Travel

By Robert McGarvey

Business travel – no surprise here – is not coming back at full force and pretty much all rational observers now acknowledge it probably won’t happen next year.  Possibly it will reach two-thirds of 2019 levels in 2022. Possibly.

Leisure travel is coming back faster, especially domestic travel.  Lift to Europe remains spotty and lift to APAC is near non existent. Longhaul air needs a helping hand to come back in favor.

What will it take to get air travel back to 2019 levels?

Put aside the question about whether that should happen.  Maybe, in a world where sustainability matters to ever more of us, air travel should remain at dramatically reduced levels, forever. But put that aside.

What must happen to re-ignite consumer enthusiasm for air travel? I see three huge impediments that are holding this back.

But they also are fixable. If we have the will. And that means us, carriers, airport operators, and the federal government.  What I am proposing is stern medicine. It won’t swallow easily.

But if we do not take these steps travel will limp along for many months – possibly years – to come.

A starting point: Covid is not going away.  In Colorado for instance hospital beds are nearly full, stuffed with Covid cases.  62% of Colorado is fully vaccinated, which means 38% aren’t and that is nearly four in ten.

No wonder people are getting sick.

Across America the vaccination rates lag.  And globally only 50% of the population have received at least a shot of some kind of vaccination which means half haven’t.  Increasing numbers of scientists now believe Covid is not going away, that it will become endemic, rather like flu, which means they also believe we will manage the disease into a less deadly format.

But very likely Covid will be with us for some time to come.

That’s why we need to take steps to deal with it, especially on airplanes. Why airplanes? Consumers are skittish about them still. We will drive, long distances, to avoid a plane.

But just a few steps, if taken, will get more of us on planes again. And that’s a sine qua non for travel’s recovery.

Here are the steps:

Lock ‘em up.  The latest numbers from the FAA catalog 5033 “unruly passenger” incidents, many of which involve physical assaults on flight attendants, occasionally on other passengers.  Enough is enough. We are not returning to “normal” flying as long as there is a lingering fear that violence will erupt at 30,000 feet.  

Police have been called to many such incidents, the FAA has levied fines – which now can go as high as $37,000 per incident, and still the mayhem continues. Is it fueled by booze?  Just plain awful manners?  Rampant social crankiness?

I have no idea and I don’t care. What I do care about is making it stop and the cure, obviously, is to pursue vigorous prosecution of the malefactors and to lock them up, preferably for a couple years in a high security federal prison.  

And publicize the sentences as loudly as possible.  Get out the word that severe misbehavior in the skies will be met with a life-changing stint behind bars.

Will this reduce the number of violent incidents in the skies?  I’m guessing yes and, frankly, I don’t have a better idea other than building in an exit chute that annoying passengers can be stuffed in and discarded at six miles high.

Just lock ‘em up.

Shut Up and Wear the Mask.  Laughably the FAA notes that it has logged 3642 mask related incidents.  What causes a giggle – or is it a scream – is that in recent hours spent at JFK and LAX I could have counted 300 mask related violations and I wasn’t even looking for them.  We have become lax about masks and that just isn’t smart.

Is a mask a safeguard against Covid? Not if you expect a sure thing.  But CDC guidance still recommends mask wearing when indoors in many places     

Of course masks are still required on planes.

Just wear the damn thing.

So I am mystified by why a Southwest pilot apparently assaulted a flight attendant in a dispute about masks at a San Jose hotel bar.  The pilot was cited for assault and battery.  

Another Southwest pilot of course recently created a stir when he used the PA inflight to chant an anti Biden slogan. Or so the reporting goes.

Southwest perhaps deserved a footnote in this blog entitled Don’t Fly SWA.  

But we’ll leave that to others to decide.

I know I won’t be flying it anytime soon because these aren’t the kinds of people I want steering my passage in the air.

But that’s my choice.

What I do insist on however is: wear the damn mask. I like ‘em no more than you do, I am fully vaccinated (with a booster!), and still I wear masks in most indoors contexts.  It’s just safer. Smarter. Saner.

Only Vaccinated Need Enter.  58.1% of us in the US are fully vaccinated. For social safety to prevail that number needs to be 20 points higher, minimum.

It’s time to put some pressures on.

The federal government is pressuring its employees and contractors – good.

Let’s ratchet this up however. I propose requiring full vaccination status to enter an airport and of course to board a plane.

There’s a brisk market in counterfeit cards – predictably – and while using one is a crime, that isn’t a crime that has much been prosecuted.

Let’s change that. Let’s seek full federal prosecution – seeking a five year prison sentence – and we will see fake cards vanish.

And that’s important because to get more of us willing to step into airports and board planes we need to offer a safe and healthy zone.  Vaccination proof is a huge step in that direction.

We need to take that step.

No one is saying people have to get vaccinated. But if you don’t you can’t fly.

That’s fair.

Three steps to more travel.  We just need the will to take them.

By Robert McGarvey

American Express is here with the news: we are now putting real priority on our health and wellness.

A pandemic that has killed 750,000 in the US and almost 5 million globally will do that to you.

The Amex Trendex survey found that consumers are “investing more time and money in their physical and mental health to combat the toll the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on their well-being. More than two-thirds (69%) of consumers surveyed indicate that their mental health has been impacted by the pandemic – either by isolation restrictions or concerns for well-being – and 66% agree that the pandemic has encouraged them to spend more money on items or experiences that help with their overall mental wellness.“

Based upon my recent trip to Spain I heartily agree.  Health and wellness, which I cannot say ever scored high in my travel priorities, suddenly loomed as make or break.  I sought out restaurants with few diners rather than the crowded, buzzy places I had preferred.  Walking the Camino de Santiago I eschewed bunking in the traditional barracks-style albergues and slept in private rooms in hotels.  In airports I fled into clubs mainly because there were fewer people than in the public areas. 

And of course I had chosen a holiday that involved a dozen days of walking outdoors, mainly on the rural pathways of Galicia and – this time of year – with comparatively few fellow travelers.  That too ties in with the Amex findings which said: “Consumers surveyed are also spending on experiences as 76% of survey respondents agree that they want to spend more on travel to improve their well-being.”

And 60% of us are dreaming of planning a wellness focused trip.

Sure, I could have gone to Greece but I have done that and, frankly, those holidays tend for me to be more sybaritic. Lots of food and drink and, lovely as that can be, it wasn’t what I wanted right now.

What I wanted was exactly what Amex says: an experience that contributed to improving my well being.  It is hard to beat a centuries old trek through northwestern Spain that culminates in a Catholic cathedral where a massive incense burner marks the occasion.  (Video here.)

58% of Americans also say they want to explore the outdoors.  

Word of advice: when planning your next vacation, think outdoors.  It doesn’t have to be an out of the way state park.  I can envision a delightful walking vacation exploring Berlin neighborhoods, a trip I actually did 11 years ago, and at least then it was wonderfully enjoyable to poke into the still not fully redeveloped neighborhoods of East Berlin.  

Also: always ask – I know I’ve been doing it – is this place sanitary? Is it a threat to my health?

My guess is that the hotels, airlines and restaurants that prosper over the next year will be the ones that put a high and visible priority on health and sanitation. The pandemic will be with us in the US at least one more year and globally, who knows? It will be several more years.

So I am for dramatic steps to keep travelers safe.

To keep me safe.

Personally I support the airlines that require employees to be vaccinated and similarly I support hotels that do likewise.  

I also support enforcement of capacity limitations.  In Spain, for instance, restaurants were forced to seat only 50% of their capacity – that made for plenty of room.

And of course I support mask compliance indoors and, at least in some cases, outdoors.  Crowded city squares are places where I think masks are required, not so much a lonely country hiking trail. But when it doubt, mask up.

When picking destinations, always check the current Covid numbers – and know that on that basis I am unlikely to consider setting foot in a quarter of the US. Definitely a full quarter of the world also is off limits to me. Too many unvaccinated, too many sick. Always check the numbers in trip planning and go with facts, not hopes and best case scenarios.

Travel, yes – but do it safely, mindfully and with a full commitment to personal health and wellness. that’s how to get through this and make it into tomorrow.

By Robert McGarvey

The sad, startling fact is that in autumn 2021 I felt much safer traveling in Spain than I did in the US portions of my recently completed three week visit to Spain.

Fact: three in four Spaniards are fully vaccinated.  Just 57% of Americans are fully vaccinated.  How dumb are we?

Spain also requires incoming Americans to be fully vaccinated and – quite wonderfully – everywhere I went in the nation, at least indoors, mask compliance was at or near 100%. It’s just something Spaniards do as a commonsense measure to protect self and others.

I spent most of my waking hours outdoors – walking 130+ miles of the ancient Camino de santiago, enough to earn a compostela – 

And on the hiking trail masks were rarely worn (I don’t recall ever wearing mine).  But walking around city streets, especially in bustling Santiago which was bursting with pilgrims who had also walked enough to claim a compostela, masks outside proved to be the norm.

I just felt safer in Spain.

I also tested negative in the rapid result antigen test that I took at Madrid Airport, a requirement for re-entering the US.  Personally I am not thrilled at spending over $100 on a test where I knew the result. Most of my time in Spain was spent in Galicia which statistically is the second safest region in a very safe country. Spain is way ahead of us in winning the fight against Covid. So I thought the test superfluous.

But if the US requires it, of course I will do it.

What Went Wrong and Sometimes Right

Nothing went wrong in Spain.

In the US, much did.

It started when my flight from Phoenix to JFK touched down in NYC and simply sat on the runway. And sat. And sat. 

Lightning was why, they said.  

The upshot is that I missed my connecting flight to Madrid – by probably 10 minutes (thank you, Delta) – and of course the customer service at JFK was woeful.  I rebooked in the Delta app and, rather than endure a night at a JFK hotel, I taxied into Manhattan, booked a night at a midtown hotel in HotelTonight and headed to the nearby Empire Steakhouse where I forgot my airport grumbles with a few Manhattans and a lovely steak dinner. One thing Manhattan still does extraordinarily well is steak.  Personally I had never heard of this joint but the hour was late and Wolfgang’s, my preferred NY beef place, was too far away so I took a chance and it paid off.

It almost made me forget missing the Madrid connection.

Almost.

The Delta flight back to JFK was uneventful but I will tell you a curiosity.  At the Madrid Airport four different Delta employees asked to see my passport.  Exactly one asked to see the negative Covid test result and yet the US government does not in fact check those results itself. It kicks that can to airlines.  And one employee asked.  

At JFK I of course headed to the Global Entry portal where, seemingly, half the passengers on the plane also headed.  The kiosk snapped a picture of me and then identified me as someone I am not.  

I looked at the print out with the wrong name and the long, slow moving line in front of me. Paces away, at the general entry portal, there was no line. I jumped the Global Entry ship and went there where I was processed in seconds, no sweat.

Note: I am not grumbling about Global Entry which I got for free with a credit card.  But I find it amusing and bemusing that the free entry portal was faster.

At LAX – my next stop – the trip took an annoying turn when Delta had changed the gate of my plane to PHX a number of times and seemingly no Delta employee I asked could provide any help regarding the correct gate.  

LAX, by the way, was stuffed with passengers.  Empty seats were few. Mask compliance was lax.  I have to ask: why doesn’t the US government require that air travelers be vaccinated?  For the airline business to recover that is a necessary step.  I felt real risk at LAX, something I hadn’t felt in three weeks in Spain.

I finally did find the gate and so was I home free?  Nope. Remember the JFK wait to deplane.  It was topped at PHX where just before we landed we were informed that law enforcement would be coming on board to remove a passenger.

There had been no drunken, rowdy incident on board, no violent mask defiance.

What had this passenger done? I had 10, maybe 20 minutes to contemplate that as we sat at the gate with the doors locked and nothing happening.

Finally a woman passenger was escorted by a flight attendant and exited.  Maybe five minutes later a man did likewise.

Law enforcement never entered the plane.

After five more minutes we were told we could deplane.

What the hell happened?  Your guess is probably better than mine because I mainly see only bullying bureaucratic incompetence.

Flying domestically sucks.

A Bright Spanish Moment

The bottomline: Spain shows that travel can work.  Be vaccinated. Wear masks.  Stay safe.

When will the US get the message?

By Robert McGarvey

In the past week, I got exactly $270 in credits on my Amex Plat card and all I did was use the programs Amex has in place and in plain sight.

I have said it before: part of me is irritated that now I have to look around for and, in some cases, specifically enroll in programs to gain the Amex benefits.  Life was simpler when – pre pandemic – I flew enough to think the card paid for itself with airport club access.  The fact that I accumulated points that I could cash in for vacation flights to Europe, which I have done twice that I recall in recent years, sweetened the deal.

Who needed the rest of the deals and discounts that caused my eyes to fog whenever I contemplated them?

Things are different today. I have not flown in 18 months, have not been in a club in a like timeframe, and that put me into a big rethink regarding Plat. I even contemplated downgrading to Gold.  Literally hundreds of dollars in credits that I claimedso far this year – HomeDepot, BestBuy, Goldbelly, miscellaneous streaming video credits – persuaded me to stay put.

But now things are different again, I am traveling, I will within days make use of club access, and in the process I stumbled into very easy Amex credits.

You may already know about them but, as I said, I have no real history of hunting for bonuses. Besides, Amex keeps mixing up the credits – such as the new cellphone protection credit.

Then I noticed an Amex $200 credit to my account for a hotel stay booked via Amex’s Fine Hotels and Resorts tab.  I have a one night stay coming up in Madrid, for convenience sake I wanted to stay very near the airport, and I came upon a Hilton that happens to be in that program.  I booked it and, a few days later, a credit for the full amount popped up in my account.

Oh, and I already had free Hilton elite status with the card.  

I also wanted to book a flight from Santiago de Compostela in Galicia to Madrid and options were few on the day I wanted to travel.  Amex Travel had a flight that worked and it also qualified for a $50 credit.

Then there’s also a twice yearly $50 credit at Saks, just for buying stuff online.

And the Madrid hotel and Santiago flight also qualify for 5X points.

Amex also now credits me for the cost of my NY Times digital subscription and I also now get free cellphone protection on two phones, just by paying the T-Mo charge with an Amex card (which I had already been doing).

There’s also a $15/month Uber credit monthly, plus a bonus $20 in December.  For the past year I have put that credit to use with Uber Eats.

And a $200 annual airline credit at a carrier I designate.  Alas, this year it is American which I have not flown all year and may not fly this year.  But once yearly it is allowed to switch carriers which probably I will.

A rub is that many of the Amex programs require enrollment – the Saks credit for instance as well as the $20/month digital credit and there’s that annual selection of one airline for the $200 credit.

Aren’t there programs I would never use? Lots in fact, such as a $25/month credit at Equinox.

But the $695 annual fee for Plat really is rather easy to cover.

The Points Guy, in a recent piece, claims there is an easy $1400 to be had in rewards.  I would quibble and immediately erase $300 for the Equinox credit and probably I won’t bother with the $179 Clear credit either.

But will I get $700?  Yeah, I will and I am finding that it’s less work than it had been, mainly because I understand the game better.  But I just may get the card effectively for free – plus various club stays.  There’s nothing not to like about that.

by Robert McGarvey

It is time to face up to reality. After months of optimistic forecasts about the return to “normal” in business travel – Panglossian utterances proliferated from the mouths of airline CEOs and their counterparts in the hotel industry – it is increasingly obvious that it ain’t happening. not this year, not next, nowhere in the future we can realistically envision.

Money talks.

A recent Bloomberg survey of 45 large businesses found that 84% plan to spend less on business travel in the post Covid era. Most expected budgets to drop 20 to 40% and to stay dropped.

Why? The c-suite has discovered that we do not need to travel to keep the bottomline climbing. Profits, in most sectors, have been rosy in this era of Zoom calls.

Meantime, a new survey by the American Hotel and Lodging Association found that even business travelers are souring on the idea of going on the road: “About 60% of business traveler respondents indicated they likely would postpone their travel plans until a later date. About 67% noted they are likely to take fewer trips, while 68% said they are likely to take shorter and 66% said they are likely will travel only places they can drive to.”

Not all travel will be nixed, not by the c-suite and not by business travelers. I expect that the travel budgets for sales teams will be restored as soon as we pass through the Delta variant resurgence of Covid-19. I imagine c-suiters and other corporate high flyers will continue to circle the globe too.

What will be cut are many inhouse get togethers and very probably quite a few conferences too.

Ditto trips to offsite trainings. You can learn better email hygiene just as well at your desk watching a Zoom presentation as you would traveling to an offsite meeting at a Virginia hotel.

Travel without a tangible bottomline payoff just is going to be cancelled. But that’s not the only factor.

There are many reasons not to travel and saving money is just one. There also is the sustainability issue and, by any measure, business travel is increasingly seen for what it is – a disaster in terms of carbon and, in 2021, with fires and floods and hurricanes, it is ever harder to deny that climate change is triggering mayhem across the planet. Any organization that wants to be on the right side of sustainability has to be trimming its travel.

Then there are the health impacts of frequent business travel. A 2018 Harvard Business Review article told the sad story: “we found a strong correlation between the frequency of business travel and a wide range of physical and behavioral health risks. Compared to those who spent one to six nights a month away from home for business travel, those who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report the following: poor self-rated health; clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month compared to those who traveled only one to six nights per month, and this ultra-traveling group also had higher diastolic blood pressure and lower high density lipoprotein (the good cholesterol).”

Frequent business travel may also dull our performance on the job. “Frequent business travelers experience 20 percent less productivity due to jet lag. Business travelers often have less time to recover from journey related stress, which leads to ‘brain fog.'”

The dirty secret is that lots of frequent business travelers plain dislike the grind. The pretense is that it is a life of glamor and excitement but is it really? Maybe it was in 1975. But today? With fist fights over masks, ridiculous arguments about vaccines, hotels without cleaning crews, a shortage of Uber drivers, and the list can go on. Travel just is not much fun anymore and it won’t be anytime soon.

And yet…I remain on track to take a trip to Spain later this year. I look forward to it. I want to go. And it will be fun.

The right trip is a joy. But too much business travel is done just because it gets entered into a calendar.

Me, I am actively erasing future trips.

For instance: although I had been a frequent traveler to conferences and conventions, I have not been to one in a couple years and have no present plans to go. What I get out of them can largely be gotten via Zoom.

I will use the same analytics on all travel possibilities. Whatever travel presents itself to me I will ask, is it necessary? Will it get better results in person?

If the answers aren’t resounding yesses, I will be a no go.

A lot of business travelers feel likewise. Half? I don’t know the percentage but I do believe it is a significant minority who will not only not protest company slashing of travel budgets they will, probably quietly, cheer it.

When a trip is right – and necessary – go. Otherwise I am staying home.,

by Robert McGarvey

I don’t recall the first time I wrote up a warning against using public Wi-Fi when traveling – and that means hotel, airport, restaurant, public transportation (subways, busses) coffee shop, even inflight Wi-Fi. Probably 10 years ago. Maybe longer.

And yet public Wi-Fi sites multiply – one count finds over a half billion globally. That’s because we use it. One survey found 18% of respondents use it more than once a day.

Definitely, too, usage is upped among travelers. When I ask people if they would use the public Wi-Fi up the street from their home the reaction displays similar enthusiasm to what I’d get if I asked their willingness to use a public toilet in the Covid-19 era. But those very same people, when asked, acknowledge they do use public Wi-fi when they travel because “what are my better options?”

We’ll answer that question momentarily – you do have a better option – but, first, understand I now have a heavyweight that is issuing the same stern warnings about public Wi-Fi as I have been. That’s the NSA – aka National Security Agency aka the Puzzle Palace — which now has broken its cover to warn about public Wi-Fi and the risks it poses to us and our employers.

In a recent information sheet, NSA pulls no punches: “Avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi, when possible, as there is an increased risk when using public Wi-Fi networks…. If users choose to connect to public Wi-Fi, they must take precautions. Data sent over public Wi-Fi—especially open public Wi-Fi that does not require a password to access—
is vulnerable to theft or manipulation.”

What that says – put in simple terms – is don’t use public Wi-Fi because whatever data you enter is easy pickins for savvy cyber criminals.

Sure, if you want to grab a baseball score from ESPN, or a stock quote, by all means use public Wi-Fi if that’s easy. It probably doesn’t matter. But if what you want to do is send business email or access files on your company’s server or even research prospects on LinkedIn, the strong advice is don’t use public Wi-Fi.

There are thousands of white papers online documenting how hackers hack public Wi-Fi. For them it is rather straightforward. There even are automated tools to speed up the process for the inexpert hackers.

NSA elaborates: “Accessing public Wi-Fi hotspots may be convenient to catch up on work or check email, but public Wi-Fi is often not configured securely. Using these networks may make users’ data and devices more vulnerable to compromise, as cyber actors employ malicious access points, redirect to malicious websites, inject malicious
proxies, and eavesdrop on network traffic.”

What the NSA is saying is that when you are using public Wi-Fi you are a fish in a transparent fish bowl and the hackers’ eyes are on your every keystroke. The password to your employer’s server – it’s theirs. The login to your email – it’s theirs. The login to your bank account – yep, that’s theirs too.

All because you took what seemed the easy – and free! – access lane onto the Internet Superhighway and that is what public Wi-Fi is for many millions of us.

What if public Wi-Fi truly is your best option? Here’s NSA’s advice: “If connecting to a public Wi-Fi network, NSA strongly advises using a personal or corporate-provided virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt the traffic.”

Not all VPNs are good. Not all are even trustworthy. Choose a VPN cautiously. Here’s a list of recommended providers from TechRadar. Here’s CNET’s list.

Won’t a VPN slow your speed? Probably, at least a little. But that is a price worth paying for the enhanced security a good VPN provides.

Even with a VPN in place NSA’s “don’t’s list” includes these about public Wi-Fi: *Do not enter most sensitive account
passwords on sites/applications. *Avoid accessing personal data (e.g., bank accounts, medical, etc.).

That’s good, cautious advice.

Either way, if you really insist on using public Wi-Fi, do it with a VPN. You don’t have guaranteed safety. But you are pretty secure.

Personally, however, I still prefer to use my cellphone to create a hotspot that I connect an iPad or laptop to. The security is quite good.

Alternatively, since I use a Google Pixel phone on Google FI network, an option I have set up is to use a Google VPN when surfing via Wi-Fi. I use that feature often.

This is the reality: safer surfing is yours if you want it.

But with all the cyber criminals out there, just do something to stay safe.

By Robert McGarvey

As sure as we are now – in fits and starts – getting back on the road, scammers, flimflam artists, and thieves are right behind us and now they have an edge because many of us have lost our instincts when it comes to being suspicious of what might be criminal activity.

Eighteen months ago most of us would have have spotted a travel related scam before it bit us but now we are fresh innocents and you can bet the hucksters are hungry for our dough.

Matters are so sinister that the Better Business Bureau has rushed out a warning headlined: BBB Scam Alert: Beware of hotel scams.

Time for a refresher on road smarts.

Phishing.  Enormously popular with criminals today is telephone phishing where, usually, the scam is that “this is the front desk, there’s a problem with your credit card, could you give us the number again?”  Often the call comes in fairly late at night so you may be drowsy too and in PJs.  Give over the number and expiration date and, oh, will you verify the spelling of your name?  And that will present the criminal with a credit card that can put to immediate use buying gift cards and other cash equivalents.

The antidote: No matter how late at night it is, say you will be down to the front desk in a few minutes and hang up.  At this point you have three options: Do nothing whatsoever, just assume the call was a scam. Or actually go down to the desk and don’t be surprised if the staff has no clue about this issue with your card. Or call the front desk and ask, is there a question about my credit card?

Food Scams.  This actually is a new one on me but it makes perfect sense.  The BBB explains how it works: “Make sure the menus left in the hotel room are authentic…. Scammers will distribute fake menus to rooms with phone numbers that connect the caller to them instead of the hotel or a real business. They will collect the callers credit card information over the phone then never deliver food.”

I salute the cleverness of the criminals.  Make up a flyer, insert fake quotes (“the best pastrami in Phoenix,” Pete Wells NYTimes), and for sure calls will come in.

Word of caution: before ordering with a restaurant unknown to you, check Yelp to see if it in fact exists. While you are at it, skim the reviews.  I personally find Yelp of hit or miss utility – but it will definitely help you detect a restaurant that does not really exist. And you may even get some useful insights about the joint’s quality or lack.  (Hint: there is no great pastrami in Phoenix. The nearest is Langer’s in LA.)

Fake WiFi: They are called “rogue access points” and what this refers to are WiFi networks with names like “Free + Fast WiFi” or “Your Hotel’s Best WiFi.”  The problem is that a tech savvy criminal can spend maybe $100 and create a WiFi hotspot that exists mainly to collect personal information from users, possibly to download malware to their computers.

This is very bad and, as I said, it is also very cheap for the crook to perpetrate.  It often surfaces at meetings, convention centers, airports and, definitely, hotels especially public areas.  How to detect it? Usually it is very slow but, hey, isn’t that the norm for hotel WiFi even when we are paying to access it?

My advice is this: don’t use hotel WiFi or airport Wifi at all.  Ever. I use a hotspot that I create with my phone. (In Android, go to SETTINGS/Network and Internet/Hotspot. Similar works on iPhone)  It takes literally seconds to create, in most cases its speed is comparable to that of a hotel network (sometimes faster), and, yeah, in many cell plans you will pay a few bucks for data in a two hour session but that is money well spent if it keeps you out of the clutches of these cyber criminals.

This all sounds simple? It is. But criminals also know we are out of training and no longer instantly see risks when before we would have.  

Just remember: they are out to grab your money and if we have lost our cautions we are easy prey.  Stay alert, stay safe, safe travels. 

by Robert McGarvey

Know that I am a travel bag cheapskate. I doubt I have spent over $1000 on luggage in a lifetime of travels. For the past eight years I have relied on a carryon Travelpro rollaboard that cost $85 and it has been a reliable companion but now as new travel looms I had to admit it had gotten shabby.

I had also grown annoyed with the clatter of the aging wheels and a propensity of the rolling bag to tip over when I am moving at speed.

Time for a new bag.

I had non negotiable requirements. It had to be cheap and it had to be carryon (22″ x 14″ x 9″). Otherwise I had no requirements. I have mulled this issue in print for some years and I thought my preferences were settled. Hah.

What I bought surprised even me.

I bought an Osprey Fairpoint 40 men’s bag – 40 liter capacity – and here’s the deal: no wheels but this is a backpack. Price: $137 at Amazon.

But this is not just any backpack.

A huge difference between the Osprey Fairpoint and traditional backpacks is that the latter have a big cavern where you stuff your belongings while the Fairpoint has a clamshell opening so what you have packed is immediately visible. Hunt for fresh socks with a typical backpack and you may wind up dumping everything out on a nearby bed. With the Fairpoint just unzip the thing and what you are seeking is right there.

Everything about the Osprey is well designed and thought out. “Also great,” ruled the NY Times’ Wirecutter reviewers who also point out it comes with a lifetime warranty which is surprisingly common with luggage (Patagonia, Briggs and Riley, etc.) but it nonetheless is a nice Osprey perk.

Many years ago I bought a backpack carryon on bag from a travel gear purveyor and frankly it was poorly designed junk. The load kept slipping and sliding around inside the bag as I walked (usually around an airport and a city, not up a slippery hiking trail). I soon gave it to a friend who admired the quirkiness of it but it cannot possibly have provided much useful service.

The Osprey is better designed. It is designed both to be a straightforward piece of carryon but also for a backpacker who wants a compact bag. And it even has a laptop sleeve. as well as compression straps to keep contents from shifting. There also are multiple organizational inserts for sale – such as a three cube set for $38 – that allow for customization of the storage.

Am I comfortable with a backpack? That is a good question. Many find them to be very uncomfortable and, initially, I did too.

In some years of walking and hiking around Phoenix I have grown accustomed to wearing a backpack – usually a compact Fjallraven that I have stuffed with water bottles. You don’t want to walk long distances around Phoenix without water. A backpack doesn’t bother me anymore.

Is the Fairpoint genuinely good for hiking? Probably, for serious hikers, purpose built hiking backpacks are a better option when you want to walk most of the Appalachian Trail. I have a 10 year old LL Bean AT 55 pack (60 liter capacity) which is what I would take if I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The Osprey Fairpoint – many reviewers agree – is better suited to day hikes where you will be bunking in hotels not campsites.

That’s me. I don’t plan to jam a sleeping bag and a cook stove in the Osprey and it was never designed for such loads. What I plan to use it for are light loads – under 20 pounds including an iPad – and for that weight the Fairpoint is a match. I have heard some say they crammed 40 pounds in it but, frankly, I think a well chosen expedition backpack is more appropriate for comfortably and safely lugging heavy weights.

That light weight load of the Osprey on my back is also why I think I won’t mind carrying the weight instead of rolling it. It just isn’t that much to grumble about.

Besides, in carrying my sack I will be fulfilling a half century desire to live novelist Jack Kerouac’s vision: “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures ….”

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

By Robert McGarvey

For probably two decades I have covered hotel data breaches.  Everything from the Trump hotels to the Hard Rock has been breached and truth to tell I doubt that there is a single large hotel group that has never been breached.  If there is I don’t know it.

Bet on this: there will be more breaches in the hotel business and soon.  A perfect set of circumstances makes this a safe bet.  Hotel revenues were near zero for 18 months and that meant, for sure, cybersecurity spend was also near zero.  If money was getting spent it was on better ways to sanitize hotels in the pandemic in order to lure guests back.

Cyber criminals, like all predators, target the weak.

Besides, cyber insecurity is a perennial industry problem. Hoteliers resist expenditures that do not contribute to the bottomline and the average hotelier sees cybersecurity as a cost, not as investment that could contribute to the bottomline.

This is why I strongly urge hotel guests to never use a debit card (protections against fraudulent use are weaker than with a credit card) and to use a credit card with a very low credit limit. If need be, ask a bank to issue a card with, say, a $2000 limit. $1000 if you think you can navigate within that budget.  Probably if a credit card of yours is stolen in a hotel data breach and put to use by crooks you will eventually be made whole.  But my advice is to try to minimize the damage by using a card with limited spending ability.

Note: you usually won’t know for many months that a credit card of yours has been scooped up in a hotel data breach.  These breaches often go undetected by the hotel for years and once discovered, hotels are reluctant to go broadly public with the info.  The massive Starwood breach – involving some 500 million consumers – was not disclosed until late 2018.

Assume any card you give a hotel is likely to be breached and behave accordingly.

By now you are probably looking for proof that in fact hotels are wretched at cybersecurity. NordPass, which makes password management software, recently looked into password sophistication across many industries and, no surprise, hospitality fared poorly.

NordPass collected its data by looking into known breaches and eyeballing the passwords that had surfaced. The researchers looked into 15,603,438 breaches and broke down the resulting data into 17 different industries.

Remember this, a company website is only as secure as the passwords used by employees who access it.  If employees use passwords that are easy for crooks to guess, the site security is nil.

Here are the top 10 most used passwords among hospitality employees, according to NordPass’s digging:

password

123456

Company name123 *

Company name*

Company name*

Hello123

Company name 1*

Company name*

company name*

company name1*

NordPass offered this explanatory gloss about the recurring company name password: “This password is a company name or a variation of it (e.g. Company name2002). We are not naming the exact company.”

Commented NordPass, “The hospitality industry had the most passwords that were the company’s name or its variation.”

That list of hospitality passwords is gravely disturbing.  Wrote TechRepublic: “Some of the weak passwords uncovered seem almost comical, but this trend has serious ramifications. Weak passwords are actually one of the leading vulnerabilities that lead to data breaches.”

Know that how cybercriminals hack a company site is they send a bot to it and the bot is scripted to try common passwords. Like what? Like, well, password, which is a perennial top ten most used password.  Hackers use the common password lists to script their bots of course and in hospitality the employees obligingly seem to use such lists to pick their own passwords and, astonishingly, the company websites are not programmed to reject their use,

According to NordPass, only 29% of hospitality industry employees use unique passwords (which is something like Ma!yo#Cty908& – the sort of password usually generated by any decent password management tool).

More than two thirds of hospitality industry employees reuse passwords across multiple accounts which is another big no no.  

Call this a huge fail on the part of hospitality.  

Just don’t say it is surprising and don’t believe ir will be fixed soon.

By Robert McGarvey

I know a guy – call him Tom – who is fully vaccinated and a couple weeks ago his company told him to show up at a golf tournament they were holding for big customers at one of the nation’s swankiest courses.

At this event there were no masks and why would there be, everybody being fully vaccinated, or at least claiming to be.

There wasn’t much social distancing either.

You know where this story is ending, right?

Tom now is in bed with a case of Covid.

His case so far is mild.  But he has Covid and he was fully vaccinated.

That is why I now say it is plain delusional and loony to talk about a return of business travel this year. And there won’t be a return of in-person events, either.

Not in 2021.

Don’t blame me.  Blame the unvaccinated who right now are about 50% of us.  Why so many?  I have no idea.  Cockamamie beliefs, twisted politics, who knows – but here’s the deal: their refusal to get vaccinated is endangering the rest of us.  Sure, if they quarantined they would be out of harm’s way, at least our harms way.  That would be fine by me.  

But I don’t trust them to self quarantine until the Covid-19 epidemic runs its course.

I don’t even trust them to wear masks.

Will they get vaccinated now that the Delta variant is rampaging across the country (and especially in states such as Florida and Louisiana with loudly anti vax populations)?  

So far many of them have ignored the carrot and what comes next is the stick.  Such as? Some experts suggest allowing health insurers to charge a penalty premium from the unvaccinated and why not? Insurers already charge smokers a penalty fee on the grounds that personal choices sometimes have horrendous health consequences and who better to pay for it than the person who made the choice?

Most who are sickened by the Delta variant are unvaccinated and the vast majority of serious illnesses are. Which means a price could be paid.

That might help motivate the unvaccinated to get on the script.

Meantime, a stampede of large employers has announced a vaccine requirement for employees, although most offer a loophole where an employee who wants to stay unvaccinated can provide frequent, negative Covid test results.  The federal government, WalMart, Disney, Google, Facebook have all joined the parade.

Another parade is forming of organizations that are pushing back their return to the office date for employees.  Many had been noodling on a September date.  As the Delta variant explodes across America, employers have torn up those orders and now are talking about a late winter 2022 return date, say February.  

Do you hear the sound of business travel plans coursing through the shredder?

To quote from Business Travel News, “Corporate travel’s return from its Covid-19-induced standstill will pick up speed throughout the remainder of 2021 but likely will remain significantly below pre-pandemic levels for at least another year, and some types of travel may never fully return, according to a new study from Deloitte.”

To quote from Finance & Commerce: “A year and a half of forgoing virtually all travel and doing business by video conference has led many business people to conclude that a lot of their previous travel wasn’t worth the time and toll on their bodies and mental state, on their families and the environment. That’s even before considering the role that travel played in transmitting the virus across continents.”

Unpack, those business trips you had been planning just a few weeks ago – and they looked very probable – now look like mirages that disappeared.  

Thank the unvaccinated in our midst.

As Dr. Anthony Fauci said on “Face the Nation,” “We have 100 million people in this country … who are eligible to be vaccinated, who are not vaccinated. We’ve really got to get those people to change their minds, make it easy for them, convince them, do something to get them to be vaccinated because they are the ones that are propagating this outbreak.”

Amen.