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The Curse of Chinatown: And Other Updated Wisdom for the Modern Traveler

Maybe it makes me sound like a hypocrite, but for all the complaining I’ve done over the years about the travel industry’s hidebound ways—at Travelocity and elsewhere—I’ve also developed an appreciation for its astounding intricacy and the overall excellence of many of those who make it work at ground level. And come to understand that a Zen-like acceptance of travel as a highly unpredictable animal is the most effective way of approaching it.

Hit the road enough and you eventually acquire a workmanlike knowledge that goes well beyond knowing what you want at the Panda Express in Terminal C before you even look at the menu. It doesn’t take a travel writer to get a basic handle on the industry, which is why it always amazes me that you almost never find anything novel or particularly useful in those “savvy traveler” columns every magazine and newspaper in America trots out two or three times a year to announce for the millionth time that you should drink plenty of water while on a plane and “check the Internet” to find deals on hotels. Wow. I’ll bet no mileage-club gold-level account rep crisscrossing the country ever thought to do that before.

In fact, most of our ideas about tourism and the companies that facilitate it are pretty old—Victorian influence on contemporary life is never ending. In the 1800s, rapid economic growth among the working class of Britain coupled with development of the steamship and railroad opened the globe to citizens of the world’s foremost imperial power, leading to the almost unheard-of idea of travel for travel’s sake. With money and transportation flinging open the doors of the world to the common man, the Victorians established a massive new industry. The template for modern travel was created around British tastes for the beach, wilderness idylls, museums, cities of antiquity, and, critically, the opposite sex. Queen Victoria’s plebes didn’t exactly roll like spring breakers at Panama Beach, but they were quick to seize upon romantic opportunities that became more available the farther one got from the restrictions of home.

For a century and a half, give or take, all proceeded swimmingly. But technology, which made tourism a mass phenomenon in the first place, has transformed the beast entirely. In 1950, international tourist arrivals around the world totaled 25 million. By the turn of this century, the number was 693 million. On a global scale, tourism accounts for more than $450 billion annually, a volume that, depending on how you count it, rivals oil and petroleum exports as the world’s largest industry. Groups like Global Exchange, an international human rights organization, claim the travel/leisure industry is actually the world’s largest, accounting for 10.4 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and 4 percent of global employment. Whatever the exact numbers, it’s time our expectations about travel were brought up to date.

 

From the ant brigade of Brazil crawling across my body to being left broke and homeless on a Thai beach, I’ve endured the most stone-hearted indignities travel dishes out. Even so, I’ve been averaging a trip a month for the past decade and will in all likelihood continue to do so. Just because the reality doesn’t often line up with the advertised fantasy—that the staff will be competent, that none of the previous fifteen hundred people who’ve crashed in your hotel room will have dried deep into the crack of their ass with the towel you just used to wipe your face, that the locals actually want you there for reasons that have nothing to do with your money—doesn’t mean you should stop traveling. It simply means that you need to travel smarter.

After giving up on finding anything new in those workhorse rundowns of tired tips, I began keeping my own list of ways of making life easier away from home. Though constantly in flux, my list (abbreviated below) always culminates in the single golden rule meant to equip any twenty-first-century traveler with the proper attitude to travel like a pro.

Lie

Chances are, you already lie a little bit when you travel—and, by the way, when you complain that you’ve been on hold or waiting in line for thirty minutes, they know it’s only been ten—but chances are also good that you should be lying a lot more. For the same reason parents lie to children about that farm in the country where Dad took Friskies the pregnant cat so she could enjoy life on her own feral terms, travel companies lie to you—because it makes their lives easier.

You’ll never be able to fool the industry to the degree that it hoodwinks you—the airlines’ vaunted “on-time” departure records, for example, are finessed in any number of undetectable ways—but you can play their game to your advantage. The easiest involves lying to phone reservation agents with hotels, resorts, and car agencies. The next time you’re booking a reservation and the agent asks if you have a corporate rate or discount, immediately answer yes, then provide the name of a Fortune 500 company you “work for.” If you actually do work for a company that entitles you to a corporate discount, name a higher-profile corporation and see if that gets you a sweeter deal.

Better still, offer the information before being prompted. After a car or hotel reservation agent quotes a rate, try this: “Geez, that’s a little higher than I paid last time. I’m a regional director for Microsoft (or United Airlines or IBM) out here in Phoenix, and I’m pretty sure we have a rate with you guys.” That’ll get a 10 percent discount on the spot, sometimes more. And don’t worry about someone checking up on your bogus employment credentials. Once your rate is logged into a computer, no one down the line has any reason to question it. Every travel transaction is a negotiation, and the easiest place to front is on the phone. How do you think sex chat lines stay in business?

Because they operate on doomsday margins—the price of jet fuel alone tripled between 2004 and 2006—the airlines are the Nazis of the travel industry and take more effort to deceive. Even so, the airport offers innumerable opportunities for dishonesty. You’re prone to deep-vein thrombosis and really need that bulkhead seat—I know a writer who carries a phony doctor’s note for this ruse. You just pulled a red-eye shift at work and you’re the best man at a wedding in Tampa and the minute you get off this plane you have to race to the rehearsal dinner, so if there’s any way they can block out an empty row in the back so that you can get some rest, you’d really appreciate it. Female counter agents are suckers for wedding stories, and details about things like rehearsal dinners establish your credibility.

On some flights, there’s legitimately little a counter agent can do to accommodate special requests, so the sob-story routine isn’t a guaranteed winner. But if you’re creative and willing to sacrifice some personal integrity, deals will fall your way more often than not.

Hang Up on Morons

Because your telephone instincts are always right, disengage from half-wits as soon as you get one on the line. Not regarded as a keenly self-motivated group to begin with, telephone reservation agents perform a repetitive and stressful job for little money—hotel and motel reservation clerks average less than twenty thousand dollars a year. They increasingly work from home, where the distractions of kids, dogs, dinner, and Oprah divert attention from the disembodied entity in Nevada looking for a deal on a Reno-to-Boise hop. Reservation agents quit all the time—25 percent annual turnover at call centers is considered good, 100 is the norm in some places.

If the voice on the other end of the line suggests a creature with the problem-solving capacity of a juvenile bonobo and the interpersonal skills of a Calcutta cabbie, cut your losses and hang up. Keep calling back until you’re connected with a voice that conjures the competent, smiling woman in the headset they show on TV cheerfully booking first-class flights to Venice. There are more than 300,000 travel reservation operators working in the United States. Don’t waste time on the 150,000 lousy ones.

Downsize

The best way to start packing for a trip is by reaching into the drawer next to the bathroom sink and grabbing a handful of trial-size toiletries—mini shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, aspirin, shaving cream, Band-Aids, sunscreen. If you don’t have a drawer like this, start one. Like old ladies who hoard cat food, I’m a habitual collector of handy-sized personal items, tossing random tubes into the basket every time I pass that shelf at the drugstore, lifting them out of hotel bathrooms, plucking them from maid carts left unattended in hotel hallways. Keep enough of these plastic bottles around and you can be out the door for Kabul ten minutes after National Geographic calls the house.

Spicy Is Almost Never Spicy

In the United States when they tell you it’s spicy, it’s not spicy. In the rest of the world when they tell you it’s spicy, there’s a 20 percent chance it’s spicy. In Thailand when they tell you it’s spicy, it’s going to taste like someone shoving a blowtorch down your throat for the next twenty-five minutes.

Steal an Extra Inch of Legroom

For an average-sized adult, cramming into a coach airline seat is perhaps the most dehumanizing requirement of the travel experience. And once you’ve been hectored about sharing overhead compartments, been spoken to like a child for twenty minutes,⁶ obediently stowed your carry-on beneath the seat in front of you, and settled in with your luxurious twelve inches of legroom, what does the airline do? It steals up to another inch of that space—legroom you paid for—by jamming the seat-back pouch in front of you with magazines, catalogs, and other promotional pieces that make money for the airline and its publishing partners at your expense. As soon as you buy a ticket, the airlines sell your eyeballs—and legroom—to advertisers. You don’t really think the TV programming is there for your enjoyment, do you?

Rolling back this crafty territorial incursion is as easy as throwing out the trash, yet few people think to do it. Since you’re under no obligation to accept the airline’s clutter, the next time you’re on a plane, take everything they’ve put in the seat-back pocket, and stick it in the overhead bin. Voilà! You just bought yourself an extra inch of legroom.

Never Eat Airplane Food

There’s a reason the “bistro bags,” box lunches, and assorted snacks—as well as the meals served on longer flights and in first class—are referred to as “earthquake food” by the flight attendants who serve them. Anything with an unrefrigerated shelf life of up to a year ought not technically be considered “food.” The smartest way to prep for a flight is to eat a big meal beforehand and pick up some fruit or deli items on the way to the airport. The same rules apply to international trips. And, yes, it’s a long flight, but if you can’t go ten hours without eating, you shouldn’t be visiting Sri Lanka in the first place.

Resurrect Dead Batteries

If your batteries die while you’re in the air, rub them briskly for a minute or two on your pants leg. The static electricity will give them a recharge that’ll last as long as an hour or two. This also works in cheap hotels where they never change the batteries in the remote.

Don’t Be That Guy

As your mother should have told you, the easiest way to make someone like you is to like them first. With no group of people is this truer than the overworked, underpaid customer-service army that runs the day-to-day operations of this country’s travel monolith.

In recent years I’ve spoken several times off the record with a flight attendant for a major airline. I’ve been acquainted with this woman for a decade and can attest that she’s one of the most pleasant, professional, and decent people I’ve ever known. Not in any way one of those surly dragons who uses her ill-gotten seniority to grab all the Honolulu routes and make life miserable for everyone crossing the Pacific because she’s thirty pounds overweight, her third divorce is hung up in court, and her dye job looks like shit. Some people just aren’t cut out to work with the public, and the airlines have an uncanny knack for finding them. Here’s what my perfectly agreeable, mentally stable flight attendant friend told me about passengers who try to play tough with airline employees.

“Every encounter at an airline starts with the customer’s attitude,” she said. “If a person comes on all demanding or confrontational, I will do everything in my power to make sure they don’t get their way. If someone’s a dick, I will get on the radio and word will spread and everyone at this airline will line up behind each other to shut that person down. It’s the same wherever you go.”

Kiss Ass

The trick to getting what you want out of an airline employee is to get on their good side before they even know there’s a problem. This might mean being prepared with small gifts inside of carry-ons—boxes of chocolates are good. In Arabia this is called baksheesh, a romantic term to keep in mind if “bribery” offends your fragile sensibilities.

Next time you’ve drawn the middle seat that nobody on the phone or at the front counter is willing to change for you, subdue the uglier side of your nature and approach the departure-gate agent with an easygoing smile. When she asks how she can help you, explain that a client has given you this box of chocolates, but that, alas, you’re allergic to the nuts in it, or whatever. Since you hate to see such generosity go to waste, and because you have a sister who used to work for Continental and know what a demanding and thankless job our nation’s counter agents face every day, you’re wondering if she’d like to have the chocolates? Of course she would. And maybe after a little more chitchat about your sister, during which you slide in a reference to the lousy seat you’ve drawn for the flight, she might be inclined to see what she can do about making your life more comfortable.

At this point you’re perhaps asking yourself, “Why bother with this charade?” The flight is “completely full”—the lady on the intercom has harped on this every five minutes—so what can the gate agent do about it? As it turns out, plenty.

In addition to those unclaimed great whites up in business and first class, many commercial jets have “special” seats they leave unassigned until the last minute. These are typically saved for handicapped passengers, solo kids, honeymooners, preferred customers, or, assuming none of the aforementioned show up, fellow airline employees. On some Boeing 767s, for example, seats 17A and B and 17H and J are more comfortable coach seats designated as crew rest seats for international flights. On domestic flights, however, these prime seats, like those in the bulkhead and exit rows, remain open until just before takeoff, when, along with some of the unsold business- and first-class seats, they’re given to traveling employees and counter-agent favorites. Such as the passenger formerly in 33B who was nice enough to drop off a box of candy and talk to the agent like she was an actual human being, not a prison guard.

Tip Early

When staying in a hotel for more than a day or two, don’t wait until the last day to tip the maid. Leave ten bucks on the nightstand the first morning. The maid who cleans the room will do a better job, and she’ll make sure she’s the one who takes care of you again the next day. She might even be good enough to forgo the daily round that requires her to barge into the room at three thirty in the afternoon when you’re on the bed in your underwear watching SportsCenter.

If you aren’t tipping hotel maids, you need to start. Tipping is a lousy system—business owners should pay their employees a living wage, not force them to beg from paying customers for tips they “depend on to make a living”—but we’re stuck with it. As long as we are, it’s near criminal not to recognize that hotel maids work much harder than the valets, bellhops, and coffee slingers who get showered with tips every time they lift an eyebrow. Since maids generally exist farther down the socioeconomic ladder, they need the money more, anyway.

Avoid Chinatown

It doesn’t matter which one—San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, wherever. Every Chinatown in the world distills the worst of the obligatory tourist trap. Most of these brochure institutions are either no longer vital or were fakes in the first place. London’s Chinatown, for example, was established way back in 1970—Old Blighty’s original dockyard slum of opium dens and red lights was leveled long before that. Unless you belong to a triad or your name is Fast Eddie Chan, Chinatowns offer no surprises. They’re loaded with worthless trinkets that look even more worthless once you remove them from the context of reeking fish markets and Chinese calligraphy. There are no public bathrooms; the food’s never as good as you think it’s going to be; the service blows; the fortune cookies are stale; and since it takes an hour to park, everyone feels compelled to get their money’s worth by hanging out well past the point of ennui. Chinatowns have stolen more time from weekend vacations than weather at O’Hare.

Pay Through the Nose—and Like It

If you’re going all the way to the Grand Tetons or the Virgin Islands or Rome, pay the upcharge for the nicer room with the panoramic view. You’re on vacation—let the travel writers worry about living like an animal on a scratch-and-claw budget. As Robertson Davies wrote, “When one is traveling, one must expect to spend a certain amount of money foolishly.” Accept this inevitability with equanimity and you’ll enjoy the trip more.

Ignore Jet Lag

Jet lag is a mental game you don’t have to lose. The best way to beat it is to pretend it doesn’t exist. When you arrive in a new time zone, simply force yourself into a behavior consistent with the local time. Stop being so weak willed. Either that or drop a melatonin pill, the “natural” sleeping pill that actually works without leaving you feeling like a sedated rhino on Animal Planet.

The first time I encountered Glasser outside of Japan was at the San Francisco airport. I was in the city for my sister’s wedding; he’d come for the sole purpose of introducing me to Gaylord’s, the Indian restaurant he’d spent a year waxing rhapsodic about while Shanghai Bob and I picked through the seaweed-wrapped bar snacks at one of Kojima’s dismal sake clubs. At SFO, Glasser staggered off the jet bridge like a ghastly shell tumbling out of a boxcar at Auschwitz. He confessed to me a lifelong battle with jet lag that he’d long ago given up hope of winning. Finally, I was in a position to help Glasser off the floor. One melatonin pill and twelve hours later, the man was inhaling tikka masala and saag paneer like it was the last days of the Raj.

Learn Language the Right Way

Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.

Stop Feeling So Entitled

The numbers thrown around in this chapter—some in the billions—should have been a tip-off to where all of this is heading. For those needing a more detailed accounting of the colossus modern travel has become, here are a few more facts that apply to the United States alone:

Each day in this country, about 1.8 million people travel on thirty thousand flights from approximately 450 commercial airports. That’s not even counting general aviation traffic originating from thousands of private airports, 150 of which are in the Dallas area alone. At any given minute during daylight hours, between six thousand and seven thousand aircraft are in the skies over North America. If you get inside the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center (aka “Flow Control”) in Herndon, Virginia, and see the real-time computer tracking system that uses a green blip to represent every plane in the air across a map of the United States, you’ll see a pulsing mass of solid green with very few open areas.

About 3.2 million hotel rooms are occupied every night in this country. The nation’s in-service car rental fleet stands at 1.7 million vehicles. Amtrak carries 25 million passengers a year—68,000 per day. Greyhound hauls 22 million more—60,000 per day. At this very minute, 27,000 North Americans are trying to talk themselves out of a third trip through the buffet line of the cruise ship they’re currently fattening up on.

Offensive as it may be to hear, no matter how much you spend on travel, your bottom-line value to the industry is so insignificant that it can’t actually be calculated. Feel free to go on and on about how this country was founded upon customer service—it wasn’t, by the way, it was founded on tobacco and land speculation—and how the impertinent attitude you received from some overworked assistant manager at an Enterprise car-rental counter is yet another grim indication of the whole country going to hell in a handbasket. You can fly over to Myanmar or Laos or Hong Kong and find whatever bamboo paradise Shanghai Bob is living in right now, knock back thirty or forty beers with him, and have one of the most memorable all-nighters of your life commiserating over the decline of standards and Western civilization. He’ll add layers to that discussion you never even dreamed existed. But the fact is there’s a reasonable chance that the freight in the belly of the plane you take to see him—invisible to you, commercial goods are the lifeblood of many routes, particularly international ones—will be worth more to the airline than all the passenger fares combined.

When you shout at a reservation agent, “I’m a loyal customer and I’ll never stay in this dump again!” or “I’ll burn in hell before I spend another dime on this airline,” the company thinks, “Good!” They’re thrilled to let someone else waste time appeasing a troublemaker. A customer who doesn’t conform to the predictive models of consumer behavior is a customer who costs the company money.

Cliché that it is, “time is money” is the unofficial motto of every travel company in the world. The time you spend on the phone, waiting in line, hanging out at the gate, en route, standing at the luggage carousel—all of these activities are calculated to the second and penny. Airlines employ teams of engineers to shave seconds off of routes they’ve been shaving seconds off of for decades. They pay millions to companies like the Preston Group in Australia for software programs that forecast incremental changes that might save them fractions of pennies on “seat mile cost,” pennies that translate into millions of dollars a year.

Travel execs care about good customer relations and they do worry about negative word of mouth. But they sleep well enough knowing that disgruntled consumers are a statistically predictable part of the business and that shafted customers get passed around the industry more or less evenly. For every passenger Royal Caribbean loses to Princess, they’ll gain one back from Carnival or Holland America. Enterprise, Hertz, Avis, and Budget share the same understanding. So do Northwest, Continental, and JetBlue.

You need proof? In 1986, 47.5 million people flew on American Airlines. Ten years later, the number had grown to 93 million. In 2006, it was up to 130 million. This despite thousands of complaints ranging from mis-handled baggage to racial profiling, and stories like a recent Washington Post piece (covering the entire industry, not just AA) that ran beneath the headline, “Airlines Rally, but Customer Service Falls.” Trust me, if you never fly American again because you got weathered out of Cedar Rapids and some counter agent rebooking her two-hundredth itinerary of the afternoon got a little snippy, they’re not going to convene a board meeting because you’ve decided to take your business to Allegiant Air.

Taking into account its leviathan proportions and considering its essential role in the economy—Boeing is this country’s largest single exporter and has been for five decades—the U.S. travel industry is a miracle of efficiency. It’s one of the most complex, cooperative, and successful private systems ever constructed. For all the manipulation, the missed connections, bitchy employees, cramped spaces, and thousands of ways it doesn’t care about you, the American travel industry’s reliability and safety are impossible to beat.

Given their enormity—Denver International Airport covers fifty-three square miles, more than twice the size of Manhattan—modern American airports are operational marvels. At DFW Airport in Dallas, for example, a wildlife control office keeps a freezer filled with birds—barn owls, doves, geese, and so on—collected from troublesome avian populations that refuse to be driven from runway areas. Because birds can damage and potentially bring down a plane if enough of them get sucked into an engine, autopsies are performed on the salvaged birds to determine what they’ve been eating so that attempts can be made to eradicate their food source. That’s called obsessive attention to detail, and an A-plus commitment to safety rarely seen by the public.

Around 658 million passengers took more than 10.5 million domestic flights in this country last year, and pretty much all of them made it there and home. That is probably the most overlooked fact in the entire business, but it’s how the real “savvy traveler” views the equation. Achieving the professional’s attitude and expertise isn’t about lowering expectations. It’s about lining them up with reality, then working the angles that are revealed when you pull back the curtain and appreciate what it takes to get the biggest show on earth off the ground in the first place.