Conversation Stopper

1. I require absolute silence from the people sitting in my row – SILENCE! (Hiss the last word for dramatic effect.)
   
2. Find the map in the in-flight magazine and say “Sorry, I’m memorizing the codes for all the airports, in reverse alphabetical order”
   
3. I’m sorry, I cannot talk with you – I have given up face-to-face conversation as a personal experiment.
   
4. I can’t really talk with anyone until I’ve had two drinks, and I always stop after my first.
   

Conversation Starter

1. If you could only drink one beverage for the rest of your life, what would you choose? Why?
   
2. If you had to give up one type of communication you use regularly, which would you choose? Why?
   
3. If you had to move to a different state, where would you go? Why?
   
4. What are the longest trips you’ve ever taken by distance and by duration? What was the best part of each?

It was either Visa or Master credit card that ran this ad campaign 2 years ago encouraging people to spend. Typically I have a filter to skip over ads, but this campaign caught my attention. There were several versions of the ad and I picked out my favorites below. It covers a variety of activities but they all have something in common – discovering humanity.

I decided to write about it today partly because weather is getting nicer and I’m ready for some indelible memories but more importantly, I realized that when we die, we don’t take anything with us except the life experiences we accumulated and the relationships we treasured. So when you get a chance, start a list and live life!

Travel

1. Go on the safari
2. See the northern lights
3. go to the Galapago islands
4. Celebrate St. Patty’s Day in Dublin
5. Go to the Olympic opening ceremony
6. Run with the bulls in Pamplona
7. Watch a space shuttle launch
8. Help dig for dinosaur bones
9. see White sharks leaping out of the water
10. Swim in a roof top pool overlooking LA

Sports

1. go to the Superbowl
2. hit a major league fastball homer
3. sit in court side seats of a Professional basketball game

Maui, Hawaii is a unique place. It is in the middle of the Pacific ocean, part of the united states and is accessible to anyone in just a few short hours of travel. You don’t need a passport to get here and you can stay as long as you like. The greatest part though is that it is absolutely nothing like the continental US.

When you boil it down it is one of the only ways to escape everyday life without leaving the country. More importantly you can experience these “once in a life time” moments on a daily basis, so if you stay for a week expect seven unforgettable experiences.

Lets start by getting into a few of things you can do, that I guarantee you will never forget.

Sunrise On A Dormant Volcano

Maui is in the tropics, it is always present but with elevation comes the cold. You wake up one morning, well before the break of dawn, after arriving to Maui, throw on some shorts and a t shirt, jump in the car and start heading up to the top of Haleakala (Maui’s dormant volcano.) Once you get to the top (at 4:00 in the morning) you realize it is 50 degrees and you’re cold! Soon after you’re ready to get back in the car you see the sun start to peek into the sky. The sky explodes into colors you have never seen before and now the cold seems to only amplify the different shades of red, yellow orange and blue! The drive back down is exhausting, but I guarantee you won’t forget this day.

Diving With Sea Turtles

The next morning you get up and head over to Polo Beach on the south shore of Maui in Kihei. You have already rented some snorkel gear and are ready to jump into the water. The water is calm because it is still early and you start swimming out, not far, only for about four minutes. The water gets deep but it is clean and clear as ever, you see reef and fish everywhere! Seconds later you see an enormous turtle out of nowhere cursing along the bottom of the reef. Seems too easy doesn’t it? We have tons of turtles here, there is even a popular dive spot known as “Turtle Town.” These creatures are some of the most amazing animals to swim with and to see in the wild.

There are two events that you will never forget. We haven’t even started talking about hiking in to a rainforest’s to jump off an ancient waterfall or driving through a barren lava field to snorkel where you can hear whales singing underwater. No matter how long you stay on Maui you can experience an unforgettable event everyday of your stay with little or no effort. More importantly you don’t have to pay anyone to do any of this.

1. Securing a bank card, credit card or an ATM card that provides one travel mile for each dollar spent. This is one way to generate miles for Domestic and International flights.

American Airlines has a program where you can drum up free miles just by eating in select restaurants, in your area. You can register ‘any’ of your credit cards and participate in the rewards program. Eating at participating restaurants often, especially for business lunches, can generate lots of miles in a very short period of time.

2. You can sign-up for a Travel Now, Pay Later program. This program allows you to have a small amount of monies taken out of your checking account each month, to pay for high end vacations or cruises.

3. You can search for travel certificates on major auction sites. Be sure that the certificates are legally transferable.

4. You can search for consolidated airfares on sites that allow consumers to access flight information.

5. You can sign up with a courier service and deliver important documents, etc., to certain parts of the world.

6. You can purchase a time share to ensure that you have different locations to vacation, once you retire. (Be sure to review the numbers on this transaction)

7. You can sign up for group tours which are less expensive then independent travel. (Group travel can save travelers hundreds of dollars when used correctly)

8. You can become a Travel Group Leader - Take groups of friends to Hawaii, on cruises, to Europe, Holy land, Asia and many other exciting destinations, where the group leader can go free.

9. You can become affiliated with an online travel web site and receive commissions on your travel and the travel of friends and family.

10. When vacationing, rent condos or vacation homes, prepare your own meals and rent a compact car, and save big.

Budget travel takes planning and research. The Internet has made the research for budget travel much easier. One of the major tricks for lower cost airfare, besides using an airfare consolidator, is to book your flight as far in advance as you can. Airfare purchased six months in advance is a lot cheaper then airfare purchased two weeks before departure.

Travelers bond easily and there’s an automatic built-in trust and credibility when meeting with fellow travelers during our travels. It’s like forming an instant clan, an instant friendship especially when the travelers are both new to the city. I’m not sure why on the biological level, but it’s probably attributed to our survival instincts or the way we’re designed to group and share. No matter what it is, it’s sweet.

If you are up for crashing on a couch or rely on traveler’s good nature, be sure to check out

YowTrip.com - Travel the world and meet interesting people while doing it. Find a new friend in every city

And

CouchSurfing.com - worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit. Alexa Rank 6,54546 (721)

• Couchsurfing the more reputable of the 2,
• Yowtrip is newer and has some social networking tools that you can use to create your own travel page.

There’s a lot more testimonials, read them but don’t get too carried away thinking it’s going to be like “The Holiday” as they of course don’t advertise “bad testimonials”. You just don’t want to end up in “Hostel“

If you are serious about using these services, make sure you

1. Check your host out at popular social networking websites: Facebook, linkedIN, Hi5, Orkut, Friendster, Flickr, LiveJornal, Multiply, or Imeem
2. Talk to them over the phone, IM, or at least email.
3. Ask them for references and check to see if these references have social networking sites
4. Plain Google them to verify they are who they say they are

No matter where you go, just be careful!

Recently, I’ve been helping with several friends and relatives with their travel hunt. I thought I share the rules of thumb and steps to follow here:

1. Don’t keep querying the same dates and flights. Familiar with Priceline.com? Yes, all your activities are tracked and these airlines form alliances (i.e. Star Alliance) to not only give you benefit program but they share data.
2. Use Farecast.com to get an idea on whether you should book your travel now or you can wait it out.
3. Use a meta travel search engine like Kayak.com, to get multiple price quotes at one instant. Remember, don’t do it one by one, your activities are being watched and shared. There are many meta travel sites but I just love the usability in Kayak.com

Another thing I’ve been asked is to do parallel search. Meaning this is your way out if you have already searched for the same route, and similar dates too many times and travel industry is determined to get you (or your IP).

What this means is get your friend to do the searches for you, and 8/10 times your friend will get a lower rate. You can then just ask him to help you book the itinerary.

Hope this helps!

If you have all the money and time in this world, what would you do?

The answer you are most likely to get it “Travel” without much hesitation. My personal favorite quote for years is:

Life is not measured by the number of breath you take, but by the moments that take your breath away

Everyone mentally inks the most pleasant memories in their own personal history book.

I would dare to generalize that the most indelible experiences and memories are happen when we travel. Why? Well, the way our brain functions just remembers those novel experiences better than routine mundane circumstances.

Do you agree? If you also believe in that we are a cumulation of our experiences then you also are most likely to believe that life is about brief joys, not a 65 million dollar home in the Hamptons with a Swedish model girlfriend (though that doesn’t certainly doesn’t hurt). Face of the matter is, it’s really not about money, ordinary people can have the same happiness level as the rich if they just stop and appreciate. Just see the movie “Family Man“.

Anyway, so how can we get out of our routine so that there are cerebral deposits? I like to travel because that’s the best memory sink for me.

Let’s take a look at some facts about the travel industry:

The travel industry pulls in approximately $1.3 trillion annually in the United States alone. That figure leaps to $7 trillion when measured worldwide. That’s some serious money and there are many out there looking to get a slice. It’s even bigger than energy and health care industry!

Four significant trends that contribute this:

Trend One: There are almost 1 billion baby boomers worldwide. One person every 8 seconds reaches retirement age. This trend will continue for the next 20 years. So what? What will these newly retired baby boomers do when they retire? Travel, of course!

Trend Two: The travel industry is growing 23% faster than the global economy. That means that travel is expected to double to $14 trillion worldwide in the next 10 years.

Trend Three: The growth of E-Commerce. Consumers last year spent billions of dollars on the Internet. Travel is the fastest growing segment of that trend.

Trend Four: Statistics show that there are a growing number of small home-based businesses focused on online travel as a result of travel engine commoditization. With large companies outsourcing and downsizing, people are turning to home based businesses to provide them with job security.

You might ask what the heck is commoditization? According to MSN Encarta dictionary, it is the process by which a product reaches a point in its development where one brand has no features that differentiate it from other brands, and consumers buy on price alone.

Having worked for corporate America for years and being a technology industry insider, it is hard to avoid this concept. You might ask, “Is online travel such technology to be commoditized?” You bet; web technology gets commoditized even faster since they have much shorter development and rework cycle, that’s why there are so many options to do everything online. It exists in all general life cycle of a product not limited to technology products like microprocessors, cell phones, game consoles, iPods but also household… that’s why it’s called commodity.

So is travel the next wave? The next disrupter that you’ll hear in the news? Probably not. because the overall user/customer experience is the same. Booking online is already a skill that most of us have; the only difference is that there will just be more of it, and most destinations to venture to and more money to be made on these travel commissions!

Life is a journey, Travel it.

What I’m discussing today has no verification by online travel giants, only bases of reasoning from my humble interview experience with Expedia when I graduated from college. It’s something that virtually all of us do when we travel - booking travel online…

Perhaps the most confusing or even frustrating thing in booking travel online is understanding why fares are so unpredictable! It’s easy to fall into the indecisive trap when finally the credit card screen appears and you find yourself suspicious of price drop in the next week, next day, or even next hour!

This unpredictability mushroomed up many online forums discussing and sharing the best deals one can possibly find but still no one can really provide a definitive strategy. In fact, the code to find the best fare is so complex, if you can decode it, you should probably call Expedia.

So why do prices differ from engine to engine where no one single online booking site can claim leadership? Why is it is sometimes cheaper to book it way way far in advance and why are last minute deals dirt cheap? Well, to answer these questions, one really has to consider the objective function in which algorithms were constructed around these online reservation engines. The three high level objective functions I can think of are:

1) Flexibility, 2) Availability, and 3) Internet Traffic.

Last minutes deals

Flexibility is really time and dates of your travel and is generally intertwined with availability. Take Las Vegas, #1 attraction in the U.S. and the most visited place on earth for example.

Monday night – Thursday nights are cheaper than cheap relative to what they sell for weekends. The reason being inventory and room availability. If the rooms don’t sell out, what happens? Hotels lose money on that room and other potential spendings in that hotel. It’s logical to occupy the space at a discounted rate than take a loss on unoccupied space. Now, apply that for Cruises, once Cruises ship off to sea, they lose that whole period of time its at sea. If branding or image isn’t an issue, they rather give away these unoccupied rooms and hope they spend more on booze. However, they need to protect their corporate reputation and like all occupancy business (Cruises, hotels and flights) so they don’t just give away room for free. Besides, they have fat built-in margins so the trade-off becomes reputation and money. Nevertheless, they are more willing to give it away in a form of FAM trips (a.k.a Familiarization trips) to travel agents to promote awareness of their services/property. So hopefully that explained the concept of last minute deals.

How about those that you book the next day? Well, the algorithm knows if you are booking something so close to current time/date, you must be willing to pay a bigger price to compensate for your urgency. They have no problems taking advantage of your desperation. I think there’s an exception for death travel but I learned that from Seinfeld but don’t quote me on it.

If you book way too far in advance, they will know this trip is very important to you (i.e. family reunion) so you must be willing to pay. OR you are booking for high demand destinations like an Alaska Cruise (the draw is mainly seeing glaciers before they disappear ). The whole mindset behind it is calculating and predicting customer’s “willingness to pay”.

Internet Traffic/Peak times

Ever find yourself losing the deal that you saw just 5 minutes ago? Frustrating isn’t it? Well, you’re not alone. The absolute worst time to book travel is during business hours (if you’re using your own money). Okay, so to back up a little bit they are two types of travel, business travel and leisure travel. Business travels are usually booked during what time? You guessed it, business hour time. By whom? well, at major corp, they are booked by admins or overworked individual contributors who don’t care about finding deals since

1) it’s a business expense NOT out of their pocket, 2) they don’t get rewarded for finding deals, 3) their time is simply more valuable than finding cheap fare.

It’s like your cell phone minutes, your carrier counts your minutes during “peak” time hours, but nights and weekends are generally free. Well, how do I explain losing a good deal at midnight?? Well, it’s probably because they are many concurrent connections raising site traffic. The logic is, the higher the site traffic, the more people who visit, the higher the demand, the higher the price.

Well, I hope that shed some light to some people. Until next time!

thanks for reading!