Monthly Archives: June 2017

Announcements

Announcing TripExpert-powered hotel reviews on Hipmunk

Hipmunk is one of our favorite travel planning tools. We’re pleased to announce that it’s now even better: on its award winning web and mobile apps, you’ll find TripExpert-powered reviews for tens of thousands of hotels.
Hipmunk is the latest company using our Expert Review API, which provides data for reviews from 70+ travel guides, magazines and newspapers.

Clicking the TripExpert logo on Hipmunk hotel results will take you to full coverage.

“TripExpert gives us the fun facts and insider tips that let our users know what it will truly be like to stay at each hotel,” said Steve Vargas, Hipmunk’s Director of Product. “Since they’re written by industry experts, the reviews not only give really interesting details, but they also have a more objective quality than user reviews. This makes them super easy to digest and to trust. ”
To learn more about the partnership, see our press release or read coverage on the Hipmunk blog.

Air Travel

Business class: The game changer

Face it. A long distance flight is often an ugly and inelegant place to begin a trip. It’s a well-organized nightmare. Who longs for a 10-hour flight across the ocean sitting nose-pore range from a seatmate?
Now consider the weird warm excitement of flying Business Class. Yeah, it’s a game changer.

The comfort

British Airways introduced flat beds in First Class in 1995 and airborne sleeping became a competitive sport. Now almost all major carriers offer fully flat beds in Business Class on many international and some cross-country flights.

Business seats once resembled dentist chairs. Now they’re sleek wingback capsules that transform into pods (assembly required). They morph into flat beds and a private slice of time all wired with a nerd’s panoply of electronics. There’s always another convenience or luxury to top the last flight. One interior designer boasted “you never want the passenger to discover all the seat has to offer in the first 10 minutes.”

Flat-bed seats on Singapore Airlines

Business seats usually have a pitch (front of one seat to the front of the next seat forward) of about 52 inches. The pitch in economy seating is around 31 inches. The grown-up seats also are wider and recline deeper.

Menu choices and libations are richer in Business Class. Even the entertainment options are on a higher plane. Allowable check-in baggage is jacked up to 88 pounds and tagged Priority.
Many of the seat and electronics innovations are a result of new Airbus and Boeing extended-range aircraft, especially the A-380, 787 Dreamliner, and 777. There’s also a new generation of interior cabin magicians like JPA Design changing the way we fly. Consider American Airlines new First and Business Class cabins on its Boeing 777-300ER international fleet, where every fully lie-flat seat has direct aisle access.

American Airlines Flagship First cabin in the Boeing 777-3000ER

The money

Business Class tickets sell at four to five times the price of economy seats. That’s major revenue for competitive airlines where costs are sky high and fluctuate beyond a CEO’s control. What about all those cheap seats back in the lower intestine of the aircraft? You can’t sell dollars for 50 cents and make it up on volume. Airlines need expensive real estate at the front of the plane to balance the bottom line.
This is what one blogger wrote:  “My basic belief is that Business Class is where they treat passengers like dignified human beings and Economy Class is where… well, where they don’t.”
Yet passengers are the same. After a landing we’ve all made the perp walk from economy to the front exit through an already deplaned business class. As Chekhov wrote: All I know about ballet is that ballerinas stink like horses between dances.
You can noodle over the cost difference between Business and Economy and what you get. A lot of high-stakes frequent flyers, the ones who know the airline’s month’s menu choices by heart, spend their bonus awards on upgrades rather than Economy award tickets, perhaps getting more value per award.

The best

Most top-tier Business Class carriers hail from Asia, and, over the last few years, include Gulf-based carriers Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways. Even Turkish Airlines gets high praise.  

United Airlines Polaris cabin

U.S. carriers also receive accolades. United Airlines’ “sleep-focused” Polaris Business Class debuted in December. Delta has a herringbone configuration allowing flat-seat conversion and aisle access. Air Canada Business Class, a frequent award recipient among North American airlines, offers fully flat “executive Pods” on their Boeing 777-200LR’s and Dreamliners.

SWISS Business Class is a perennial award winner among European airlines. In the hospitality industry, Swiss hoteliers are the gold standard. The same holds true in the sky. SWISS integrated-massage seat converts into a roomy 6-foot-6-inch flat bed at the touch of a button.

SWISS Business

But to many long distance fliers nothing beats business class aboard Singapore Airlines — the perfect trifecta of modernity, service (even charm), and efficiency. Flight attendants wear batik sarong kebayas instead of uniforms that look like children’s naval wear. They’re professional, fun, alert, and indefatigable. You can reserve your main dining course from a celebrity-chef menu up to 24 hours before boarding.

Singapore Airlines New Business class

As for passenger surveys, the deepest comes from Skytrax World Airline Awards, an independent survey analyzing 20 million responses. 
And here are the rankings for the best premium class (whatever the name) by airline:

1 Etihad Airways
2 Cathay Pacific
3 Air France
4 ANA All Nippon Airways
5 Singapore Airlines
6 Emirates
7 Lufthansa
8 Qatar Airways
9 Qantas Airways
10 Garuda Indonesia
Destinations

Stay classy in Singapore without breaking the bank

There’s no denying that Singapore is a glorious place to visit, but all that glamour comes with a stiff price tag. For a vacationer on a set budget, it’s easy to come unstuck in one of the world’s most expensive countries. It doesn’t all have to be so pricey, though; all it takes to keep costs down is some planning and foresight. Just because you don’t have jet-set funds doesn’t mean you can’t have a blast within your means on this 277-square-mile tropical playground.

Staying

While its neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia offer good accommodation at a reasonable price, Singapore isn’t so generous. Four-star rooms in Malaysia can be half the price of their Singaporean counterparts — so why not stay in one? It’s surprisingly easy to travel to Singapore from Johor Bahru (JB), Malaysia’s biggest southern city — in fact, tens of thousands of Malaysian workers do so every day by train, crossing the half-mile causeway bridge between downtown JB and Singapore. Several services operate in both directions daily and cost less than $4 a trip. The journey takes five minutes and you can clear both countries’ immigration counters at Woodlands station, on the Singaporean side. If you miss the last train back (11pm), a taxi to JB will still cost far less than the savings you’ve made on accommodation.

Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Eating

Singapore’s 29 Michelin-starred restaurants suggest that this is a nation with a taste for fine cuisine. And judging by the packed crab and lobster restaurants around Clarke Quay every night, which can charge upwards of $100 for a crustacean, there are plenty of people in Singapore who can afford to eat extravagantly. But it doesn’t have to be so.

Singapore is quite rightly celebrated for its astonishing blend of local, Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisines, which are available on huge plates for a couple of bucks at a vast number of “hawker centres” across the island. This is where real Singaporeans eat, and many say that the food they sell—often prepared by third-generation stallholders—is just as good as you will find in a swanky restaurant. Top tip: Singaporeans are willing to wait in line for a long time to get the best food, so follow their lead and always pick the longest line.

Clarke Quay

Drinking

Many travellers like a tipple, but it’s hard to enjoy sipping on a drink when you’re fretting over the colossal size of your impending bill: in Singapore it is bound to be a big one. The island’s most famous cocktail, the Singapore sling, at the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, where it was invented, will set you back around $23. A survey last year found Singapore, where a pint of Heineken will usually cost around $15, to be behind only Hong Kong in terms of beer prices in Asia.

As long as you plan ahead, though, it is possible to get your buzz on more cheaply. Irrespective of what time it is, there will always be a happy hour going on somewhere in Singapore, and some of these offer fantastic deals. Check out Brewerkz at Riverside Point between noon and 3pm for some strong afternoon craft brews, made on the premises, for just $4 (later on, the price almost trebles). At night, Chupitos on Clarke Quay is well known for its sub-$1 shots with flavours changing every week. For those who like a drink, the local listings magazines are a good source for planning a happy-hour bar-crawl.

Brewerkz

Doing

For those who like to explore, Singapore has two substantial things going for it. First, though the island sprawls, the bits you actually want to see are quite compact and easily strollable. Secondly, many of the best sites are either free to enter or charge a token price. It is less than 3 miles from Little India to China Town, yet between these two points lie many of Singapore’s historical, cultural and architectural gems — the eating and shopping aren’t shabby either. At the end of your jaunt you can take in the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, which is free and fantastic. Try to avoid taxis, which run such a byzantine system of fares that it is rare to find two cars charging the same rate. Instead, the MRT subway is cheap and extremely efficient and will probably get you to within a couple of hundred yards of your destination.

Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

Timing

Don’t stay too long! Singapore doesn’t really merit more than a three-day visit for even the most laid-back traveller, so you could easily find yourself with too much time on your hands. Instead, you can add a couple of new stamps to your passport by taking an hour-long ferry ($6.50) to the Indonesian island of Batam, south of Singapore, or catch a train north to Malaysia. Though it will take much longer than a flight, you could even get a sleeper all the way up to Bangkok (48 hours, $60), which provides an incredible way to see the region and allows you to get off at various points on your trip.

Batam