cloudtravel

New Orleans after the Hurricane

Ernie the Attorney jumped in his car on Sunday and fled the Garden District of Uptown New Orleans just ahead of Hurricane Katrina.  He sat in his car for four hours and gained a total of 15 miles on the storm, after which he turned around and went home. 

He's without power, but has water, provisions, a car, a phone line and some limited ability to post on his site.  Take a look.

Views of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans

As of this writing Hurricane Katrina is making landfall in southwest Louisiana, with the forecast that it the eye of the storm will just skirt to the east of New Orleans.  All day yesterday the Interstate highways were running contraflow, all in one direction, in order to effectuate a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans and coastal areas (LA DOT evacuation maps). The topographical bowl of New Orleans could easily get swamped by the 18-22 foot expected storm surge and overflow from Lake Pontchartrain.  Here is the latest news from Baton Rouge, and here is the latest Hurricane tracking map.  Here is a map showing current rainfall.

The Department of Transportation digicams that monitor the major roadways have mostly stopped updating as of Saturday.  But a few private digicams are functioning, allowing a view into what's happening right now.  Here is a digicam mounted above Fat Harry's Bar that shows St. Charles Avenue near to the intersection of Napoleon Street.  Here is a view from a high rise building near the W Hotel in the Central Business District.

Fare Hunting in European Cyberspace

As I reported on Tuesday, I've been farehunting more on kayak, which seems to find lower fares than many better known faresearchers, like expedia and travelocity.  There are so many great fares for destinations inside Europe that I'm also looking more at European-based fare search websites.  Take a look at opodo, for instance.  This UK site is easy to navigate and use and has rock-bottom fares out of all kinds of English primary and secondary airports into the continent.  You can translate the fares in pounds sterling using the Universal Currency Converter.  The Belgian site Travelprice is another example, however you have to be ready to deal with French or Dutch language text.  Fortunately, the farefinder layout is the same as you're probably used to, so you get the gist of it.  You can also use Google's language tools to translate blocks of text into English.

Travelocity and Expedia Slipping as Fare Hunters

Borrowing liberally from a running joke in the movie, Amelie, Travelocity has an ad campaign featuring a traveling garden gnome.  Like Zagat's restaurant guides, Travelocity has gone mainstream.  Eight years ago or so Zagat and Travelocity were sleepers.  Fewer people knew about them.  They worked hard, delivered the goods, and when new subscribers found them they delighted. Zagat went online and was free!! (No longer, mister; you have to subscribe and the on-line menus are pre-packaged and arguably less flexible than they were in the heyday.) 

As the Zagat story illustrates, mainstream doesn't always deliver better product.  There has been growing speculation and a few articles suggesting that Travelocity and Expedia are losing ground to competitors as the best on-line way to shop for fares.   As a lesser-known alternative to Travelocity and Expedia, Sidestep has long been a closet favorite (athough, annoyingly, Sidestep loads a program on your computer that pops up anytime you try to search a fare with a competitor program and inserts its own quote in a minimizable window on the page).  Mobissimo is getting press for finding rock-bottom fares, though its substandard personalized customer service functions (like calling the 800 number to get a seat assignment) take criticism. Kayak and Yahoo Farechase have also earned attention in their ability to undercut the fares coughed up by Travelocity and Expedia.

Cruel Cruise Rules: Stuck at Sea

The idea of taking a cruise has both appeal and revulsion to me.  The idea of a worry-free, pre-packaged travel plan is nice.  You just book your option, board with the family and forget about the fuss. For sure, cruises have been the fastest-growing segment of the travel business since the 9/11 attacks.  But cruises can be an unrewarding way for you to eat up your vacation time and dollars.  They are the epitome of the fish-bowl vacation.  There are customer-care inflexibilities in how cruises are booked and run that I find pretty outrageous, and so I flag them from time to time on this site for traveler consideration, particularly because so many people are taking cruises many for the first time.

I've had a number of posts about the cruel rules applied by cruise lines in dealing with their customers (this June 7 post is one). For instance, your ability to sue for damages for something that goes ary on a cruise is limited by maritime laws.  There other kinds of restrictions that travelers would never stand for on dry land.  This travel horror story page is largely populated with cruise stories, and there is a good reason for it. 

The big nightmare for me is that I book a cruise and I'm stuck.  The food is lousy, the accomodation is loud and maybe uclean, the pre-planned events are stuipid and the promised childcare is unreliable.  It's day one of my cruise, I hate it and I've got a week to go - do I have any options?  Well, let's say that you decide you want to get off a cruise for some reason.  The truth of it is that there is a fair chance you're just stuck on the cruise.  According to the chat and sites I've found, passengers are generally only taken off a ship a sea in the situation of a medical emergency.  Even a documented emergency like the death of a close family member requires jumping through lots of hoops to get off the boat.  You have to work with a guest services representative to arrange a flight out at the next port of call. You may have to pay the cruise line a fine.  If the ship is close to completion of the cruise, you may just have to wait it out, buster.