How to avoid travel scams: some resource links

 Blog
Apr 202013
 

New York Travel FestivalI spoke today about how to avoid travel scams at the New York Travel Festival. If you missed my talk, Spike the Baby (And Other Rules for Dodging Travel Scams), you missed a lot of detail about various scams both tried-and-true and newfangled.

One element of my talk was a brief list of resources for finding out the latest scams and knowing how to ward them off. Here are some key links for doing your own country-by-country research before you set off on your own.

Recent travelers keep warnings current on the many excellent travel sharing boards such as Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree and BootsnAll (although beware that some people think that voluntarily overpaying for an inferior product qualifies as a “scam” — it doesn’t), here are a few additional links that you should keep in your  bookmarks. Be warned that the State Department’s Travel Safe mobile phone app is not updated with the speed of international events, so it’s best if you avoid using that and stick to the Web-based warnings pages, which are updated more attentively.

Because the U.S. State Department doesn’t have the good sense to create easy-to-use URLs for its most important travel update pages, I have taken the liberty of creating shortlinks that you actually stand a chance of remembering at the moment you need them most.

My NY Travel Fest talk was about avoiding scams while you’re on the road. I gave a separate talk, with its own list of prescriptions (click here for that), at the recent New York Times Travel Show, and it covered ways to protect yourself when you’re still at home, booking travel.

As I said during my talk today, if you should fall prey to a scam, don’t beat yourself up. Stuff happens, and there are professionals who devote every one of their dastardly brain cells to devising new methods of outwitting you. The happy fact is that major scams are fairly rare. Don’t be afraid.

The London Eye is raised, fall 1999

 Photos
Apr 162013
 

From my travel photo files: The 443-foot-tall London Eye is erected in the fall of 1999. It was assembled flat, lying on barges in the Thames, and had to be slowly winched into a vertical position, 2 degrees an hour, while London stood by and wondered what millennial folly this would turn out to be.

It turned out to be a landmark for our age. It has been called the Millennium Wheel, the British Airways London Eye, the Merlin Entertainments London Eye, and the plain old London Eye. Today, it is known as the EDF Energy London Eye.

The London Eye is hoisted into place, fall 1999.

The London Eye begins life as a sort of wink, fall 1999.

Cool USB flash drive press kit designs

 Blog
Mar 312013
 

I get a lot of press kits on USB drives. A decade ago, when they replaced paper kits (thank goodness), they were uninspired and utilitarian, and they often stored as little as 256 MB of information, so they didn’t hold much interest even in re-use. Now, even a standard stick drive can contain 2 to 4 GB and they compete to be memorable. Even though they publicize American attractions, nearly all of them are still made in China.

I saved a few of my favorites.

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Who knows — maybe I’ll add more cool designs as I run across them.

Are Disney’s Magic Kingdom Google Maps images fake?

 Blog
Mar 252013
 

What’s the deal with these bird’s-eye photos of Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida? They appear on Google Maps when you zoom in and click “Satellite.” They seem fabricated. Why?

1. Parades don’t do that.

MKOverviewGM

Check out the configuration of the parade. Normally, the enter the Hub from the bridge at 10 o’clock, travel clockwise, and exit at 6 o’clock. Here, the floats go round and round the entire Hub as if it’s a carousel. In real life, floats pack together, with lots of dancers between them, and with no large gaps. But look:

Continue reading »

NY Travel Festival wants to rock the world (& I’ll be there)

 Blog
Mar 222013
 

New York Travel FestivalOn April 20, a new breed of travel show will make its inaugural appearance. It’s called the New York Travel Festival, and as my friend Valarie D’Elia describes it, the TravFest “promises to reinvent the consumer travel show.”

Travel shows, if you have never been to one, are often big meeting halls full of lots of kiosks where semi-informed representatives jockey to hand out brochures about whatever they’re selling. In a separate area, you’ll usually find conference rooms, and at the head of those rooms, long tables where travel experts sit dutifully behind their name tags, pouring Dixie cups of water from a sweating pitcher and trying not to say anything too earth-shaking. Traditional travel shows are, ironically, a somewhat passive experience for audiences who presumably go because they’d rather be in motion somewhere.

Not this one. The New York Travel Festival is about vigor and action. Walking tours of New York City are built into the schedule. There will be food tastings. Experts will tell you how to explore corners of New York that most guidebooks and magazines shrug off. Even the panelists have been tasked to challenge each other — intellectually, not like the WWE — by taking opposing views of the same topic.

Continue reading »

Why ‘travel writing’ can cease to exist

 Blog
Mar 192013
 

I have a confession: I haven’t read a travel book in years.

I’ll dip in. But I usually can’t get myself enthused enough to finish. For a while, I wondered if something was wrong with me. I’ve worked in travel journalism for 13 years. Why do I get bored by travel writing?

It may say something about my poor introspection, but it took many years to figure it out.

For me, travel is about the place, not someone’s reaction to it. I would rather cut out the middle-man.

Travel isn’t just about vacations. It’s a study of history, food, people and nature. That’s why it’s inexhaustible.

So although I don’t read travel books, I am voracious about non-fiction books. Books about the history of salt, about Reconstruction, about a guy who grew up in Bombay, about the banana trade, about the heyday of silent movies in Hollywood. I always have at least 8 to 10 in the dugout, waiting for their turn to step up and knock me into their world.

All are the stories of other places. Isn’t that the essence of travel?

The concept of “travel writing” is so limiting. Far fewer people want to read about the act of travel (the revenue figures are cratering) but reading about the world has never gone out of style. The act of travel is a personal process, and it often involves details (taxicabs, tickets, uncomfortable beds) that obstruct actual learning. If you drop the “travel” and are just a “writer,” you haven’t lost a yard of territory. You are still covering the whole planet.

Continue reading »

Hatch Show Print in Nashville: iconic style, letter by letter [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jan 252013
 
Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

You may not know the name Hatch Show Print, but you know the style. Its block letters are visually synonymous with Nashville and country music history. When Hatch began business in 1879, Nashville was the fifth-largest printing center in the United States, and at that time, hand-assembled letterpress was how printing was done.

The middle years of the 20th century were hard on letterpress. Newer technologies rose to supplant the inky, time-consuming moveable type method, and both machines and their output were trashed. But Hatch’s curator and chief designer, Jim Sherraden, saw beauty in its imprecision, and he rebuilt the faltering business into an indispensable institution.

To someone in the 1880s, the blocky letterpress style that filled every handbill and advertisement simply signified disposable culture. Today, with so few practitioners, Nashville virtually owns the look.

I was lucky enough to be invited behind the scenes of Hatch Show Print.

The video shows you just how damn cool it is:

This graphic design stalwart merits its own book: Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop. I want one.

Hatch Show Print

Letter by letter, page by page, we leave history behind

Congress demands answers on privacy from Disney: the letter

 Blog
Jan 242013
 

Today, Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger demanding answers about the new MyMagic+ “magic bands” RFID-based wristbands that are being implemented at the Orlando theme parks.

“As a Co-Chairman of the Congressional Bi-partisan Privacy Caucus, I am deeply concerned that Disney’s proposal could potentially have a harmful impact on our children.”

This is a very interesting wrinkle. I’ve been talking about personal data collection, personalized content, and Disney for years, but who knew the three would collide in such a big way?

The complete letter follows. (h/t Epcyclopedia) Continue reading »

Manzanar, where decent Americans were destroyed [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jan 242013
 
With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

The history of the United States could fairly viewed as a succession of excuses for not living up to its contractual obligations.

All men were not created equal, according to the Declaration of Independence: Slaves were allowed. The Supreme Court said the Cherokees were a sovereign nation: The South took their land anyway. Every citizen was entitled to equal protection, according to the Fourteenth Amendment: Women still couldn’t vote for another 60 years, and the Civil Rights Act had to wait another century. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Washington to cash a check, but his people are getting paid on the installment plan.

In our living memories, few stains are more indelible and illustrative than the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War Two. They were American citizens, but that didn’t matter to the government. They were locked away in one of 10 residence camps, and by the time they got out, many people had lost everything — homes, businesses, all gone, wiped out. George Takei and Pat Morita are just two of the well-known people who endured these places and rose above them. Many others were affected for the rest of their lives.

I recently went to the isolated Owens Valley in east central California for a forthcoming feature that will be published by the New York Post. In the spirit of my visit to the little-known concentration/POW camp of Andersonville, Georgia, I shot a video tour of Manzanar, which was made a National Historic Site 40 years after the war ended. By then, most of the barracks had been sold to soldiers for tool sheds and cheap housing. They usually bought them for more money than the typical detainee received from the government upon liberation.

Ironically, this National Park unit is run by the Department of the Interior, which is the very same government body that oversaw the incarceration of legal citizens through the War Relocation Authority. Continue reading »

How Ann B. Davis changed my life

 Blog
Jan 232013
 
One day, I talked to Alice on the phone

One day, I talked to Alice on the phone

I was a cub reporter for Entertainment Weekly. Now and then, I got juicy feature assignments such as the review of Saving Private Ryan on video or a rare interview with Christian Bale, but as a cub reporter, I was more often asked to create those little sidebars and boxes that the more experienced staff writers had no interest in doing. Today, twentysomething idealists sweat at long benches, hammering out posts to chase the day’s hot search terms. But then, I worked the phones for “Rent Check,” in which I asked famous people what movies they had rented recently. It was a grind and pretty dumb stuff, but there were fringe benefits.

I talked to some good people. Jerry Springer told me about his family’s tragic history with the Holocaust. Alex Trebek cryptically alluded to a dark period in his past. Don Knotts passed, saying he’d let the younger folks have their say, but my favorite “get” was Ann B. Davis.

In her own way, she was more reclusive than even Christian Bale. She had found God, retired from the rigors of television, and spent most of her time dwelling with an Episcopal community in Pennsylvania. She seemed mistrustful of secular life. This interview thrilled me: In middle school, I watched 90 minutes of The Brady Bunch every day on Channel 56 in Boston. I could tell you within two lines of the opening which episode it was. I even kept a handwritten checklist of them all. Ugly Aunt Jenny? Hatch mark. Bobby loves Jesse James? Hatch hatch. Cousin Oliver the Jinx? Hatch. (I hated that one.)

Anyway, I interviewed Ann and asked what she had watched recently. One of her answers was Tender Mercies, and the reason she gave was that Robert Duvall plays a man who faces difficult choices and makes the right one. Duvall was a good Christian man, she told me, and being a Christian woman, she admired his work and would see anything he was in. Her sense of faith, decent but not preachy, permeated her responses, which I appreciated, since I knew there were millions of Americans that would identify with her thoughts. Her movie selections felt as nurturing as Alice herself. Continue reading »

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