Travel checklist for the over-50 set

From the Economist Gulliver blog, a humorous travel list for older travelers.

Sadly, the website that the list is advertising does not have quite the same charm, at least not based on my pretty quick visit.

TSA = that's some agency!

Jeffrey Goldberg on airport security, humbug and the TSA.

How security theater protects us all

The Economist's Gulliver blog on the latest evidence that security theater is not only not very entertaining, it is not very effective either.

And don't forget to shower!

Travel: Cleveland Zoo

We ended up meeting family yesterday at the Cleveland Zoo. I had never been to the Cleveland Zoo; indeed, I think this was my first time really stopping anywhere in Cleveland, though I have driven through several times.

The zoo turned out to be a very positive surprise, which may say more about my priors regarding Cleveland than the zoo itself. In any event, it is large, clean, beautifully landscaped, well-organized. Much of it appears to be recently remodeled. It is organized into zones like a theme park; we got through the Australian, African and rainforest zones; overall I would say we did about a third of what there is to do during our four-hour visit. I thought the rainforest part, which is inside a large climate-controlled building, was the most impressive of what we saw.

This zoo is on the middle of the spectrum of zoo styles that runs from "amusement park with animals" to "we will allow you to be entertained while we do science if you give us money but don't expect us to approve". This means that while there is lots of scientific information about as well as lots of ecologically motivated moral claims (including a quote from the great moral philosopher Sting), there are also slides and mazes and camel rides and such like to entertain younger visitors. And, indeed, the younger visitors in our group - ages 4, 5 and 10 - all quite enjoyed the outing.

Recommended.

Cracked on air travel

A fine Cracked complement to the piece on airline ticket prices I linked to the other day.

Hat tip: Scott Imberman

Determinants of airfares

An interesting piece on the determinants of airfares.

Just ignore all the bits about what is "fair" or not. There is no real normative question here, but the positive question surely warrants attention. More narrowly, the author seems not to understand that the high airfares in small places such as, to use a personal example, London, Ontario, are implicitly reflected in local wages and house prices as part of the grand general equilibrium of mobility that sorts people and firms among places.

Via: Economist Gulliver blog; here is the original Gulliver post.

World's coolest parking garage?

On Saturday after my seminar at Miami, my wife and I drove our rental car to South Beach and spent the late afternoon and early evening walking around looking at the Art Deco architecture, the beautiful people, and the beach.

The parking garage where I parked the rental car, 1111 Lincoln Road, is surely the coolest parking garage I have ever parked in, and attracts many high quality parkers. Above is a picture of me standing next to the Lamborghini that I parked next to. As we walked down the stairs within the garage, which is not all that large, we also saw a Porsche, a Jag and multiple BMWs, Mercedes and Lexi.

Also within the garage is a trendy boutique called Alchemist that appears to sell only white, gray and black cocktail dresses, for those, I guess, who forgot to shop for their evening out before leaving the house.

U of Miami

I gave a seminar at the University of Miami on Friday and had a delightful time. Thanks to everyone there for a very enjoyable visit, some good comments on my paper and useful discussions.

My seminar took place in the Bernie Kosar classroom, pictured above.

1,000,000

I got an email today informing me that I have achieved "Million Miler" status at Delta. That means I have flown over 1,000,000 miles on a combination of Delta and Northwest. These are "real" miles that do not include miles from credit cards and the like.

That puts me ahead of the George Clooney character in Up In the Air.

I even get a free gift and, apparently, silver elite status forever.

Wow.

About Concur I do not concur

Michigan recently adopted the Concur system for travel planning and reimbursement management. The system consists, as that description suggests, of two integrated but conceptually separate parts: one is an online travel planning system similar in spirit (though not in ease of use) to Kayak or Orbitz and the other is an online reimbursement system for both travel expenses and other expenses such as books or journal subscriptions.

Prior to the arrival of Concur, a UM employee would make their own travel plans, and then submit the receipts, along with a short written explanation, to a staff person when s/he returned the trip. The staff person would then process the documents through the university system, and payment would show up via direct deposit a few weeks later.

The Concur system was advertised as having three advantages relative to what it replaced: cheaper prices for travel due to volume discounts, faster reimbursement and less time spent on getting reimbursed. Let me consider each of these in turn:

1. There is no question that reimbursements are a couple weeks faster. This has no value to me but I can understand how it might matter to credit constrained graduate students who get university funding to attend a conference or course.

2. Less time spent on getting reimbursed. So far, I am spending about three minutes more per reimbursement on average; I think I spent about seven minutes per reimbursement under the old system. I suspect that after I finish paying the learning costs this will fall to one or two extra minutes per reimbursement. Under the old regime, the time cost consisted of assembling and then making paper copies of the receipts (in case they got lost) and then typing up the explanatory cover letter and carrying it down to the main office. Under Concur, the time costs consists of assembling and scanning the receipts, uploading the receipts to the system, entering data from the receipts into the system, and then making the inevitable corrections required by the nit-picking anonymous "Concur auditors", who appear to get paid based on the number of irrelevant inconsistencies they find. Why the Concur auditors are not empowered to simply correct obvious and unimportant errors on their own is beyond me. The net effect of Concur is to reduce the time spent on reimbursements by university administrative staff while increasing it for the Concur auditor and for faculty and graduate students.

3. Lower travel prices. I have compared flights on three routes - DTW to DCA, DTW to SYR and DTW to MIA - as well as hotels for a couple of different locations. In all but one case there was no price difference from what was on offer on Kayak. In one case, Concur had a fare that was lower by about $10 on a base of about $600. This is not sufficient, at least to me, to compensate for Concur's more awkward user interface.

The bottom line from my perspective is that if you are at a university or other institution that is thinking of adopting Concur, it is likely worth putting up a bit of resistance, but not much. Concur might be a little better for some users, a little worse for other users in the end. The best argument for avoidance may be the non-trivial institutional transition costs. The transition at Michigan was a full scale celebration with powerpoint files sent by email, personalized instruction by department staff and even a paper star on the door of one colleague who somehow achieved the elevated status of "Concur all-star".

In hindsight, I suspect that the actual institutional attraction for the system is to please university lawyers worried about reimbursement scandals. Maybe that is a good reason, but it would be good to be up-front about it at the time of adoption.

Uncle Sam: Monopoly Man

In truly appalling news, the TSA has put the kabosh on the further replacement of TSA security workers by private contractors at airports around the country. Says CNN:

A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was "neutral" on the program.

TSA chief John Pistole said Friday he has decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports, saying he does not see any advantage to it.

Clever program design there, allowing the TSA to stop its competitors in their tracks. Oh, and guess what, the TSA labor cartel is on board as well:

A union for Transportation Security Administration employees said it supported the decision to halt the program.

"The nation is secure in the sense that the safety of our skies will not be left in the hands of the lowest-bidder contractor, as it was before 9/11," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. "We applaud Administrator Pistole for recognizing the value in a cohesive federalized screening system and work force."

The TSA seems remarkably tone deaf here. I suspect that a quiet strategy of delay and discouragement, rather than a very public confrontation that allows the Obama administration a chance to show that it can actually say no to a labor union in the context of a program that the public hates would have been more clever. We'll see.

My view: if we must have security theater, let's at least do it as cheaply as possible.

Via: MR

Denver thoughts

I am in Denver for the ASSA meetings. Some observations:

1. The downtown suffers from the lack of older buildings. Some impressive ones remain, and there are a couple of distinctive newer buildings, but lots of generic blandness.

2. Yazoo BBQ is awesome - in my lifetime top 10.

3. The local alternative weekly, called Westword, has an astounding volume of ads related to "medical" marijuana, including ads from doctors who will write you a prescription, shops that will fulfill your prescription, and suppliers of materials to grow your own. The pot-related ads far outnumber the usual escorts, chat lines and massage parlors. Some names I found entertaining: "way to grow", "budding health", "420 wellness", "herbal remedies", "nature's cure", "the health joint", "mile high green cross", "thc: the herbal center", "tender healing care" and "garden of the gods". So many puns, so little time.

4. Bistro Vendome was pretty good too, and with excellent service.

Bob Poole on airport security

Bob Poole has some wise words on how to improve the resources presently spent on airport security.

Say hello to our dear leader for me

The Economist goes to North Korea.

Sounds even more dreary than when I went to the Soviet Union in 1979.

Airplane solitude

Therapists apparently run a risk of receiving unwanted life stories from the passengers sitting next to them on airplanes.

I like this deterrence strategy:

Niranjan S. Karnik, a psychiatrist and sociologist who teaches at the University of Chicago, said he often told seatmates, “ ‘I’m a sociologist.’ That’s an effective conversation-ender.”

My strategy is to read an article with lots of math in it. That deters nearly all would-be conversationalists.

Via: U of Chicago magazine email

Hide and seek at hotels

Hotels without pretensions helpfully attach the blow drier to the wall right by the sink. It is easy to find and easy to use. Hurrah for hotels without pretensions.

Hotels with pretensions of greatness, though, find the sight of a naked blow drier, right there on the wall by the sink, off-putting, like Victorian ladies who covered naked table legs lest their male guests come unglued by the sight. Or, perhaps but rather implausibly, they imagine that their guests have such a reaction.

So, these hotels put the blow drier in a cloth bag and hide it somewhere. Less ambitious hotels hide it in the bathroom, so that it takes only a minute or two to find, though you still have to unwind the cord and all the rest (and you have to do it every single day, because the cleaning people always put it away again, even after you signal that you do not care by leaving it out).

More artistic hotels will perhaps hide the blow drier in a desk drawer, or in a small cupboard within the big, ugly, wooden box in which they have hidden the attractive, modern TV. A couple of hotels I have been to have even hidden the blow drier at the front desk, so that one has to go down in an elevator and wait in line with the people checking out while offering them your wet, wild hair to gaze upon.

I do not understand why posh places, or places that pretend to be posh, do this. Blow driers are not that ugly. Posh hotels don't put their toilets in cloth bags and hide them, and they usually are ugly. Their lamps are often pretty ugly too and they, too, escape the cloth bag treatment. Presumably the guests at posh hotels have higher values of time, too high, one might think, to want to play hide-and-seek with the blow drier.

A mystery to be solved by some clever applied theorist.

On flying

1. Stories from a flight attendant.

2. Stories from a passenger.

It is not quite as bad, usually, as the passenger makes it out to be, though my own impressions are tempered by often being bumped up to the front on domestic flights. It is different up there, in part because everyone is drinking the free alcohol. Plus there are fewer kids and fewer adults who want to talk to with you because they came on the plane unprepared with something to read or do.

But even in the back, Bose noise-canceling headphones do a wonderful job of putting off would-be conversationalists (you don't even have to turn them on) and help to focus my attention on whatever paper I am reading.

Business travel divas

This is so on target it is scary. I do everything on the list other than number 8 and, just like the author, am perplexed when my wonderful wife and daughter do not immediately do them as well.

I do one other thing that is not on the list:

4.5. As you walk briskly past the long lines of unhappy people at the check-in desks with your pre-printed boarding pass in hand, marvel that (a) anyone would get their boarding pass at the airport and (b) anyone would actually check bags.

Via: Gulliver

Air Canada

Air Canada [sic] has won awards for service the past couple of years, according to this piece on the Economist's Gulliver blog.

This just cannot be right. I have told the joke that opens the Gulliver post on many occasions to explain my views about Air Canada, as it neatly summarizes my experience.

My favorite Air Canada story took place when I was teaching at Western Ontario. I wanted to fly from London, Ontario to Rochester, NY, to give a seminar at Rochester. This involved two short Air Canada flights, with Toronto as the transfer airport. When I arrived, the Air Canada gate agent would not let me "planeside check" my roller bag. I had, for some reason, to check it through the formal luggage system, which of course means time wasted at Rochester waiting at the luggage carousel as well as the opportunity for Air Canada baggage handlers to lose the bag in Toronto. I resisted but ultimately had to give in.

When I arrive at Rochester, I waited patiently (well, perhaps not so patiently) at the luggage carousel, but of course my bag did not arrive. I went and waited in line for the Air Canada luggage agent. Eventually it was determined that my bag had never even been loaded on the plane in London. The gate agents had decided that there were other, more important, bags already on the plane, so mine could wait for another time. In any case, I was told that my bag would be available at the airport early the next morning. So, Lance Lochner, who was at Rochester at the time and was the host of my visit, dutifully drove me to the airport in the morning. No bag. No reason. Just Air Canada incompetence. Probably they are used to dealing with Canadians who tend to take these things with resignation and good humor. I do not.

I ended up giving my seminar in the ratty clothes I had worn on the plane. I eventually got my bag back, but it never did make it to Toronto. It was this incident that led me to resolve to fly Air Canada only when absolutely necessary, a resolution I still keep.

So, at the risk of sounding like those folks who still go on about how Al Gore really won the 2000 election, I think there must be something amiss with the voting system that led to these implausible awards to Air Canada. Either that or all the nice staff from Canadian Airlines, sadly absorbed by Air Canada about a decade ago, somehow effected an astounding change in the business culture at Air Canada.

Mysteries of air travel

Why does Delta serve "dinner" at 11 PM on its flight to Amsterdam that departs at 9:50 PM from Detroit? Why not just assume that people probably had (a better) dinner at, you know, dinnertime and let them get to sleep?

Just a thought.