Category — Travel

It seems to be time to put the boot in on Groupon. The share price is tanking. Businesses have had bad experiences with the online daily-deals service (though this is hardly new news). Schadenfreude is doing the rounds. Last week I was speaking to a London restaurateur about how she uses the service. And you know what? She is delighted with the results of her two offers. But then:

1. She’s done her maths. She knows that the Groupon voucher breaks even for her, at best. That’s all. There’s no chance she’ll lose money on the deal, but if she wants to make a profit, well, …

2. Not everything you could ever want from an evening in the restaurant is on that voucher. There’s an up-sell/cross-sell strategy in place before anyone walks in the door.

3. She knows when she’s busy, and when she isn’t. There’s no point in her shipping in break-even customers when regulars are fighting for a table. For her, November is a great month to run a Groupon deal. December would be nuts. [Read more →]

Slack, slack, slack.

No, not my “forthcoming projects” folder. That one’s bursting-full, thankfully. More my unforgiveably irregular postings and updates here. It’s about time, so here’s a snapshot of some of what I’ve been up to work-wise in the last couple of months.

• My regular slot in the Sunday Telegraph‘s travel Q&A column, as consumer technlogy expert, continued with two advice pieces on data roaming. There are more coming out soon, on different subjects.
• A couple of UK guidebooks I worked on last year have been published. For Frommer’s England & the Best of Wales 2012, I wrote chapters on “Hampshire & Dorset” and “North Wales”, and co-wrote chapters on “Wiltshire & Somerset” and “London”. For Frommer’s London 2012, I was lead author and wrote 3 new chapters. There are more guidebooks in the pipeline, some already listed on my Amazon author page.
• I’ve been back in Tuscany (twice), researching a piece for the Guardian (coming soon) and two new guidebooks due out in 2012, one of them a new edition of my Frommer’s Florence & Tuscany Day by Day.
• Various travel features have appeared here and there, including this slideshow guide to Britain for music lovers.

If you represent or know of anywhere (or anything) I should see or hear about, I’m always happy to be contacted by phone or email, or on Twitter. I’ll attempt to update this page a bit more regularly in future… but my record on that to date would suggest I’m wise not to make any promises. See you around.

If you travel with an unlocked smartphone (and you should), you really don’t want to access the Web overseas via your home mobile network. Not unless you can afford the second mortgage payments that data roaming requires, anyway.

For visitors to Italy, buying a local SIM card with internet access is as simple as 1-2-3:

1) Find a cellphone shop. All you need to do is find the tourist office or a friendly local and ask: “Sto cercando un negozio [INSERT NETWORK NAME… SEE BELOW]…?” Italians talk on their mobiles all day every day, and anywhere with more than about 100 inhabitants has a phone shop. Euronics superstores sell all the networks under one roof.

2) Remember your passport, or driving licence, or similar official ID. As well as cash or credit card, they are going to ask you for “un documento,” which they will photocopy. This is required by Italian law. If they also request a “codice fiscale” (a tax number), just tell them “sono un(a) turista.” Visitors don’t need one to buy a mobile phone.

3) Choose your network and tariff. If you’re only here temporarily, you want “una scheda ricaricabile, anche per navigare in Internet sul mio smartphone” (“a pay-as-you-go [PAYG] SIM that also connects to the Internet via my smartphone”). Make sure that you also register for a prepaid data option, as paying-as-you-browse for data is very expensive (for EU residents, not much cheaper than connecting via roaming).

As of August 2011, these are the best network-by-network deals on data in Italy: [Read more →]

Still buried in guidebook work for 5 titles covering various bits of the UK and Italy. However, a couple of features have appeared online in the last month.

A Guide to Italian Street Names for Frommers.com:

Popes and lovers, assassins and pacifists, artists, scholars, inventors, and industrialists: There are no set criteria to qualify for an Italian street named in your honor — though saints, like important dates in the country’s short history, are pretty much a shoo-in. Among literally thousands (including several named Via John F. Kennedy and Via “Abramo” Lincoln), here are just a handful of monikers to get you started.

Read the rest at Frommers.com

And, for the Sunday Telegraph, an answer to a reader’s question: Can I really use Groupon or similar group-buying websites to find travel bargains? The answer, of course, is yes you can.

More soon.

I spent part of March and most of April on the road, in Tuscany, researching an update to a major guidebook (about which more soon), but while I was away one or two things have appeared on- and offline.

Most satisfying of the lot was the publication of the new edition of our award-winning family travel guidebook (with a slightly revised name), Frommer’s Tuscany, Umbria & Florence With Your Family. I’m always happy to hear opinions on what’s right, or what’s wrong, about the book, so if you’ve read it or (better still) test-driven it in the wild, do leave a comment below or get in touch. If you’re a journalist or blogger and fancy reviewing it, drop me a line and I’ll arrange that. It’s not yet published in the US, so you can get a jump on the rest if you fancy seeing it now.

Three features appeared online in the last month. The first was a contribution to the Guardian’s 10 of the Best Summer Holidays for Under-Fives, in which I went with the island of Elba (out of season), and these friendly family apartments in particular. As part of my regular tech-expert Q&A slot for the Sunday Telegraph, I answered the reader question: Where can I search online for affordable alternative accommodation? Among my suggestions for sidestepping the usual villa, apartment, and hotel websites were the excellent “pop-up B&B” site Crashpadder.com and MonasteryStays.com, which sells what you think it sells, currently in Italy only (but watch this space). MonasteryStays.com recently hosted me with the Suore di Santa Elisabetta, in Florence, a friendly place I’d certainly recommend to anyone travelling on a budget and bringing a car into the city.

Most recently, I wrote an extended slideshow piece for Frommers.com on San Frediano, Florence’s rapidly-changing left-bank neighbourhood:

Cities change. It’s what they do. However, one of the draws of Florence has been that its center is stuck in time. It was old when Lucy and George traded gazes in E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel, Room with a View. It was old when the English Grand Tourists of the 1700s came to study the palazzo architecture and church art. Heck, some of it was even old when Michelangelo raised his giantDavid outside the Palazzo Vecchio. He’d still be able to navigate much of Florence’s centro storico, without Google Maps.

However, one part that is changing — and fast — is San Frediano.

There’s more in the pipeline, including three more guidebooks due out before the end of 2011 and hopefully an update to my Florence iPhone app (iTunes link). My Amazon Author Page has details of a couple of the books.

Yesterday saw the launch of a major lobbying effort by ABTA, for a so-called “Fair Tax on Flying“:

The Fair Tax on Flying  campaign is an alliance of more than 25 airlines, airports, tour operators, destinations and trade associations who are uniting to call on the Government to make the system of aviation tax in the UK fairer.  We already pay the highest levels of aviation tax of any nation in Europe.

By fairer, of course, they largely mean lower. Or, at least, no higher than it is under current APD 4-band rules: £12 per person for economy class flights to Europe, £60 for the USA, and £85 to Australia, for example. There is a Facebook group, which has attracted “Likes” from plenty of respectable travel industry names, alongside the odd anti-all-tax nut and corporates with an obvious interest. Major players at the top level of the industry (largely the CEOs and MDs of the big airports, airlines, and large outbound tour operators) have written to the Chancellor outlining their case (pdf).

If the idea is to “unite the travel industry” behind the campaign, I’m afraid I’m not joining. [Read more →]

I’m going to be contributing regularly to the UK Sunday Telegraph‘s weekly travel advice column, answering reader questions on technology and the Web. My first piece was in reply to:

Q: “I know it should be possible to save money by shopping around for flights. But what’s the best website for finding deals? There are so many to choose from these days.”

Answer:

It wasn’t so long ago that the terminal operated by a high-street travel agent was the gatekeeper to all our holiday bookings.

Then along came online travel agents (OTAs), such as Expedia and Travelocity, with websites that allowed us to search for ourselves. However, an OTA isn’t usually the cheapest place to find a flight deal online. A newer breed of site known as the “meta-search engine” provides (in theory) a more comprehensive service.

These meta-search engines trawl hundreds of airline websites, OTAs, flight-data wholesalers and other search engines to find the best price. But which one finds the cheapest flight most often?

Read the rest, and the results of my test, at Telegraph.co.uk

There’s a short interview with me in this week’s annual Bookseller travel supplement. It’s part of an interesting piece about how the move to digital has “changed things” for travel publishers, and what (if anything) this means for print. Quite rightly, I think, the conclusion is: The printed guidebook ain’t dead yet, and indeed is still seeing some clever innovation.

I won’t lift directly from the piece, as it’s not online, so pasted below are transcripts of the answers I gave to the interview questions. My meanderings were (quite rightly) truncated for the final feature; even I had to trim some of the waffle, in retrospect, to reproduce these below. So…

Are travel writers being given different briefs, and has the type of content that publishers want changed?

Yes and no. Certainly, we’re now clear from the minute we put keystroke to page that the content we’re producing has to work in a variety of formats. Given the wide range of the Frommer’s offering, for example, that might include appearing in an app, as lead destination information on Frommers.com, or as an e-book… as well as its traditional home in the pages of a guidebook. However, the basic demand for well-crafted, timely, accurate, and informative content hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, given the poor signal-to-noise ratio of travel information on the Web, those traditional qualities demanded by a leading guide publisher are even more important. Writers and publishers who want to make a profitable living in the era of mass “free” content have to be 100% committed to quality in order to survive. Sometimes, that means a 2-hour round-trip to check the accuracy of a couple of sentences of text.

Is the commissioning process changing? Is there less work available?

The commissioning process is changing in the sense that it’s now possible to bypass it altogether. There’s more work than ever before for entrepreneurial writers, and some out there are doing a fine job of producing quality content from outside the traditional publishing industry. I write for Frommer’s, in the traditional, contracted way, and have written and commissioned iPhone travel apps for InstantCities.com in a looser way, taking a share of the profits. Both work for me. Far more than the details of the commissioning process, however, it’s the role of the editor that’s key. The editorial process is what makes the quality difference, and I’m always grateful to the people that edit my work at Frommer’s, the Sunday Telegraph, and elsewhere. The carefully crafted edit, as much as the research and writing, is one of the key factors making content worth paying for.

What are the key changes as a result of the digital shift?

The explosion of digital is probably the biggest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg. It’s an exciting time to be a travel writer, for sure. However, the proliferation of “publishers” hasn’t eroded the value in writing for a leading outlet, a name that comes with its own reputation. It’s no longer the only way to get your writing heard, of course, but it’s still the best. The exponential growth of the “travel Web” has also tweaked the nature of our job. We’re as much “curators of the best things” as “discoverers of new things” these days. Digital offers one set of tools for curating information, certainly, but print isn’t standing still either, and print design is becoming hugely important for leading readers around guidebooks. Some of the forthcoming redesigns I’ve seen from Frommer’s for 2011 are mighty impressive.

[Disc.: I mention Frommer's and the Sunday Telegraph, obviously, because I write for them. Other publishers, newspapers, and travel websites are available.]

With my head firmly buried in four separate major guidebook projects (including a completely revamped edition of Tuscany & Umbria With Your Family due out in April), as well as commissioning some great new additions to the Instant Cities series of iPhone apps, this Autumn has been a little light on the journalism front. In addition to a feature on essential technologies to take travelling, for Singapore Airlines’ inflight magazine SilverKris (not online), I wrote about Finding the best late holiday deals for the UK’s Sunday Telegraph. The piece covered private sales and auctions, smartphone and iPad apps, deals newsletters, luxury hotel discounters, Twitter, Facebook, cashback sites, forums and voucher websites. Anyway, read it all at telegraph.co.uk.

More coming soon…

It’s been a busy few months working on two new guidebooks plus the new edition of an Italian phrasebook, but here are links to a couple of my recent contributions in print.

Every September, history and architecture buffs have a field day as countless private and government buildings across Britain throw open their doors to visitors – for free.

For Singapore Airlines’ SilverKris magazine; read it all at silverkris.com

One of my favourite Dorset walks takes me in and around the “ghost village” of Tyneham, by the southern coast of the Isle of Purbeck. This farming hamlet at the foot of Ridgeway Hill was requisitioned by the War Office in 1943 (the area was suited to gunnery practice), with a promise that it would be returned to the villagers after the war… It never was.

A short contribution to the Telegraph‘s “Best countryside holidays in Britain”; read it all at telegraph.co.uk

Finding the best late holiday deals online. It isn’t only tour operators’ websites that offer bargain holidays. For the best deals, you have to look farther afield.

Read it all at telegraph.co.uk