Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Useful Travel Advice Roundup

I’m getting to know Kansas City this week at a travel media conference—more on that later. Meanwhile here’s some good advice from others that is worth your attention if you’re a surfer, are a woman traveling to India, or hate to get stuck in traffic in a foreign land. And more!

Airlines are saying “screw you” to surfers, charging them insane fees to check their board. As that L.A. Times article points out, there seems to be a clear bias since board charges are far higher than those for golf clubs at many airlines, despite being far lighter and easier to pile on a luggage stack. Thankfully, Surfline.com has broken down all the charges for you, from free (Air New Zealand, Qantas, South African Airways) to $25 at JetBlue to $200 one way at United and Lufthansa. Plus some airlines impose seasonal embargoes and British Air says “no surfboards” all year long. Do the math and it’s probably better to rent or buy a cheap used one after arrival.

Beth Whitman fills us in on how a woman should dress for India. As in most countries where there’s pent-up sexual frustration, you’ll still get leered at and maybe even felt up in a crowd, but you’ve got a better chance of blending in with this advice, especially if you have dark hair.

The traffic in Istanbul has gone from bad to worse, with the Turkish Daily News wondering if we’ll see The day we became Michael Douglas. The most populated city in Europe routinely shuts down streets and highways when a head of state comes to visit and the last time this included the one everyone takes to the airport. A problem when there’s water on three sides. Don’t forget, you can take a train to and from the airport and trams and ferries around much of the city. Avoid the roads whenever you can.

The irony meter went to 11 last week as the guy who wrote 100 Things to Do Before You Die kicked the bucket at age 47. He fell in his own house and banged his head. Maybe the book should have stopped at 50 since “He only managed to achieve half his list.” His legacy will live on, unfortunately. “It was an instant bestseller and inspired a publishing industry all of its own with dozens of ‘100 Things’ spin-offs.”

Travel Stories From Great Authors

The new issue of Perceptive Travel is out, with six great travel stories from four continents, plus travel book reviews and world music reviews.

Tony Perrottet, the author of Napoleon’s Privates, returns with an excerpt from that book, on times when travel was far more decadent than it is today. Amy Rosen returns to take us down the Bloodvein River in Manitoba, Lea Aschkenas goes on a tough hiking trip in Iceland, and Michael Shapiro discusses Paul Theroux’s new book through a meeting with one of its characters.

We’ve got some new authors on board, with a Patagonia story from Camille Cusumano and a return to India from Anne Cushman.

I step up for the book reviews and Laurence Mitchell handles the global music reviews. See the lineup for those and the scoop on all the other stories on the Perceptive Travel issue page.

Indians not Ready to Shop ’til They Drop

As someone who has spent months in India on several occasions, I get a chuckle out of stock pick analysts breathlessly rattling on about how India is going to be a great world economic power and that it’s going to soon represent some vast hungry market for foreign goods. “Have you actually been there?” I feel like shouting to the TV.

Well, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal came out with an article this past week that says, basically, don’t believe the hype. The article, Retailers Take a Slower Road in India, discusses how all these retailers believed the rosy narrative and are losing a bundle on under-performing stores. Seems that in a land where $12,000 a year is considered a nice salary for a college-educated professional (and many live on a fraction of that), the billion residents are not quite ready to shop ’til they drop. Here are a few choice quotes:

Many outlets discovered that consumers didn’t really want their products. And unlike shoppers in Asia’s other booming economy, China, Indians are rarely willing to pay three to 10 times more for an international brand than for its domestic equivalent.

“We all have to go through some restructuring and shake-up,” says Thomas Varghese, chief executive of the Aditya Birla retail unit, which has more than 500 grocery stores. Most were built in the past two years, and few are profitable yet. “The Indian consumer is a damn tough customer.”

In a land where squeezing a few extra rupees out of every transaction is a national sport, what did they expect? Next time, maybe form a focus group of visiting backpackers, 3rd-class train passengers, and customers from the 30-rupee thali restaurant. That group could have told you that few people are going to pay $100 for a pair of Reeboks.

Besides, with news out that Bangalore leads the country in suicides, maybe retail therapy is the last thing they need.

For more on India’s uneasy lurch into the future, see Anne Cushman’s article, A Passage Back to India.

Our Crowded Skies

Some say that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for flight capacities to get cut way down and for half the population to stop flying for a while. I originally saw this cool photo above in Wired magazine and found it online at a design site hosted by UCLA. In case that site goes down in the future, it’s a collection of work from Aaron Koblin that also appears at the Celestial Mechanics site.

In this case they’ve taken FAA data from 2005 that tracks 141,000 aircraft paths over a 24-hour period. I cropped out the Hawaii and Alaska parts just to show the mainland, but it’s amazing how few places there are in the lower 48 where you won’t see a jet’s vapor trail overhead, even in “flyover country.”

Follow that Celestial Mechanics site link and you can see some other rather scary images, like our planet enveloped in satellites. Hey, that GPS signal has to come from somewhere, right?

Developed World’s Worst Airline Sinks Even Lower

Every time I think the first world’s worst airline—US Airways—couldn’t possibly get any worse, they do something unfathomably dumb that erodes whatever shred of good will anyone could possibly still have towards them.

First, they cut everything that could possibly make a flyer’s experience a positive one, even making dehydrated passengers pay for water and charging en extra fee to check even one bag. Then they turned to extortion, charging passengers extra to reserve a window or aisle seat. (Great idea for attracting vacationing families!) Then they said “screw you” to their most loyal frequent flyer customers, devaluing their miles and eliminating all their bonus miles from here on out. With that move, they basically admitted they don’t care about casual customers OR their remaining loyal ones, the kind of coveted road warriors that rack up dozens of flights per year.

But the new low was a doozie. Basically they stranded a plane full of passengers in the Dominican Republic on August 15, refused to give them a place to stay, an alternative flight, transportation, or even information when the crew’s time ran out. They then sat back while airport guards forced all the passengers out of the terminal and into the rain! Here’s the whole sordid story, with the airline’s reply that “per policy and guidelines this is not a compensation issue.”

If your choice is between flying on USAirways and taking a 14-hour bus ride, the latter will probably be more comfortable and more reliable. If US Airways is the only carrier flying to the island you want to visit, pick another island. There’s no reason to hand your money to this kind of company. The sooner they go under, the better.

[flickr photo from JeffreyPutnam]