Those annoying airline credit card charges
June 13th, 2008 by Tim Uden
One thing that annoys me about low cost airlines is their deceptive pricing policies where prices are advertised exclusive of taxes, leaving you with no idea of how much your ticket will cost.
That’s one reason I am more likely to give preference to low-cost carriers that advertise all inclusive prices such as Flybe or Sky Europe over airlines like Ryanair that give away free flights and then rack up your credit card bill on taxes, fees, fuel levies, excess baggage fees and so on.
At least in Australia all domestic airlines quote all inclusive prices - they’re required to by law - although that still doesn’t stop them for charging for so called optional extras. Extras like credit card payment!
I think it is a bit cheeky to charge an extra $2 credit card fee when it is the only payment option, yet this is common practice. It would be understandable if there was the option of paying cash, direct debit or PayPal; but that’s just not the case, yet we are still charged a premium to pay using the only payment method accepted by the airlines.
At least Air Asia X, the long-haul offshoot of Malaysian cut price airline Air Asia, gives you the option to pay by PayPal. Air Asia X claims to be the first airline in the Asia Pacific region to accept PayPal. As a promotional offer they are crediting $50 on the first 4000 flights from Australia to Malaysia (Gold Coast and Perth to Kuala Lumpur) paid by Paypal before the end of the month.
I don’t think PayPal is the most convenient option for most travellers, in fact I would assume that credit card payment is more convenient for at least 90% of travellers, but it is nice that we get a choice so we can avoid another extra fee.
Life’s Cheap
May 8th, 2008 by Isak Ladegård
Skydiving is cheap in Argentina, and when I see our plane I realize why. The entire back wall of the tiny 2-man plane is duct-taped at place. Too late and too proud to run away, we hit the clouds and the big blue sky. The pilot cruises around and while he keeps silent Aljandro, the skydive master and company runner, asks if I’m ready.
“I’m ready.”
Then he turns to the fourth and last man in our plane. He’s a small and chubby Argentinean, my co-jumper, the guy who’s supposed to push me out of the plane with himself attached. (Basically he kills me – before he saves me again by unfolding the parachute)
“Are you ready?”, main man Alejandro asks my co-jumper.
“Si, si,” he responds. And from this point my Spanish skills fail in understanding the following phrases. But Alejandro’s serious eyes and explaining and gesticulating hands scares me. My co-jumpers madly nervous face scares me even more. It’s my first jump, ever, and I’m scared because here it’s obvious that my co-jumper, the man who’s supposed to save my life, he’s a rookie as well.
“OK my friend!” Says Alejandro, to me, and it’s time.
My life’s in his hands.
V Australia to start trans-Pacific flights
April 1st, 2008 by Tim Uden
V Australia, the latest offshot of Australian low cost carrier Virgin Blue, started selling tickets for its first route (Sydney-Los Angeles) yesterday. The first flights on the new airline will be in December 2008.
V Australia was set up by Virgin Blue to serve the Australia to USA market, which has long suffered from high prices due to very little competition. It was hoped that the introduction of a budget focused airline to this route would shake things up a bit and introduce a much needed price war. With just a handful of airlines flying between Australia and the United States, the relatively short 14 hour flight from Sydney to Los Angeles often costs more than the much longer 24 hour Sydney-London flight. Unfortunately the introduction of V Australia does little to lower the price.
The first 1000 return tickets are selling for AUD $999. I did a test booking to work out what the regular fare on their Sydney-LA route will cost and came up with a return fare of AUD $1898.
I understand that there is little competition on the Sydney-LA route, even with the launch of V Australia, and that the new airline wants to be profitable as quickly as possible. But I expected much cheaper fares.
To put things into comparision, Sydney-LA is only a 14 hour flight in each direction and you can fly Sydney-London (not on an a LCC, but on a full service airline) for around the same price, which is a much longer 24 hour flight. In other words a return Sydney-LA flight on V Australia costs around the same as a return Sydney-London flight but you get around 20 hours less in the air.
Twenty fewer hours in your airline seat should account for much lower fares. The standard return fare between Australia and the California should be around AUD $1000, but instead V Australia want to charge you almost double.
We need a real low cost carrier on this route. Air Asia, Tiger, Jetstar, Ryanair, anyone?
The Idea of North
March 18th, 2008 by Thomas Maresca
An Auckland native whom I met in the ski town of Ohakune described New Zealanders to me this way: “The farther south you go from Auckland, the friendlier people get. The farther north you go, the weirder they get.”
It was an ungenerous way of putting it, but substitute offbeat or quirky, or maybe just different, for “weird,” and I’d have to say he was on to something.
There’s definitely something about the Far North. Even though New Zealand is tiny, the north feels remote, isolated from the rest of a country that itself already feels isolated. Driving through, I always had the sense that almost anything might be around the next bend in the road, that I was bound to meet somebody . . . offbeat . . . at the next place I stopped. And often, I was right. Transplants from Japan and Germany who were dropping out of their overcrowded countries; hostel owners eager to share salacious gossip from towns that seemed way too small to have so much salaciousness. I really liked it.
In a strange way, the attitudes somehow reminded me of the frigid, northern parts of the U.S. and Canada, even though you’d think it should be the opposite—here in New Zealand, the north is lush, abundant, the most temperate part of the country. Maybe a certain type of person is just attracted to heading as far north as possible, as if following some internal compass.
Anyway, there’s a real feeling of edge-of-the-world remoteness at Cape Reinga, the northern tip of the North Island. From here, you can look out over an unbroken expanse of sea and sky, and see the waters of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet and churn together. This is where the Maori believe spirits of the dead leave this world for the underworld (Reinga means “underworld”, and the Maori called the cape Te Rerenga Wairua, the “leaping-place of the spirits.”) It’s an undeniably powerful experience.
A couple of practical points if you’re making the drive up to Cape Reinga yourself: One, you should fill up the car in Pukenui; there is a petrol station closer to the Cape in Waitaki Landing, but it doesn’t have a reliable supply of petrol.
Also: drive carefully! The last 21km of road to Cape Reinga is unsealed and very winding. My car was sliding all over the place, and I heard lots of stories of accidents. Driving extra-carefully is sound advice on the North Island in general; roads all over are narrow and winding and there are just so many distracting views.
Fruit and Loathing in Western Australia
March 5th, 2008 by Isak Ladegård
Forbidden fruit
In one of his well known stories, the great doctor of gonzo and bad craziness Hunter S. Thompson is on the road with the trunk stuffed by illegal cargo. The car which is blasting through the Nevada-desert is getting dangerously close to the state border and he has to get rid of the goods. However, it’s decided that the wide range of hard drugs he’s carrying is altogether worth too much money to be just thrown out of the window. The problem is solved by sniffing, eating and smoking all of it.
Closing up on the South-Australian border I find myself in a similar situation.
Dead kangaroos are laying bloody and destroyed alongside the dusty highway, the sun is going down, Joni Mitchell pours out of the car stereo and I’m eating fruit like a madman. The road from the West to Adelaide is long and my Ford Laser’s stuffed by food for 72 hours. Three days with cookies and donuts isn’t too tempting, so walking the healthy way I pack up big bags of apples, bananas, pears and carrots. In the next three days I can make up for all the greasy & easy meals. Then I pass a roadside-sign which tells me that a $2500 dollar fine is the price I’ll have to pay for my fruity truckload. It is illegal to carry fruit across the Australian state borders, and all of a sudden I have 12 apples, 10 bananas, 5 pears and maybe 15 carrots to get rid of in half a day, before the end of WA is reached.
Thanks to the Australian fruit police my road trip in this country mutates into an experiment. This is my hypothesis: Will I physically turn green? As in, what will happen when the body is force-fed with this veggie-overload? Will I turn green, or will I grow 10 inches closer to the roof, will my vision reach telescope level, will muscles build me up overnight in the same way Peter Parker turned Spidey?
Time will tell.
Melbourne airport top five in the world…
February 29th, 2008 by Tiffany Miller
Melbourne Airport has recently been named as one of the world’s top five for passenger service. It came in behind Kuala Lumpur, San Diego, Zurich and Vancouver.
Funny, then, that I had two of my worst ever travel experiences there. When I flew in a couple of weeks ago from Brisbane, I was walking to the baggage claim when all of a sudden the entire airport (or at least the terminal I was in) lost power. It was a mere ten seconds before they came back on, but apparently it was enough to cause an hour-long delay for our baggage to come in. That was not fun, especially in light of the fact that I had two friends who I hadn’t seen in years waiting outside the terminal for me.
I went back a few days later to catch a flight to New Zealand. When I arrived at the counter without my onward ticket printed out (oops…) the woman told me to go over to the Hilton Hotel to print it. Not being able to leave my bag behind their little counter, I hauled about 30 kilos of stuff over to the hotel only to find that their computers were down. Back to the counter, directed to the (closed) Emirates offices, back to the counter, directed to (closed) internet cafe, finally found internet which I needed coins for and three different businesses in the vicinity would not give me change, emailed document to JetStar manager, ran to JetStar counter at other end of airport to pick it up, back to counter just in time to check in before closing. Phew…
So I get to the gate and hear the loudspeaker switch on. “Attention ladies and gentlemen, due to some technical difficulties there will be a departure delay for flight numbe……”
Top five, eh? In all fairness, it may have just been that few hours I was there. I have had the tendency toward bad travel luck in the past two weeks… But at the time, I probably would have rated it somewhere in the 3,000th-4,000th bracket, especially thinking back to the wonderful world of Vancouver and Zurich Airports, which offer quite a bit more than good duty-free shops and Starbucks.
Hyundai Accent (rental car review)
February 28th, 2008 by Tim Uden
I had booked a Hyundai Getz for a week driving around Tasmania to update the Tasmanian hostel information on BUG. As usual I asked for a small manual hatchback as they are economical fun cars that I love to drive.
The problem is that rental car companies think they are doing you a favour when they upgrade you to something bigger and I ended up getting upgraded to a Hyundai Accent, which really pissed me off as I hate driving big cars. I know there are many cars that are a lot bigger than the Accent, but it feels like driving an ocean liner when compared with the small zippy hatchback that I had requested. Maybe AVIS should try harder and actually give people the cars they ask for. I guess it could have been a lot worse; they could have upgraded me to an automatic.
After getting settled into the bridge of my ocean liner I negotiated around Hobart’s waterfront and set sail for the Huon Valley. As usual for big cars, it was clumsy to drive and awkward in the city; but I found it surprisingly agile on the open road and it even handled quite well on Tasmania’s many narrow winding roads that make up a large portion of Tasmania’s road network.
Like other larger cars that I had driven. It had an uncomfortable driving position that feels like you are reclining near the back of the car. It is probably just something to get used to and I suppose that people used to big cars would find the opposite uncomfortable when they get behind the wheel of a small car.
It also had the annoying habit of setting off the alarm whenever I turned the key the wrong way when opening the car door. Maybe I have a problem with opening car doors but I’ve been driving for the past 20 years so I figured I should have worked it out by now. I was relieved to discover that it wasn’t a problem with my door opening abilities when, on my travels around Tasmania, I saw other people set off the alarm in their Hyundai rental cars too.
The car could have had a bit more oomph, but it wasn’t as gutless as I expected and it had enough power to zoom up some steep hills. It was one of the better big cars that I had driven but I still would have preferred the car that I had asked for.
On the Wallaby
February 23rd, 2008 by Tiffany Miller
There is something about a road trip through Australia that really stokes nostalgia and gives you that sense of journey which is often missing from package tours and public transport. Rolling hills, the wind in your hair, and a good song, and suddenly life is a highway.
I cannot stress enough how important I think it is to experience this. Far too many travellers jump on the buses and wind up in a different city every few days sampling the pubs and seeing no more wildlife than a dead ‘roo on the roadside every once in a while. Get your own wheels. Get on the wallaby (and find out what that means). Here are your options:
Car. Hire a car from any of the 5 billion rental agencies. Pretty straightforward. Or buy a car from one of the 5 billion sales ads posted on hostel notice boards and try not to get ripped off. Something to consider is buying from a dealer with a buy-back guarantee- that saves you the headache of trying to sell it to another wary traveller at the end.
Camper/Kombi van. Hire a camper. Check out the most popular (and so least likely to rip you off) companies around, like Wicked Campers (the ones with the psycho graffiti all over them), Hippy Campers (the ones with the flower power all over them), and Calypso Campervans ( the ones with nothing all over them- in case you want to be a little more low-key)…
You may want to head north on the buses, and then hire a camper for the trip back down south. I have met heaps of travellers who decided halfway up the coast that they should have done the self-drive thing.
Hostels often offer free pick up service, but for out-of-the-way places this can be a real hassle. You initially take the bus option because you think it will be easier, but it ends up being more of a pain in the long run. Although some Australian towns and cities are excrutiatingly sign-deficient, driving is for the most part straightforward (albeit on the other side of the road). And when you see the sign for Yungaburra, you can (and should) take it.
Just two rules: don’t drive like an idiot and wind up with a $250 fine. And don’t buy a car on its last legs/diff gears and wind up stranded in a mining town in the Outback. Believe me, it’s not pretty.
But everything else is.
Australian Driving Tips for Rightsiders
January 23rd, 2008 by Tiffany Miller
Besides our obvious handicap of driving on the right (and for some of us, being used to an automatic transmission.. ahem..), there are a few things to learn about Australian traffic rules before you start your “roady.”
First thing’s first: roundabouts. Many of us, unfortunately, have never driven through them. The most important thing to remember- go left! But before you glide into oncoming traffic, yield to any cars already in the roundabout. Then, keep to the left if you are going left or straight ahead. If there are two lanes, pull into the right (inside) lane and use your right indicator (blinker). Also, remember that your indicator is on the right. I can’t say how many times I have switched lanes using my windscreen (windshield) wipers. And always signal left when exiting.
This isn’t New York. Don’t use your horn unless your’e about to have a smash (accident).
Driving on the highways is pretty straightforward. Stay to the left; go right when overtaking. And save your car (and your heart) some damage by trailing a large truck or bus. Those koala signs are not just there for photo-ops. Hitting a kangaroo will do serious damage; swerving to miss it could do worse. Mornings and sunsets are the most dangerous times.
Then, find yourself a buddy or two. Not only will this help with petrol costs, it may save your life. Many points of interest are two or three hours apart. So get yourself a passenger (hostel walls are the perfect place to advertise), put on some driving tunes (no Radiohead, please) and fill up the coffee mug. The long stretches of highway, are full of dreamy coastline and hills of dramatic gum trees. It is lovely, but after a while it will put you to sleep. Many Aussie towns’ and cities’ road signs are scarce, so get a navigator and a good road map, and get off the beaten track.
How to survive a plane crash
January 9th, 2008 by Tim Uden
The BBC documentary Survivor’s Guide to Plane Crashes was on the telly last night.
Although flying is one of the safest forms of transport it was a good programme to watch and it has some great practical life-saving advice.
The show states that 90% of plane crashes are survivable, and knowing what to do dramatically enhances your chances of survival if you are involved in a crash.
These are the main points:
- Adopt the brace position. this makes a much bigger difference than you would ever imagine.
- Don’t inflate the life jacket until you get off the plane. If the plane fills with water, an inflated life jacket can make it impossible to swim to the exit.
- Be familiar with your selt belt. It sounds unbeliveable but many people die because they panic and can’t undo their seat belt. Remember it is the opposite to a car seat belt - you don’t push a button, you pull the latch instead.
- Plan how you will evacuate in an emergency and count the number of seat rows to the exit. Many people die because they can’t find the exit in a smoke-filled plane.
- If you are within seven seat rows of an exit, you have more than a 50% chance of surviving a crash.
- The safest place to sit on the plane is usually - but not always - above the wing. You are close to an emergency exit and it is structurally the strongest part of the plane. But it really depends how the crash impacts the plane.
- If you’re travelling with a group, don’t try and find your friends, just get off the plane. Trying to fine other people you are travelling with just blocks other people from getting off the plane.
In short, people who survive are those that pay attention to the flight attendants’ safety demonstration. They know about the brace position, they don’t inflate their life jacket until they leave the plane and they can get their seat belt undone and get to the exit.