Ways you could (but shouldn't) manufacture spend

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In addition to the garden variety manufactured spend I do day in and day out, I also enjoy keeping my eyes open for new avenues that might prove easier or more lucrative. Naturally, most of those either don't work or do work, but cost too much to be worth pursuing. Here are a few examples in the latter category.

Reselling Marriott gift cards

There's a whole cottage industry devoted to gift card arbitrage, which consists of buying discounted gift cards and reselling them at a higher price or theoretically even the same price while pocketing any rewards earned on the initial purchase.

Remembering an Amex Offer from back in 2014, it occurred to me that you could manufacture unlimited spend by buying Marriott gift cards and earning bonus points on a card like the Chase Ink Plus, then reselling the cards below their face value.

And it would work! Except at the rate offered by Cardpool (currently the highest payout), a Marriott gift card receives just 88 cents on the dollar, meaning you'd need to get 6 cents per Ultimate Rewards point just to break even, or 4 cents per ThankYou point earned with a Citi ThankYou Premier or Citi Prestige card.

That's certainly possible with a premium cabin redemption on a partner like Singapore Airlines, but it's not even close to worth doing unless you're desperate to top up an account and don't have the liquidation bandwidth (or free time) to manufacture your points more cheaply.

Returning merchandise to a different form of payment

What if you could make a purchase with a rewards-earning credit card, preferably at a bonused merchant, then return it and send the refund to a different form of payment, like a non-rewards earning debit card or even a check?

That would be great, except for obvious and non-obvious reasons banks are extremely sensitive to returns or refunds from merchants where purchases weren't originally made. The obvious reasons have to do with interchange fees and the costs of processing transactions, and the non-obvious reasons might include concerns about money-laundering: a refund to a debit card would be a great way to deposit money in someone's checking account without attracting attention — which is why it attracts attention!

All sorts of stuff is plainly illegal

I've been living in my current apartment for 2 years, and an Oster-brand toaster has been living here with me just as long. I'm moving soon, and don't particularly care to haul a 2-year-old toaster across the country with me. If I were a thief, instead of a travel hacker, I could just order up a new one from Amazon, take it out of the box, send the old one back in the same back, and sell the new one on eBay.

But again, that would be illegal, so don't do that either.

Conclusion

I find that keeping my eyes open and walking through potential techniques step-by-step is worth doing, even when I find that a deal isn't ultimately worth pursuing. It usually isn't! But it's the rare deal indeed that's discovered by someone blindly following only the most-travelled paths.

Is this how UberPOOL is supposed to work?

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On our return from Germany last month, we stayed overnight in New York City, flying into JFK on airberlin Saturday evening and out of LaGuardia on Delta the next morning. Traveling between the two airports and midtown Manhattan should be easy on public transportation, but when we boarded an E train Saturday evening in Jamaica, we discovered after 30 seconds of panic and 2 minutes of confusion that E trains were running on F tracks in Manhattan.

Unrelated: is there another city in the world that phrases their maintenance-related inconveniences in this way? On every other system I'm familiar with, if such a rerouting were required, they would announce that "this train is an F train between such-and-such stations." Why do New Yorkers insist on saying that it remains an E train while behaving in every way like an F train? Is it for union-related purposes, so E-train drivers can continue to operate what are obviously F trains?

Rather than try to figure out which E trains were E trains and which E trains were F trains, Sunday afternoon we decided to take a car to LaGuardia instead.

UberPOOL was strange, but cheap

This taxi fare guesser suggests a yellow cab would have cost $26.70, plus tip, for our Sunday trip to the airport, and the Uber app estimates an UberX would cost $32-$41. Then, since I'd never seen the UberPOOL icon in my Uber app before, I decided to check how much that would cost, and was offered a fixed price of $26.27.

This ended up feeling like an even better deal than those numbers suggest because Sunday was also the day of the New York City Pride march, and 5th Avenue was tied up with revelers. So instead the driver took what I guess you would call the scenic route under Central Park to avoid the parade. This longer route would have run up a higher UberX or yellow cab fare, so we benefited from locking in our UberPOOL rate in advance.

That's not the strange part. The strange part is that since the driver ignored the directions Uber was feeding him, he was forced to ignore all the other UberPOOL users trying to hail him. For Uber to add people to a pool they have to be able to predict where a driver will be, and when. But since our driver was never where he was supposed to be, he ignored all the additional UberPOOL requests he was given, and we enjoyed a private ride to the airport.

Conclusion

I will definitely use UberPOOL again, if I'm ever in a city where it's offered as an option. Their prices seem extremely competitive, and I consider being able to lock in prices in advance regardless of traffic and route to be a big convenience.

Now, I'm perfectly aware that having a fixed up-front price does not save anyone money, on average, and indeed allows Uber to apply "sneak" surge pricing and quiet rate increases. I'm totally fine with that — if the ride's too expensive, I'll take a different form of transportation. You should too.

This is what Uber's promise should be: identify the most annoying practices of the existing cab monopolies, and eliminate them. Then, some people will be willing to pay higher prices to avoid experiencing those inconveniences and some people won't. I consider the constantly-ticking taximeter and attendant fear that a driver is taking you on the long haul and deliberating missing traffic lights to be one such inconvenience, and I'll happily pay a premium to avoid it.

Microhacking: ATM fee refund edition

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Even before most travel hackers' American Express prepaid cards were shut down last year, American Express had restricted Bluebird and Serve cash withdrawals to ATM's in the United States. That was a shame since they had previously worked as fee-free ATM cards around the world, and with reasonable exchange rates.

Fortunately, I have a Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account, which offers as one of its rewards "No ATM fees - CCU will reimburse all ATM and surcharge fees." I'd never actually made an ATM withdrawal with the card (I bank with a local credit union), so I was eager to see how this benefit works.

My experience withdrawing money in Europe

It works really well!

I made three ATM withdrawals during the two weeks we were in Europe, and incurred ATM fees on each withdrawal:

  • 30,000 Hungarian forint ($109.40), $0.87 ATM fee;
  • 200 Euro ($226.85), $1.81 ATM fee;
  • 200 Euro ($225.96), $2.26 ATM fee.

On the first of July, I received an ATM fee credit of $11.19. Since only $4.94 had been charged to my account in separate ATM fees, that leaves $6.25 in ATM fee refunds unaccounted for.

That $6.25 happens to be the sum of the difference between the first two ATM withdrawals in dollars and the next lowest multiple of $5 ($109.40 minus $105, plus $226.85 minus $225).

Now, maybe that's a coincidence ($6.25 is the sum of a lot of numbers, real and imaginary). But it's my current best hypothesis, although it doesn't explain why the odd $0.96 on my final ATM withdrawal wasn't refunded.

Microhacking ATM fee refunds?

If my hypothesis is correct, that means a simple hack is possible: intentionally make ATM withdrawals that are at least $1 more than a multiple of $5, getting the additional amount refunded the following month.

The only ATM's I've ever seen that allow such odd withdrawals are TD Bank ATM's, which allow you to specify the exact composition of a withdrawal, including $1 and $5 bills.

According to this CNN article, Chase and PNC were rolling out ATM's with this function back in 2013, but some light Googling didn't turn up any more recent information than that.

Have you tried this? Does it work? And do you have a better explanation for my mysterious $6.25 ATM fee refund?

When do you contact the hotel, or, living gratefully

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The feeling I most associate with travel hacking is "gratitude." That's because before I discovered the world of miles and points, or at least before I knew just how big and beautiful that world is, I still traveled all the time.

Back then I traveled "on the cheap," the same way many people travel today: booking flights based on the price of a ticket, regardless of the number or inconvenience of the connections, and booking noisy, inconvenient hostels. That wasn't all bad — I once stayed in a trailer park reconfigured as a hostel on the far, far, far outskirts of Amsterdam and had a great time biking around the Dutch countryside. But it also wasn't great (the steel trailer got up to 100 or so degrees in the sun).

Altogether, that means I'm sometimes confused about what conditions rise to the level of a "complaint."

Club Carlson properties are confusing

Last month we stayed in two Club Carlson properties, the Radisson Blu Beke Hotel in Budapest and Radisson Blu Carlton Hotel in Bratislava, and both properties had an ice situation that was confusing (remember, I'm easily confused).

The Radisson Blu Beke Hotel had an ice machine on our floor that appeared to me to be a Soviet relic. After I tweeted about the thing, someone apparently managed to get it working and it was full of ice the next day. Although in all honesty, I'm fairly sure they just filled it with ice from the restaurant to get me to shut up.

The beautiful old Radisson Blu Carlton Hotel in Bratislava upped the weirdness ante: every single floor of the hotel had an ice machine in a specially designed cabinet across from the elevators, and every single ice machine was unplugged, apparently permanently. I called the front desk for an explanation and the young lady working was happy to send up a bucket of ice from the bar. So that was terrific service, on the one hand, but on the other hand what were the ice machines doing there on every floor?

Hyatt Diamond food and beverage amenities are confusing

One of my favorite things I learned last month was the neologism "regranding." It's when, well, it's when this happens.

But that's neither here nor there. What I find confusing is when a Hyatt property has already installed some fruit basket or something in your room, then asks whether you'd like the Diamond points amenity or the food and beverage amenity. As a rule, I always take the food and beverage amenity.

At both the Park Hyatt Vienna and Grand Hyatt Berlin, the property then sent up a bottle of wine, which was much appreciated after a day of travel.

But under those circumstances, does the already-existing bowl of fruit in the room count as the food amenity? If I selected the points, would someone come up and take the fruit away? At the Grand Hyatt Berlin I simply told the agent at checkout that we'd never received a food amenity and he gave me the 1,000 Gold Passport points instead. Was I wrong?

What kind of feedback do hotels appreciate?

The waiters at the Park Hyatt Vienna breakfast buffet are absolutely incompetent (with one marvelous exception). The first day, we got a cup of coffee from our waiter and never saw him again. The second day, I managed to place an order with my waiter from the à la carte menu, and never saw him again. Only on our third morning in Vienna was I able to actually receive eggs Benedict cooked to order from the à la carte menu, once I shanghaied the only competent waitress in the entire restaurant (if you're staying there, e-mail me and I'll let you know which one she is).

Why I started this post by mentioning "gratitude" is that none of these things bother me at all. I tweet about stuff because it amuses me, or because I think my readers will find it amusing, but the fact that I'm able to stay in a hotel with a spa (even if the guy who does massages no longer works there) is a radical improvement over the kind of travel I did before I learned about the game.

But the response on Twitter from the brands themselves is invariably, "did you contact the hotel?" And that's a question I never have a good answer to. The Radisson Blu Carlton Hotel presumably knows that its ice machines don't work, but does the Park Hyatt Vienna know that its service staff is incompetent?

What helps improve the experience of guests, and what is just another box the property has to check when the chain's social media team tells them a guest is complaining?

Conclusion

I never "contact the hotel" unless my comfort is directly impacted in some way, like the time we had to get a maintenance man to fix the lights in our very strange room at the very weird Grand Hyatt New York. So I'm just throwing this out there: when do you "contact the hotel," and when do you just enjoy the ride?

Quick hit: things I've learned about German trains

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On our trip to Italy in 2015, I reserved all our train tickets in advance, thinking by analogy to airline tickets and hotel rooms that I was locking in the best prices ahead of time. That turned out to be totally unnecessary, as Italian train tickets seemed to cost the same whether you book 6 months in advance or just walk up to the ticket counter on the day of travel.

Having learned from that experience, on last month's trip to Europe I didn't book any of our train tickets in advance, planning to maintain flexibility in case we wanted to spend more or less time in a particular city. That worked great until we got to Germany.

Buy at least a day in advance

Unlike the Hungarian and Slovak trains we took, the German national railway service Deutsche Bahn offers multiple fare types on many of their trains. The price differences aren't always very large, but if you don't know about them you might find yourself overpaying. Here are the fare options for a non-stop train from Vienna to Berlin:

Here's the train we actually took from Vienna to Regensburg to visit my partner's relatives in Bavaria:

And here's the train we took from Schwandorf to Berlin:

While the fares are reasonably close, the fixed-date and fixed-routing tickets purchased in advance would save 36.50 Euro per ticket on our routing, or 28.50 Euro per ticket on the nonstop routing.

So if it's at all possible, buy German Deutsche Bahn train tickets in advance!

Reserved seats

Like coach class tickets on Amtrak, second class tickets on Deutsche Bahn do not come with assigned seats. However, for an extremely modest charge (4.50 Euro on a sample trip), you can request a reserved seat.

You can decide whether or not this is confusing (we were extremely confused), but reserved seats on Deutsche Bahn trains are indicated by a pair of cities listed above each pair of seats. For example, seat 65 on this train is reserved by someone boarding in Leipzig and leaving the train in Hamburg:

In other words, if you are departing the train before Leipzig, or boarding after Hamburg, you're free to sit there. If you are sitting there between Leipzig and Hamburg, you'll have an irate German standing by your seat angrily gesturing at his ticket and at the digital panel above your seat.

The travel hacking index card

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I popped by the library this week to pick up "The Index Card," the famously slender volume of personal finance advice by personal finance columnist Helaine Olen (author of "Pound Foolish," a previous entry in my pretty good book review series) and University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack.

It's a pretty good book about personal finance, although not spectacular. The authors' "model portfolio" is invested in small-cap and international index funds for reasons that are not made clear, presumably in order to keep the book as simple as possible. But people who don't understand why they're doing the right thing are just as vulnerable to persuasion from hucksters are people who are doing the wrong thing. So while their model portfolio isn't terrible, it also doesn't have a straightforward evidence-based argument presented for it.

Reading "The Index Card" got me to thinking about what would go on a travel hacking index card. There's plenty of information about individual rewards programs and "sweet spots," which makes it easy to get bogged down in specifics — and difficult to tell the difference between real values and credit card sales pitches.

So what kinds of simple rules can keep a travel hacker from making expensive mistakes while developing a travel hacking practice that helps them achieve their financial and travel goals?

Here's what I came up with, with a few words about each.

1. Start slow

When you're just getting started, there's absolutely no reason to sign up for more than a single new credit card as you get a feel for how credit card rewards programs and travel loyalty programs really work.

This rule also applies to experienced travel hackers testing out new techniques. I'm happy to take a loss by putting $5 on a prepaid debit card with a $5 activation fee, so I can find out whether it's PIN-enabled before I start filling up shopping carts with them.

2. Keep good records, but don't get hung up on a single system

When you're dealing with thousands of dollars in financial products or merchandise, you obviously want to keep good records. But the system you develop when you are just getting started might not serve you well as you scale up or down. A reseller handling $50,000 in merchandise per month has different record-keeping needs than one who just jumps on the biggest deals. When a system starts to get clunky, take a step back and think about how you can improve or simplify it.

Likewise, an envelop in the glove compartment may work great when you're handling a few thousand dollars in money orders, but may start to become unwieldy when you're handling a hundred thousand dollars.

3. Build relationships

The overwhelming majority of travel hackers love this game and love helping people think about the myriad problems we encounter on a daily basis. The rest are ornery bastards, but you'll learn to identify them pretty quickly.

I'm always reminded of the couple that spent a million Starpoints on a paid American Airlines flight using SPG Flights, instead of transferring a small fraction of that number to AAdvantage and booking award tickets. If they'd known to ask anyone in the travel hacking community, they'd have half a million Starpoints left in their account! Don't be them.

4. Every deal dies eventually

I like to joke on Twitter about bloggers killing deals, but the simple fact is, most bloggers of any merit are fairly circumspect about deals they believe are fragile, and most credit card affiliate bloggers either don't know or don't care about real travel hacking deals, since there's no money in it for them.

Bloggers don't kill deals; time kills deals. So when your favorite deal dies, take a moment to mourn, but don't lash out at the blogger you're certain is responsible for its passing.

5. Treat employees calmly and with respect

Let's stipulate that you're always right. You know a store's point-of-sale system better than any of the cashiers there. You know a chain's purchase limits by heart. You have a Christmas card from the CEO clearing you to purchase an unlimited number of cash equivalents using the payment method of your choice.

If you cannot explain yourself briefly, calmly and with respect for the employee you're dealing with, you will fail, you will be remembered, and you will draw attention to techniques that will become harder to implement. Service employees don't work for you: they work for their supervisors, managers and, ultimately, for faceless corporations that they know are completely indifferent to their well-being.

Customer service employees have more to lose than you do.

6. Spend cash last

Once you've dug deep into the travel hacking weeds, you're going to have some unavoidable expenses (or investments, if you prefer): annual fees on your most valuable credit cards, activation fees and liquidation costs, losses on reselling mistakes, postage on 94 envelopes, and so on.

The last thing you want to do is unnecessarily add to those expenses by paying cash for your travel while you hold out for some "ideal" points redemption! You've already paid for the points — now use them. Save your cash for expenses that can only be paid for with cash.

7. Be realistic about your travel goals

In other words, earn the points you redeem and redeem the points you earn. I'm not saying you should think small: if you want to go to the Maldives, travel hacking makes that possible, if not exactly easy. But don't build a travel hacking strategy around something amorphous like "this blogger made the Maldives sound nice."

If you have an ambitious goal, then pick a date (or range of dates, since award availability can be tough), pick a strategy (Hilton or Hyatt?), earn the points you need, then stop. Enjoy your vacation.

If you have less-ambitious goals, then focus on earning the miles and points you find yourself redeeming most often. Consider using fixed-value points currencies like US Bank Flexpoints. Earn points you're likely to be able to use across a range of destinations, like Hilton HHonors.

8. Don't structure transactions

It's against the law, and if you do it the government will ruin your life.

Conclusion

The travel hacking index card isn't a travel hacking strategy: it's a strategy for developing a practice that will achieve your travel and financial goals with mistakes as few and cheap as possible along the way.

So what did I miss — what would my readers add to a travel hacking index card?

About Hyatt suite upgrade awards

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Hyatt Diamond enthusiasts know that there are three kinds of room reservations at Hyatt properties: paid reservations, Free Nights, and Points + Cash reservations.

Points + Cash reservations are popular for two key reasons: they earn elite-qualifying stay credits and, like paid reservations, they're eligible for Diamond suite upgrade awards.

During my stay at the Park Hyatt Vienna, I got the best of both worlds.

Hyatt is thrilled to combine reservations into a single stay

There are few trivialities more annoying than having a room key deactivated in the middle of a hotel stay because you made two or more reservations as award availability or points became available.

As Joe Cheung pointed out during my most recent appearance on the Saverocity Observation Deck podcast, Hyatt is able to combine reservations so that multiple reservations are treated as a single stay, which is a terrific convenience given how some of their properties throttle Points + Cash award availability, potentially making you piece together a stay gradually over many months.

How I applied a suite upgrade award to two award nights

Soon after being matched to Hyatt Diamond status, I booked three Points + Cash nights at the Park Hyatt Vienna, and applied one of my four Diamond suite upgrade awards.

Then, since I don't chase signup bonuses and was well below the supposed "5/24 rule" for new Chase credit card approvals, I applied for a Chase Hyatt credit card and was approved, which quickly earned me two free nights at any Hyatt in the world, as long as award space was available.

I bided my time (i.e. set a Hotel Hustle award alert) and finally award availability opened up for my second and third nights in Vienna. I placed a quick call to Hyatt and had my Points + Cash award nights replaced with free credit card nights.

That made me wonder: would I have to change rooms after my first night, since that was the only night I had the right to apply a suite upgrade award to?

Of course not.

Can you apply suite upgrade awards to award nights? Maybe!

If you can replicate my experience, the advantages are obvious: you can earn a stay credit based on your first, Points + Cash night, but save cash by redeeming only points for all your subsequent nights.

So to review, here was my experience applying a suite upgrade award to my Park Hyatt Vienna stay:

  • book a Points + Cash stay;
  • apply a suite upgrade award to the entire stay;
  • replace all but the first night with award nights;
  • enjoy my suite for the entire stay.

Since my first night was also my 5th paid night during the current Stay More Play More promotion, I even got to take home 5,000 bonus Hyatt Gold Passport points for my trouble.

What did I miss: JetBlue edition

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I got back last night from New York, the final leg of a ridiculously circuitous trip through Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Bavaria, and Berlin.

It was fun!

After managing to go all last week without a blog post (subscribers did get a newsletter out of me) this week I'll be easing back into the old blogging routine with some reflections on what I've learned. I mostly can't stand trip reports, so don't expect one! But it's an ironclad rule that travel hacking involves a lot of things that aren't immediately obvious, or spelled out in terms and conditions, and I've always sought to help readers understand how those things really work.

But first! Let's talk about JetBlue.

JetBlue is running a generous points match from Virgin America

You've certainly seen a rundown of this deal other blogs, but to refresh your memory, JetBlue is offering a tiered points match to Virgin America Elevate members with points in their Elevate account who book a new roundtrip JetBlue ticket after registering and before August 31, 2016.

To break that down even more clearly, the terms state:

  • you will receive bonus TrueBlue points up to 300% of your current Virgin America Elevate balance (30,000 TrueBlue points for a balance of 10,001 Elevate points);
  • if you submit a screenshot of your Virgin America Elevate dashboard and your TrueBlue account number by July 4, 2016;
  • and book and fly a new roundtrip JetBlue reservation after having your request approved but before August 31, 2016.

Should you go for it?

If you are planning to book a roundtrip JetBlue flight between now and August 31, 2016, and have a screenshot of your Virgin America account dashboard with more than 500 miles in it, you should definitely register for this promotion!

There's nothing glamorous about picking up nickels in front of steamrollers, but there's always a nickel in it for you.

Should you hack it?

On the other hand, a lot of bloggers are recommending "maximizing" the value of the promotion by transferring 40,001 Starwood Preferred Guest Starpoints to Virgin America (yielding 50,001 total Elevate points), then requesting the match, and then flying the cheapest JetBlue roundtrip flight they can find out of nearby airports.

As you might have guessed, I have a couple of problems with this.

First, a transfer of 40,001 Starpoints does not maximize the value of the promotion; a transfer of 10,001 Starpoints does. That's because at the 10,001-Elevate-point level JetBlue adds 30,000 TrueBlue points to your account, while at the 50,001-point level they add just 75,000 TrueBlue points. If 45,000 TrueBlue points are worth $630, you'll get just 2.1 cents per Starpoints for the additional 30,000 Starpoints transferred, which is below their imputed redemption value of 2.105 cents! That is, in short, not a promotion at all.

Second, even at the most valuable 10,001-point level, you're required to make and fly a new roundtrip JetBlue reservation by August 31, 2016. Maybe you have access to cheap JetBlue flights. Maybe you don't place a high value on your time. But you need to have access to cheap JetBlue flights and not place a high value on your time to justify booking a mileage run in order to trigger the promotion.

Finally, let me gently remind my readers that the point of travel hacking is not to accumulate as many points as possible in as many programs as possible, but rather to pay for the trips you actually want to take, while spending as little money as possible. If you are able to successfully redeem 30,000 TrueBlue points for $450 worth of travel, and you're able to successfully redeem 10,000 Virgin America Elevate points for $220 worth of travel, and you manage to trigger the roundtrip flight requirement on a trip you were planning to take anyway, then congratulations: you'll have earned $670 worth of travel for $210 worth of imputed redemption value (assuming you manufactured all 10,000 Starpoints at an otherwise-unbonused merchant). That's a pretty good discount of 68.7%.

But to secure that pretty good discount, you have to build your redemptions around maximizing the value of your TrueBlue and Elevate points, even if another points currency would have offered you better connections, availability, or out-of-pocket cost.

Conclusion

There are a lot of people served by JetBlue and/or Virgin America, and a disproportionate number of travel hackers no doubt live in the large urban centers those airlines serve. If the stars align such that this promotion scores you huge, valuable points balances at little or no out of pocket cost, rest assured that I'm here cheering you on.

But if you've never flown either JetBlue or Virgin America and you find a credit card huckster is trying to get you excited about JetBlue because they've temporarily raised affiliate payouts to accompany this promotion, feel free to come back and re-read this post for a slightly different perspective.

Related reading:
On the value of not chasing deals
The JetBlue Points Match Is Worth It And You Should Do It
JetBlue Points Match Promotion: Is It Worth It?
 

Quick hits: Turkish Airlines, IST, Budapest

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Hello from the Radisson Blu Carlton Hotel in Bratislava!

It's been a hectic few days, so I'm taking it slow today and thought I'd check in with some thoughts on the first leg of our trip.

Turkish Airlines is very nice

Thursday night, I flew from Chicago to Istanbul on TK6 in the economy cabin. The seats were pretty comfortable but there was not quite enough legroom for me to ever get comfortable enough to sleep for more than a few minutes. Next time: business class (famous last words).

Fortunately, there was a wide selection of movies available on the large seat-back screens, so I got caught up on some movies I'd missed this year. I particularly enjoyed this bizarre Indian television show "Great World Hotels," which follows sultry hostess Elisha Kriis as she coos over fresh fruit and in-room swimming pools at Amansara.

I also enjoyed watching our tiny Turkish flight attendants free-pour cocktails from novelty over-sized bottles of liquor.

Istanbul is a pretty easy place to connect internationally

It's become fashionable in certain circles to lament that US airports are collapsing into rubble around us while international airports are sleek hyper-modern affairs. Not Istanbul!

Istanbul Ataturk Airport still features the teeming mass of humanity and rundown facilities that makes you proud to be an American. I don't think I've ever seen an airport with more toilet facilities, or an airport where such a high percentage of the facilities were closed for "cleaning." It's also been a long time since I've seen someone casually smoking a cigarette in a public restroom!

Travel is fatal to prejudice, as people are fond of remarking in their social media profiles.

Anyway, connecting in Istanbul to our Budapest flight was a cinch, although a mobility-impaired person might struggle with the long walk between gates, and our bags were checked all the way through to Budapest without issue.

Budapest is lovely, and cheap

I had a three-night reservation at the Radisson Blu Hotel Beke, which is a fairly basic business hotel, and like all Club Carlson properties featured a range of confusing amenities:

  • Treadmills and other workout equipment were placed poolside in the basement athletic center;
  • The health center prominently advertised massages, but when I inquired about a massage with the attendant, he explained that his colleague used to provide the massages, but he doesn't work there anymore;
  • Our room featured a real king-size bed, but with two twin comforters;
  • When our room was made up, the housekeeper didn't replace the coffee — but did artfully rearrange the empty plastic packets we'd already used.

We spent a few days exploring Budapest, and visited the Széchenyi bathing complex, which was a very interesting experience. I've never seen so many pools with such slight differences in temperature before. Pro tip: either bring your own towel, or bring cash to rent one. You'll pay 3,000 Hungarian forints and receive a towel, then get 2,000 forints back once you return it.

Speaking of forints, Hungary still hasn't adopted the Euro, and at this rate it seems unlikely to ever do so, making visiting Budapest ludicrously cheap. Over 3 days in the city, I spent $308 total, including our pre-arranged (i.e., overpriced) cab to the hotel, train tickets to Bratislava, and some pretty thorough minibar-raiding at the hotel, and I don't think I could have spent any more money if I were trying to.

That's it for now; I'm off to see what I can see in Bratislava!