orleans five years after Katrina. The story focuses on the city’s resilience, vis a vis a Second Line parade down a city street. Having just participated in my first Second Line, at a friend’s wedding, the story resonated with me. It’s a great tradition, whereby people line up in pairs and dance in a line, either behind a newly married couple at a wedding, or behind a casket during a funeral procession. When I die, I want a brass band and people dancing, and I love the use of a Second Line as an emblem of New Orleans’ continued strength and rebirth. I almost loved it enough to ignore clunky lines like this one: “Though we weren’t wearing suits or carrying drum sets, the heat and humidity still drove my friends and me to peel off from the parade and drive back to the French Quarter for the refuge of a cool bar.”

The post Weekly Travel Scorecard [8.29.10] appeared first on The Faster Times.

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

Is it me or is the NYT travel section getting shorter? It’s not actually, there are about the same number of stories as usual … it just feels like there’s less to read, maybe less to really dig into. Then again, does the average reader want to really dig into the travel section? Probably not. As much as us travel writers would like to believe that, the reason service journalism has been on the rise in travel for years is that it’s basically what people want. Or what they’ve been conditioned to want in the digital age, where it’s assumed that no reader will pay attention for more than about 800 words and that’s pushing it. Sigh. The problem may also be that the Europe coverage is getting to be a bit much. In addition to two features on European destinations, this week saw the launch of Eurofile, a new column focused solely on the best tables and hotels on the continent. I suppose New York readers probably want to read about Europe more than most other destinations, but it makes things a bit dull week after week. Then again, how many other people out there read the entire travel section every week … two, maybe?

All of that said, the Grey Lady still sets the bar when it comes to travel writing, and this week’s section made up for anything it lacked in breadth with quality. The “Explorer” feature on surfing in North Carolina, for example, could have been a generic “learning to surf story.” It even sort of started out that way, with the writer narrating his first few moments standing up and the exaltation those moments brought. Then we find out that he’s in North Carolina, on the Outer Banks, and that, whereas in Hawaii or California the local surfers would be annoyed at the newbie taking their waves, here there’s plenty of space. “It’s not that the Outer Banks isn’t popular with tourists — far from it,” writer Ethan Todras-Whitehill explains. “It’s just that the Banks — a string of barrier islands more than 175 miles long that changes little from north to south — has enough room for every group of beachgoers, including surfers, to claim their sovereign territory.”

And Seth Sherwood did what he does best and painted the most incredible picture of Normandy. Forget World War II monuments (no offense, Uncle Bob), I want to go to Normandy to eat dinner in fabulous restaurants and party like a low-profile celeb. “Sure, the Côte Fleurie serves up film festivals (the Deauville American Film Festival in September is second only to Cannes), expansive beaches (particularly the golden sands of Deauville and Trouville), seafood-laden local cuisine (with excellent new spots in the port of Honfleur), artistic history (Monet and other Impressionists painted here), celebrity residences (the Rothschilds, Gérard Depardieu and Yves Saint Laurent are among current and former homeowners) and all-night casinos (place your bets in Cabourg and Deauville),” Sherwood writes. “But unlike its southern sibling [Cannes], it does so without fanfare. Mega-yachts with helipads are rare, the Lamborghini-per-capita ratio wows almost nobody, and local Calvados apple liqueur (made in the region’s famous orchards) finds far more favor than Cristal Champagne.”

Even the “Next Stop” and “Frugal Traveler” sections, which I usually just skim, were engaging and superbly written this week. I loved the story about the traditionally Argentinean province of Jujuy, where the old concept of Argentina being “European” gets thrown out the window in favor of rituals that pay homage to Pachamama (Mother Earth). “Here, pagan rituals overshadow Catholic beliefs, medicine men are sometimes preferred to doctors, and everyone, regardless of ancestry, embraces an indigenous heritage that dates back to the 10th century,” writes Paola Singer, after describing the Pachamama ritual that includes cooking lavish, gourmet meals and burying them in the ground as an offering. Sign me up!

And Seth Kugel’s Frugal Traveler bit, about taking his parents on a budget vacation in Nicaragua, was entertaining and hilarious. It’s hard to write a travel story that makes readers laugh out loud, so hats off to Kugel. The funniest bit is the story’s introductory graphs, where Kugel starts out describing dinner in a white-tablecloth restaurant.

My mother paused to sip her drink,” Kugel writes. “‘I’m really enjoying this fine orange wine,” she said. ‘What an aroma.’

O.K., it was a bottle of Fanta, and we were not in a restaurant, but at Bar de Choy, a charmless space whose concrete walls reminded my mother of an auto mechanic’s shop. Our host had decked the place out with the tablecloth, a nice touch, but one that didn’t quite mesh with the three stray dogs that sat patiently at our feet waiting for crumbs. Still, my parents both agreed that the food was superb. And there was no beating the price: 115 córdobas apiece (about $5.50 at 21 córdobas to the dollar), which included an escort by flashlight back to our lodging a few unlighted dirt roads away.

After that the piece becomes a bit list-y for my taste (we went here, we tried this, we like this but not that), but all in all it’s a good read.

SCORE: 9/10 carry-ons

Nicaragua’s tourism board must be doing its job because the destination is showing up everywhere lately. The LA Times ran a piece earlier this summer, and this week both the New York Times and the Washington Post went to Nicaragua. The Post piece differs a bit in its theme. It’s still adventurous — it seems you can’t really go to Nicaragua without being somewhat of an intrepid explorer — but it’s got very specific angle: Mark Twain. That’s what made it a fascinating read for me, not just because I love Twain, but also because I never knew he had traveled in Nicaragua. And what a trip that must have been in his day! “Things have improved in the nearly century and a half since Mark Twain arrived here by steamship, forced to spend an extra night on board because of a cholera epidemic onshore,” writes Julian Smith. That piqued my interest, and the following description of Twain at the time that he was visiting Nicaragua made me fall in love with both Twain and this story: “He was fresh off his first lecture tour, and his writing career was just starting to take off,” Smith writes. “He was still basking in the praise that his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” had earned the previous year. He didn’t know what the future held, but at 31, he had high hopes.”

I’m almost as big of a Faulkner fan as I am a Twain fan, but this week’s WaPo story on his hometown didn’t capture my interest nearly as much as the Nicaragua story did. It felt like a failed attempt to make Oxford, Mississippi sound like an interesting travel destination. A valiant effort, to be sure, but a failed one all the same. Perhaps the paper is running out of towns within weekend-trip distance?

In contrast, Zofia Smardz took her dud destination — Wildwood, New Jersey — and made it cool. She basically had me after the first few lines: “I don’t like the word ‘cozy,’” she begins. “When writers use it, I mercilessly slash it from their copy. But now I was flummoxed. Because standing in the middle of the little aluminum trailer where I’d be spending the night, all I could think was, ‘Wow, this is really … cozy.’”

From there she goes on to describe the retro Airstream trailer that made her use the offending word, and it sounds pretty awesome. I’m not planning a trip to Wildwood any time soon, mind you, but if I happen to find myself there, I will remember this story. And it kept me entertained for five minutes on Sunday. Job well done, WaPo.

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

If the NYT section feels like it’s shrinking, the LA Times travel section seems to be growing. I can’t tell yet whether that’s a good thing. On the one hand, given the shrinking column space of newspapers in general, more is probably always better. On the other, I can’t really get excited about reading more lists, or a feature on dude ranches that spends three paragraphs making an overworked reference to a 1990s movie (City Slickers, naturally) before launching into a cliche: Hey, dude ranches have gotten pretty nice lately – how about that?

Thank heavens for Christopher Reynolds, the paper’s one solid travel writer. Despite the fact that he appears to be living in, and only writing about, Wyoming lately, Reynolds and his work are a welcome break from the rest. First, a quick note to the LAT headline writer: Using the phrase “even a middle-class family can afford” is probably not a good idea in a travel section. In case you haven’t heard, there’s a recession on, and the travel industry is hurting (oh wait, so is the publishing industry). Toe the line, son.

Back to this week’s Christopher Reynolds-on-Wyoming story: It’s about Jackson Hole, which is, of course, a rich man’s playground. But where the headline writer handles that fact clumsily, in Reynolds hands it becomes charming. After waxing poetic about the aspens, the Snake River, and a little boy he spots riding a bicycle gleefully along it, Reynolds writes: “It helps, of course, if you’re rich. Even in the current slump, some fancy travelers spend $695 a night to sleep at the Four Seasons resort here, and others drop $875 for a suite at the Amangani resort. Even at the national park’s Jackson Lake Lodge — an ugly, brown box with a grand location — rates start at a daunting $224 for a room with no view, no TV and no air-conditioning.”

He follows that with this reassuring statement: “But I’m here to say there’s room for the rest of us too, especially if you book well in advance.”

The story then heads to service-ville, but Reynolds’ snappy tone keeps it interesting. To be fair, his isn’t the only readable piece in this week’s section. The feature on wine-tasting on horseback in Los Olivos (of Sideways fame) is a fun read, and the piece on soul searching in Ubud, Bali, although annoyingly full of Eat Pray Love references isn’t 100% awful.

I finished the section torn: I’m glad there are more stories, and I liked the mix, from dude ranch to Jackson Hole to Bali, but I can’t help thinking, surely there are tons of great travel writers out there who would love to write for the LA Times. Do they pay that badly?

SCORE: 4/10 carry-ons

Sometimes there are stories that just don’t resonate with me, but I know it’s just a personal thing. Similarly, there are those stories that I like purely because they remind me of a good trip, or are focused on a destination that I love. The latter was the case when I read the main travel feature in this week’s Detroit Free Press, about the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I wrote a guide to that region once, and while any travel guide author will tell you it’s pretty tedious work, that was one project I loved. The people in the UP are warm and friendly, and the place itself is beautiful. Mostly because, as the DFP writer points out, it’s basically a huge swathe of wilderness.

“There is no true wilderness left in the Lower Peninsula,” Eric Sharp writes. “‘Wilderness’ by definition means ‘roadless,’ and in even the least-developed woodlands below the bridge, there is some kind of road about every mile. Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park draws me back to the western Upper Peninsula several times each year to experience true wilderness, 60,000 acres where the only way to travel is on foot. Roads are something you leave behind at the trailhead parking areas.

The park is the biggest wilderness left in the Midwest and among a handful that survive east of the Mississippi River. I’ve visited the park maybe 30 times in 20 years in every season — and it never gets old.”

Those paragraphs took me immediately back to my time there and I loved the journey back. It’s impossible for me to have perspective on this story, but I can say that I’d recommend every American check out the UP at some point in their lives. Especially now, it’s nice to get a taste of what the country was like before we got here.

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The post Weekly Travel Scorecard [08.08.10] appeared first on The Faster Times.

Everyone loves to bitch about lousy flight attendants, but I find myself feeling sorry for them more often than not. I mean, really, how many people do you know who would cheerily be the whipping boy for every passenger on a delayed or canceled flight? It can’t be fun. And we all know they’re not paid well.

That said, air travel isn’t cheap these days, and it’s certainly not pleasant, so it doesn’t really seem like much to ask for a little customer service. Two blog posts I read today got me thinking about the relationship between passengers and flight attendants and how, when it comes down to it, neither side wins.

First, after the 10th Facebook Friend “liked” a TechCrunch post about a particularly hellacious flight, I gave in and read it. It was a fun read so I gave it a thumbs-up “like,” too. Who doesn’t have a story about United or Delta wrecking their day, or an airline staffer seeming to take pleasure in lost baggage or a missed connection? It was easy to empathize and frankly, it also made me feel better that this guy (Michael Arrington) had been treated just as badly as a first-class customer as I usually am in coach.

One line in particular jumped out at me, though:

” If only a flight attendant, or baggage person, or whoever, would just commiserate with me for one moment,” Arrington writes. “Maybe smile and say they’ll try their best to help. But until all that bad energy is gone, and the airlines have employees that don’t stare daggers at their customers, I’m out.”

I noticed it because it seemed to be the exact same sort of thinking that led Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater to jump ship yesterday. Arrington actually cites Jet Blue as one of the airlines that’s doing it right, that is making its employees happy because happy employees give good customer service. Unfortunately, nothing can make up for shitty passengers, not even decent pay and the industry’s best-designed uniform.

Here’s what went down, according to the Wall Street Journal:

JetBlue Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh had taxied to a stop at Terminal 5, Gate C around noon Monday when flight attendant Steven Slater, 38, was struck in the head with luggage that a passenger was trying to unload from an overhead compartment, according to an airport official with knowledge of the incident.

Slater demanded an apology from the passenger, the official said, but the passenger refused. The two argued before the passenger told Slater to “f— off”, the official said. The official said that Slater then got on the plane’s PA system and directed that same obscenity at all the passengers and added that he especially meant it for the man who refused to apologize.

Slater is alleged to have then activated the plane’s inflatable emergency slide, grabbed two beers from the galley, then slid down the chute, the official said.

Like Arrington on the passenger side, Slater just wanted to be treated like a human, to be shown a little common decency. You hit someone on the head with your luggage, you apologize, no? And on the flip side, if, as in Arrington’s story, an elderly Indian gentleman tells you he has medication in his bag that you’ve lost, and that he needs to take it right away, the appropriate response is not to grin and tell him to go find an all-night pharmacy.

Has flying gotten so bad in this country that both passengers and airline staff just wish they were anywhere else? It seems like it. But if that’s true, where do we go from here? The old “no place to go but up” adage would be a cute way to end a blog post on air travel, but unfortunately it looks like it’s only going to stay the same. Or get worse.

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