Travel plan idea blog

Getting away from work

As usual Forbes talks about some vacations most of us can't afford. They mention something about a 1-week vacation for $21,000. I think that's about 3-5 months worth of vacation for me...

Anyway, I enjoyed reading about places with little cell service:

Gobi Desert
Alaskan wilderness
Mongolia
Morocco
Rocky Mountains

Of course even in these places you have to be careful since parts of each do have service...

How are the foreign transaction fees on your credit card?

I just noticed that mine are pretty steep (I use an MBNA turned Bank of America NCL cruise rewards card) - a $600 charge = an $18 foreign transaction fee. A $9 charge is more like 25 cents. Is that normal?

Corporations trying to reduce travel expenses

I liked this article but let me warn you that it's not the type I usually recommend. It discusses business travel from the corporate point of view, how Mike Hall has lowered costs for Johnson Controls travel program. He has:

reduced the number of preferred suppliers

driven down costs through integrated reporting tools

delivered online booking solutions on a market-specific basis to efficiently manage the corporation's 20,000 travelers.

Sounds like a tough job but if he's saving the company millions of dollars I'd think he has more job security than most of us...

Talk to the person sitting next to you

In this article aimed at business travelers the author recommends learning something about whoever you end up sitting next to. Sometimes you get lucky enough to sit next to a gorgeous Argentinian doctor or a biologist with videos of mating mokeys on his laptop.

My wife and I sometimes follow this advice and did meet an interesting lady from Japan, an office worker who was crazy about Def Leopard. She was flying to New York to see them for the 27th and 28th times if memory serves.

There's also something about a contest where you enter by emailing a business travel tip to bizcontest@bostonherald.com.

Tethered vacations and negotiating for more vacation time

I read an interesting article about what it really means to go on vacation because it varies from company to company. There's also some good advice about negotiating:

Find out what's expected. Does your manager expect you to call in once a day, check e-mails regularly and be available for conference calls? If that's the case, you might be able to negotiate for extra days or more frequent vacations.

That does sound like a good bargaining chip and fair too. If it's not really a vacation it should be longer, right?