September 28, 2009
With over 20,000 tweets per minute, Twitter can offer a wealth of information. From interesting industry stories to great deals offered by an airline, there is no shortage of tweets about travel. But if you are looking for information on a city you are traveling to, sorting through this constant stream of 140-character posts to find a relevant post can be daunting. This is where Twaller comes in.
Twaller does all of the searching and sorting for you. Pulling together applicable tweets based on keywords, hashtags, and user locations, Twaller then sorts them into categories and specific cities to make it easy to find what you are looking for. Say you want to find a good place to eat in Barcelona, some fine shopping in Chicago, or what the weather is like in Mumbai, this site makes it easy to find what you are looking for.
The site is still in Beta, meaning that they are actively working on improving it and adding more features, but we wanted to give you a head’s up on this promising service. We would like to see more corresponding tweets to the categories (right now you just see the three latest), the ability to click through to the actual twitter post, and a better flow to the site.
Twaller shows a lot of promise. We hope that you can find some useful information for your next trip through their service.
Posted by Carol Margolis under Web/Tech |
September 22, 2009
During the countless time spent in security lines, have you ever wondered to yourself how many miles you’ve traveled, or how many times you’ve flown between New York and D.C.? Flight Memory can keep track of your trips and display fun graphs and interesting statistics of your travels.
Flight Memory is free to sign up. Once you have an account, you can input all of your future or past flight information. How much you input is up to you, so you can detail all the information you have (Delta Flight 85, Leaving MCO at 9:15 AM, Arriving ORD at 10:45AM, Oct. 13th, 2009, on a Boeing 757, sitting in First Class with a window seat for a business trip) or you can just put in what you can remember (I flew from Phoenix to Seattle back in 2005) and Flight Memory will take care of the rest.
It can be a bit laborious to put in all of your previous flights, especially for the well traveled, but if you are a numbers nut then the payoff is worth it. Not only can you keep track of your longest and shortest flights (in terms of distance and duration), but you can find out how your travel milage stacks up to the circumference of the Earth or the distance to the Moon. It can also tell you, if you didn’t already know, your most frequent airports and routes taken, as well as the airline you fly the most.
But the coolest feature of this site is the poster you can have made of your travels. I wish I had this when I was showing my kids all of the places that I was traveling to! You can even order a personalized world map documenting all of your trips and statistics. Show off all of the cities and countries you’ve conquered in your travels!
Flight Memory is free to sign up and is a great way to put all of your travels in perspective.
Posted by Carol Margolis under Web/Tech |
September 17, 2009
This flu thing has been bugging me (sorry about the pun). As a frequent traveler for over 20 years, I am used to traveling with strangers on flights and using hotel rooms and rental cars after them. However, this year the flu numbers are too telling to ignore.
The Orlando Sentinel recently ran an article about two women who died from the flu. Both were fairly young women – ages 46 and 53 – who never gave a thought to their risk anymore than you or I would. Nevertheless, they became fatal victims of this relentless virus.
Indeed, there have been nearly 100 confirmed flu deaths in Florida alone. Numbers like this are much too high to ignore.
To make it worse, we can’t control the behavior of others. I admit I was shocked and embarrassed to see how many women on a recent cruise failed to wash their hands after using the restroom. This is inexcusable on a ship with 2,400 passengers and almost that many crew members.
What can be done to protect travelers?
All travel vendors need to step up and do their part. Cruiselines have been particularly good about this, no doubt in part because of the frequent reported Norovirus outbreaks. Whatever the reasons, good hygiene is the norm on ships with very strong encouragement that passengers practice it as well.
Hotels vary on their commitment to hygiene but I was delighted with Bill Marriott’s recent blog about this problem. We can only hope that other hoteliers follow Marriott’s lead.
The airlines have not been so robust dealing with this. I have yet to see any comment from any airline addressing this serious health concern.
Fact is, the airlines have very tight turnaround schedules with no time to completely disinfect a plane. While the cleaning crews no doubt do a decent job given their time constraints, there is no suitable substitute for anything less than excellent hygiene with so much at risk for passengers.
UPDATE: Only hours after this blog was posted, MSNBC posted this article warning travelers that airline workers may actually spread the flu faster than the risks from other passengers. This warning comes from the Center for Disease Control. No comment yet from the airline industry.
As for restaurants, anyone involved in food preparation should be wearing gloves. Unfortunately, there is no way to know if this is done without examining kitchens. Otherwise, you can ask and hope they answer honestly.
What’s can travelers do for protection?
I am not a fan of wearing masks or gloves – good luck getting by TSA with a mask on – but if this flu outbreak reaches further deadlier heights, they may be necessary.
What you can do is cover your face if you cough or sneeze and wash your hands very frequently. I know this sounds a little Lady Macbeth-ish but there is no substitute for keeping your hands as clean as possible. Think about it, you touch your face and everything else hundreds of times each day.
Also, don’t walk around without slippers or socks on your feet. This is especially true for heavily traveled spots like hotel rooms.
If you are feeling ill, stay home. After all, you wouldn't want anyone who is sick flying in the seat next to you, much less walking around a mall or sitting at the next desk at work. If you are ill, avoiding contact with other people is critical to minimizing the spread of this disease.
Another thing: Consider getting a flu shot. Of course, check with your doctor first but for most people, they should be safe. USA Today made it easy for fliers to get shots by posting a schedule of airports and times the shots are available.
However, to complicate things this year, there is the normal flu influenza as well as the much publicized and more deadly H1N1 strain, often called swine flu. As of this writing, the H1N1 vaccine is not available but will be soon.
Nevertheless, the Center for Disease Control recommends both injections for those who are at high risk. For more information, check out the CDC here for the normal flu and here for the H1N1.
What else to do? Encourage others to do the same. It is much safer for all of us if everyone does their part.
Think this is not a concern because you won’t get the flu? I certainly hope it doesn’t happen to you, your family, or your friends but consider this sobering thought…
Remember the nearly one hundred people above who died from this bug? They never thought they would get it either. Look where they are today, leaving behind hundreds of grieving families and friends. And this is only in Florida. Do the math for the rest of the country, much less the world.
Please take care and be safe.
Posted by Carol Margolis under Current Affairs |
September 15, 2009
Whether we are on vacation or a business trip, our schedules are full every minute of every day. Must do this.. must see that … we try to do it all. And at the end of our trip, have we accomplished what was on our long to-do lists, or do we lament over what did not get done? Unfortunately, I am in the latter camp more than I want to be. I spend so much time focused on the 'doing' that I overlook the 'enjoying'.
On a recent flight, I started a conversation with a gentleman sitting next to me. He was reading one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, authored by my mentor Jack Canfield. This gentleman had just been to visit his 90-year old mother. He was upset that TSA had not allowed him to bring a jar of beets through security – a jar of beets made with love by his mother. He had recently lost his job and he struggled to pay for the airline ticket, but he really wanted to see his mother. He relayed how unworthy he had been feeling of late, and his confidence in finding work was very low.
Well into the conversation I began to have regrets about starting the conversation in the first place. I had a novel with me that I really wanted to get back to. I had work that I should be doing … and magazines to catch up on. But I felt that he needed someone to talk to so I continued to listen. The values that he was expressing in family, in his religion, in hope and trust, made me realize that I could learn a lot from this man. I began to relax and enjoy and learn from his conversation and decided that my novel could wait for another time.
I put aside that mental checklist that I carry around in my head that says I have to check off each item on my to-do list, and it felt very nice and freeing. The time in flight passed quickly. As I got off the plane, I was really pleased that I had been able to enjoy our conversation and felt that the guidance we offered each other would be valuable for a long time to come.
The point of this article is to let some enjoyment into each and every one of your travels; even business travels with full to-do lists. That enjoyment will be different for everyone. Some of the enjoyment is planned – some of it comes upon us unexpectedly as in the gentleman with the beets. It may be a full day of enjoyment or just a few minutes.
Your enjoyment may come from being with friends or from some precious moments spent alone. Be open to it, look for it, and start each day asking "What enjoyment am I going to experience today?" You may find that you will be able to tolerate more of the travel challenges when you focus on the enjoyment you experienced. So leave your to-do list and long list of travel complaints aside for a short time. Really feel the enjoyment that you were able to have a result of being fortunate to travel.
Posted by Carol Margolis under Random Thoughts |
September 2, 2009
There has been lots of talk lately about the FAA’s rule about having only official airline-approved materials (safety brochures, in-flight magazine, air-sickness bag) in the seat back pocket. This may be a rule, but it is certainly not a 100% enforced rule. Only once have I had a flight attendant tell me that I could not store my laptop in the seat back pocket (this was on a commuter jet). So instead I placed the laptop under the seat in front of me to follow ‘the rules’ (my laptop bag had to be gate-checked because it was too big for the tiny overhead bins). If we were to hit any turbulence, the loose laptop had a much more likely chance of going airborne instead of safely being tucked inside the seat back pocket. I think it was this same flight attendant who told me we could not take off if I had my purse on my lap (my purse is a wallet, so not big at all).
Regardless of this one seat back pocket event many flights ago, I have never heard of this FAA rule until last week. I checked with several flight attendants from various major airlines. They had not heard of the rule either, and some of them checked with their companies to verify that they were not enforcing it. Not only were none of the major U.S. airlines enforcing it, the flight attendants said that they dreaded the day if they ever had to enforce it!
Can you imagine waiting to take off until the flight attendants had checked down into the depths of every seat back pocket? We would never take off on time! And then they would need to check the pockets again in preparation for landing … so we would end up circling for an hour while they did pocket-check. It is already difficult enough for flight attendants to get everyone to cooperate with the no phone and electronics rule. Airlines would need to replace the fabric or leather pockets with clear vinyl that flight attendants could see through, and that is an expense the airlines do not need now.
And what about the creative companies that have developed seat back carriers that hold lots of stuff in a myriad of pockets (especially great when traveling with kids) – is that now also against the rules?
I went to www.faa.gov and www.tsa.gov and looked for any articles on “seat back pockets”, but found nothing. So until the rule is enforced and made public to travelers on these websites, I am going to continue filling my seat back pocket with magazines, my iPod and water bottle. And I think most flight attendants will be A-Ok with this.
Posted by Carol Margolis under Travel |
