Some Miscellaneous Travel Notes

We've reached the end of an unusually lengthy cold snap in the Pacific Northwest, with sunny skies and temperatures consistently below freezing day and night. The rain has returned.

We spent the time inside making the final preparations for our upcoming trip to Prague and Vienna. 

We've mentioned before how much we value TripIt, an app with both free and paid versions (we've opted for the paid) that serves as a detailed travel itinerary in which you can record flights, cruise ships, hotel rooms, and a lot more. We review it in detail as a sort of dress rehearsal before any trip. 

One small example is discovering today that we hadn't included the phone number of the Philadelphia airport hotel where we'll stay both on our outbound and return flights. We added it to TripIt, and now we can instantly pull it up on our phones and call for a shuttle.

We've previously written about checking for price drops in hotels we've already booked. Many savvy travelers continue to check air fares after they've purchased them. If the prices drop, it may be possible to change and re-book, depending on the airline and perhaps your status. Even some experienced travelers don't think about doing the same for hotels. That's a regular part of our routine. Less than an hour's checking and rebooking this mornnig and we've saved well over a hundred Euros on our hotel stays for our short upcoming trip. Sometimes the prices are higher. In that case, we congratulate ourselves on cleverly snagging a bargain rate!

A couple of other miscellaneous notes...

One of our go-to professional travel bloggers, Gary Leff of View From The Wing, writes here about a United flight to Dublin diverted due to a medical emergency to "rural Canada" where passengers were "trapped" for some time. 

The airport in question, YYT,  serves St. John's. Newfoundland. St. John's is the provincial capital of Newfoundland, and a modern city with a population of around 200,000.

"Trapped in rural Canada"?  Give us a break (insert laughing emoji)!

This opportunity seems tempting. The Association of Ferry Shipping and Ferry Tourism (VFF), based in Hamburg. Germany, is looking for a "Ferry Ambassador" who will travel on a fleet of ferries (and one cruise ship) for one year without charge, worth up to 10,000 Euros in fares. 

In return, you have to report about your trips on social media. There's one catch - you don't get paid anything, so you'll have to subsidize yourself. Oh, and reasonable fluency in German is probably a necessity. If you're still interested, you can find a link to the application here.

Finally, FlyerTalk covers a new study that claims to reveal who is sitting in first class.  We know that we don't as often as we used to. It's fortunate our Alaska status automatically assigns us seats us in Alaska's pleasant Premium Economy. 

Now we're off to record our upcoming trip on the U.S. State Department's Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP). It might come in handy someday, although we hope it's never needed.