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Lufthansa, SWISS and Austrian To Offer Customer Service Through Messenger
Finally, a little bit of tech-forwardness. Twitter customer service is so dead.
The United Kingdom Opens Its Electronic Passport Gates To More Nationalities
Updated: May 20, 2019Per an official statement, the electronic gates are open to citizens of the seven countries listed starting May 20.
One Mile at a Time recently reported this fortuitous change in the UK’s immigration process: Starting June 2019, the automated e-gates at immigration in all UK airports will be available to passport holders from seven new countries, including the U.S.
The countries included on the list are:
- Australia
- Canada
- Japan
- New Zealand
- Singapore
- South Korea
- United States
It is already available to UK, EU, EEA or Swiss passports. It is not known if the new countries will kick in on June 1, or sometime later during the month of June.
Essentially, this means these citizens are now eligible to use the ePassport gates, which use biometric scanning and a camera to get through immigration instead of speaking to a live, customs officer.
Though the UK has a Registered Traveller program through which select passport holders were able to use these (for a cost, like a whopping £70 or $88.89 USD per year), that simply won’t be the case anymore.
(Portugal already offers this service to electronic passport holders, and I was able to use this recently while exiting the country. Hong Kong also offers this to its residents. I’d love to see more and more countries begin to offer this, instead of jumping in a ginormous, inefficient line.)
Probably a countermeasure against Brexit, or something.
A Quiet Reflection on the Notre Dame Fire
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel: The Notre Dame, a historic landmark that has stood on the edge of a cultural lexicon for 850 years, seemingly immune to catastrophe, has caught on fire.
Over the decade I’ve spent devoted to traveling and seeing the world, I have been to enough places to know if it’s a place I will ever return to partake in again. What I rarely know is when I will be back, and how I, or the place, may change in the meantime.
In some cases, it’s a mere matter of months before I return. Sometimes supposed months turn into years, and in some cases, several lifetimes will have passed before I am able to come back. And in that time, I often find that not only I may have become a different person, but it may also have become a different place.
Time rarely ever stands still despite our plans.
Tragic as it is, the Notre Dame Cathedral, like so many other landmarks that have encountered misfortunes, is a sobering reminder that there is a rarely a moment that is best savored as the present. Everything is so fragile, isn’t it?
No matter how many times that you proclaim “Mongolia will always be there!”
It is moments like these that reminds me of other things that were lost. Two years ago, Malta’s Azure Window, the country’s most celebrated rock arch collapsed, after massive winds eventually rocked and reduced the formation to literally pebbles at the sea floor.
The Azure Window. The rock arch is no longer there as of 2017. (Juan Antonio Segal / Flickr)
In the last five years, almost all of Syria’s UNESCO’s heritage sites, including the ancient city of Palmyra were completely lost. Treasures that withstood multiple millennia, only to be destroyed in the brief, fractional presence of looters and hooligans.
There are things that can not be replaced. Maybe what the Notre Dame’s roof is telling us is to not be careless with our time, and with what we love and value.
I don’t proclaim to to be personally and intimately tied to the Notre Dame Cathedral; I wasn’t into The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Quasimodo seemed creepy to me). I am not Catholic. I am not from Paris, nor am I from France. It plays no part in my identity politics, other than as a tourist.
But I do remember visiting the Notre Dame one quiet afternoon. I remember stepping into the cathedral, and feeling my heart lift ever so softly. It is these fleeting moments, however we find it, whether it’s a place, song or a person, that keep us connected to the world at large.
This Victor Hugo quote will probably be oft repeated in the countless stories that will be written over the next coming days: Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin.
Love is a strange thing. How simply being there can affect us in strange ways. But like it does for so many other things, it will also quite literally, lift the Notre Dame out of the ashes.
The ancient city of Palmyra in 2007, before it was destroyed five years ago. (brunomalfondet / Flickr)
Get Ready to Register In Order To Visit Europe (in Two Years)
Gone long are the days where borders are seamless and open. On top of Britain’s exit from the EU, the European Parliament will now require American travelers to register ahead of time before traveling there starting in two years.
Tell Us How Much Your Trip Really Cost.
No shame here, but we were fully inspired by Refinery29’s money diaries to want to ask you how much you actually spend on a trip.1
Besides, we are secure enough to admit when we don’t have an original idea.
Real talk, how much did you spend on hotels and hostels, the Michelin prixe fix lunch, the booze, and flying over the Nazca lines? How much was incurred in foreign transaction fees? (I mean, if you’re that fastidious about the money tracking, by all means.)
There are a couple of things that we want to do differently, though. We want this to include travelers of all genders and walks of life, so even if there’s a little one in tow, we want to hear about this. Plus, the truth is, that in this day and age, many people are using points to pay for a substantial amount of things.
Travel editors also don’t travel like normal people.2 In our gilded life, tourism representatives wine and dine us, and we stand at the freakin’ center of Mexico, in the crypt that houses all the archbishops (seriously).
So we’re relying on you to tell us! Aside from blogging about our occasional, once-a-year vacation where we’re forced to pay for things. 😅3
Pro Tip Our budgeting spreadsheet is not only helpful for tracking expenses, but also for submitting this diary. 😉
Marriott Bonvoy New Members Get a Free Night After Two Stays
Because everyone had better things to do on Valentine’s Day, most people might have missed the fact that Marriott has decided to rebrand its loyalty program to Marriott Bonvoy.
How To Use Atlas Obscura To Plan a Trip
Looking for something a bit kooky to visit? Here’s how to navigate Atlas Obscura for the next trip, short of building a master adventure map.
Few People Know Google Trips Offers Discounts Inside the App.
It seems for a while now that Google Trips has offered travel discounts for, well, virtually doing nothing.1 This feature has been around since 2017, but it appears to be one of those things that no one knows about.
Part of Google Trips’ appeal is being able to condense everything from reservations to sightseeing in one cohesive place. Talk about one-stop shopping.
The discount feature isn’t one that we were even aware about before but plan on utilizing a lot more. (It would even incline us to use Google Trips more often, as opposed to TripCase, TripIt or other like-minded app.)
The discounts are mostly centered around local activities. Current partners include Expedia, Peek, Urban Adventures, GetYourGuide and several other tour operators.
On a recent trip, though the GetYourGuide price was higher for things like museum activities, the Google Trips discount often made it cheaper than the museum. For instance, in Porto, Portugal, the official FC Porto museum and stadium tour cost €15 ($16.74). The final GetYourGuide cost was $13.83 (€12.39).
It would be great to see this extended to lodging and other travel operators, but hey, so far it seems like a good deal to us. Money is money.
Finding Discounts in the app
Google Trips pulls in its travel data based on a user’s emails. Discounts are only offered for future trips, not past trips for the obvious reasons.
One quick workaround to get this feature to show up in the app is to quickly create a trip in the future to book an offer (in case a trip is not showing up). It will generally show up as a block under the large umbrella of a particular trip.
For a sample Boston trip, deals ranged from $20 off Expedia activities to 30% off Boston airport transfers with Holiday Taxis.
To see how this quickly worked, we selected 20% off a pretty reputable European-based tour booking platform GetYourGuide. To see if we actually received a discount, we selected a Boston 90-Minute Historic Sightseeing Cruise for $30.40 on the both the app and through the website.
Though it took a bit of finagling to get the dates right, the GetYourGuide deal in the app finally yielded a 20% off discount that was reflected on the checkout page.
The Google Trips discount yielded $6.08 off the normal price of $30.40, bringing the price down to $24.32.
The website offered us $30.40.
Seems kind of like a no-brainer to us.
