Cheap Tickets, Hotels

The New York Times William Grimes writes about Chuck Thompson's travel memoir:

In a chapter on the workings of the travel industry, Thompson strongly recommends lying whenever possible to gain extra discounts on cars, hotel rooms and air tickets. No one knows that you are not the regional sales director for Microsoft. If your batteries die midflight, rubbing them briskly on your leg to generate static electricity can prolong their life for as much as an hour or two. "This also works in cheap hotels where they never change the batteries in the remote," he writes.

A cloud of guilt envelops Thompson as he writes, conscious that he and his travel colleagues have strip-mined the earth of its most precious resource: pleasant, undiscovered destinations. "We venerate what we destroy," he writes. "But first we destroy."

By the time he got around to returning to Eastern Europe, travel journalism had done its work, specifically television travelers like Rick Steves and the Lonely Planet guides, two of Thompson's favorite targets.

Every description sounded as if it had been lifted from a feminine-hygiene-spray commercial," he writes of one of Steves' Eastern European video tours. "Seas glistened. Cities sparkled. Hungary was a 'goulash' of influences. And, of course, the Croatian city of Split was the usual fascinating blend of ancient and modern."

How about South America instead? "Second only to the Himalayas for mountain drama, the turbulent beauty of the Andes" � but wait, could this description possibly be written by none other than Thompson? As he duly notes, travel journalists are a little like alcoholics, doomed to repeat the same story in the same words. Backsliding, apparently, is always a danger.

David Pogue writes:

* Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones? --" Because the people that can afford to stay at expensive hotels are willing to pay for it. "[Many, many responses like this one.] --""No, the real question is: Why does the free Wi-Fi at the cheap hotels work perfectly 99% of the time, while the expensive hookup at the fancy digs usually fails on the first try?"

* What's the real reason you have to turn off your laptop for takeoff? --"So the laptops won't go flying around if the plane stops abruptly during an aborted takeoff, and passengers won't be distracted in case of an emergency evacuation." --"Security theatre: the illusion that the airlines are doing all they can to protect you from harm."