Vermont, the ratchet of prosperity, the community of isolation, and the isolation of community

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I recently spent a few weeks in Vermont during what they hilariously call “stick” season, the one between “leaf-peeping” and “ski” seasons (because the leaves have already fallen off but the snow hasn’t fallen yet), and the experience made a surprisingly profound impression on me, much like my bizarre trip to Galveston, Texas.

Vermont is a wonderful state, and I spent two memorable summers at Middlebury College’s Language School, so I have unlimited built-in good will for Vermont and Vermonters. But over the course of the trip I developed a kind of unease which I think is familiar to people who’ve read H.P. Lovecraft and his descriptions of the virtues of Yankee life.

Vermont is a very rich state

I think a lot of people intuitively understand that New England is one of the richest sections of the country, and therefore the world, mainly because it has been settled by capitalists for so long. There are lots of ways of measuring this, but they all tell the same story.

Besides the blip around Spring, 2020, Vermont has had an unemployment rate below 3% since 2018.

In 2023, Vermont’s GDP per capita income (in constant 2017 dollars, which is to say, actual per capita income is thousands of 2023 dollars more than this) ranked 23rd in the country, at $57,521.

If you prefer to judge the wealth of a society by how it treats its people, Vermont has performed better than the national average on NAEP standardized tests since they began administering them in 2002. Vermont also extended public health insurance to low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act in 2014. In 2020 it ranked seventh among US states for life expectancy at birth, at 78.8 years, placing it between Estonia and the Czech Republic among the social democracies and obviously well above the US average.

Besides the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont also is home to one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the country, in Middlebury, and a number of even smaller private colleges founded by various religious sects over the years.

This is a rich state. This is a virtuous state. But it’s also a state filled with people who behave like they are absolutely terrified.

New England newspapers are a national treasure

The first thing I do when I visit any place is grab the first newspaper I see, and keep grabbing until I leave. Over the course of my trip I managed to snag 5 weekly papers from 2 different publishing groups across several Vermont valleys. This is a bit of a callback to my conversation with Ted Fleischaker, publisher of a Portland, Maine, independent newspaper on a 2021 episode of the Manifesto.

There is something glorious about New Englanders that makes them simply mad for newspapers, but even Ted couldn’t compete with these things: 40-page tabloids with news, gossip, police blotters, classifieds, notices, and of course obituaries.

But as I read page after page of this loving-crafted, high-quality local reporting, a kind of unease crept up on me. What are they all so scared of? Don’t they know they’ve already won?

The Terror of taxes

What alerted me that something was wrong was a bizarre story in the Stowe Reporter about a fight over short-term rental registration fees. I don’t believe the article is pay-walled and I’d encourage you to read it for yourself before continuing here.

The core of the dispute was not, as it is in many communities, whether Stowe should regulate short-term rentals marketed through the lawless online marketplaces. That fight had been settled. The fight was whether the fee levied on short-term rental providers would raise too much money. At this point it’s necessary to quote at length:

“The selectboard last week wrestled for nearly an hour over how much to charge, to make sure the fees cover the extra cost the town will incur enforcing its short-term rental ordinance without fleecing owners just for the sake of bringing in extra cash…

“…Based on the idea that there are roughly 1,000 short-term rentals in Stowe, that fee would bring in $50,000 in revenue, which would cover the annual software cost of $40,000 and an extra $10,000 in staff time for the first year…

“…Board member Ethan Carlson said it would be better to err on charging more now and, in a future year, decide to cut back if necessary, instead of setting a fee that is too low and having to increase it later and having to face ‘a room full of people who are very upset.’

“He felt the estimate of $10,000 a year to cover the town’s administrative costs for running a registry was too low. But board chair Billy Adams said fees are rarely intended to cover the entire cost of doing business — for instance, fees for zoning permits, liquor licenses and dog registrations don’t fetch enough revenue to cover their respective administrative costs, he said…

“..Adams also worried about upsetting property owners who are already upset about paying high taxes to both the town and the state education fund. Adams, the lone no vote in adopting the $100 fee, instead suggested a fee of $40.

“‘One could say this is a little bit of double taxation or triple taxation,’ he said. ‘I think it’s reasonable to start out in a conservative place, until we get more information, and then move out from there.’”

After reading the article a few times, a lot of things started to settle into place. These are people who think every individual government activity — even activities they enthusiastically support, like regulating short-term rentals — should be financed by individual government agency assessments that exactly mirror that agency’s cost of doing business.

Why are hospitals organizing golf tournaments?

This creates situations that are genuinely absurd, to a non-Vermonter. Every issue of the Stowe Reporter and the Mountain Times (Killington) included two or three stories about local organizations holding pumpkin carving competitions, Halloween costume competitions, whatever. But then I found out about the golfing hospital. I will quote here only briefly:

“Sixty-eight golfers enjoyed sunshine, a light breeze, and perfect course conditions at the Copley Country Club for Copley Hospital’s 37th annual golf scramble on July 13. Thanks to 22 sponsors and the players, the event netted more than $26,000 for Copley’s Emergency Department.

“‘At the end of the day, we announced the five teams with the lowest net scores and distributed prizes, but the big winner was Copley Hospital,’ Emily McKenna, the hospital’s executive director of development, marketing and community relations, said. ‘We are close to reaching the $75,000 goal to purchase bedside monitors for the emergency department. The Gravel Grinder on Saturday, Oct. 5, should put us over. I am so appreciative of our generous community and their continued support of Copley.’”

Let me put my cards on the table here: I do not think hospitals should be organizing golf tournaments to raise money to buy bedside monitors for their emergency departments.

The curious case of the public schools

The main issue rocking the state of Vermont during my visit was not fees on short-term rentals, or hospital golf tournaments, or pumpkin-carving fun runs, or when the resorts would start producing artificial snow (although there were a lot of conversations about artificial snow).

The main issue was property taxes, particularly “school” property taxes. This is not a post about school financing, it’s about Vermonters, so I will explain the system as I gleaned it purely from my newspapers.

Each community sets its own budget for public schools, presumably through interminable town hall meetings like the one depicted in Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” (where the speaker is depicted opposing the construction of a replacement school for the one destroyed by fire). The Vermont legislature then determines what the property tax rates in that community should be in order to raise enough money to pay for that budget. Parts of the budget (like capital improvements) are paid for by the state and I believe there’s also a burden-shifting adjustment between wealthier and poorer communities.

This creates a strange gap, between the people who set the budget (the town hall) and the ones who calculate how to pay for it (the legislature).

Into that strange gap stepped a lobbying group with a novel theory: Vermont’s schools are too good.

The “you’ve had it too good for too long” theory of government efficiency

As mentioned above, Vermont’s schools are outstanding, and everyone knows it and likes it. They like sending their kids to nearby schools (especially when it snows and the highways are impassable), they like seeing them thrive, they like seeing them graduate, and they like seeing them go on to bigger and better things. So how do you convince them to cut their school budgets, and the property taxes assessed by the legislature to pay for it?

You promise they can have the same quality schools while paying $400 million per year less in property taxes.

Obviously, no one believes this. The authors of the report don’t believe it, the legislature doesn’t believe it, the parents don’t believe it, and the second-homeowners (who don’t send their kids to Vermont schools) don’t believe it. But if enough people pretend to believe it, they can lower their property taxes by $400 million, which is a powerful incentive to pretend to believe something.

Isolated communities and the ratchet of prosperity

I’ve gone out of my way to be as generous as possible both because I love Vermont and because I think there are both obvious and true explanations for this behavior. The zealots and slave traders who settled New England believe they carved out their little islands of European civilization through frugality and virtue, and they did carve out little islands of European civilization, so who’s to say they were wrong?

Since I have a lot of rich readers, I am fully aware they’re nodding their heads right now: that’s the way to run a society. The lowest possible property taxes to pay for a few things like volunteer fire fighters and expired textbooks, and then a few charity events every year when the hospital needs a new defibrilator or runs out of stethoscopes.

But as an outsider, it looks like cringing terror, and I wish Vermonters would realize they’ve already won. The only people coming to take away what they have won are the people promising austerity for generations to come in order to save a few thousand dollars in taxes on their ski chalets.

A tale of two Hyatts Place

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Last week I took a road trip to neighboring Delaware to check out some of the beach communities we missed on our trip to Exmore in August. It was a fun time, and since neither of us had ever been to Delaware before we built the trip around completing the Discover Delaware Trail. We saw a lot of Delaware, and got some great ideas for stuff we’d like to do next summer assuming the vaccination campaign is up to speed by then.

But I don’t want to talk about Delaware today, I want to talk about “brand standards.” Except when American Express is running offers that are only valid at specific property types, I’m basically indifferent to the sub-brands each hotel chain licenses, not because I don’t acknowledge there are differences, but because there are just too many for me to keep straight. At the low end who cares if it’s a Hyatt House or a Hyatt Place, in the middle can anyone keep straight the difference between a Hyatt, Grand Hyatt, or Hyatt Regency, and even at the most luxurious properties, how do you decide between a Waldorf Astoria and a Conrad (the Maldives is host to both)?

Like any sane person, I decide between hotels based on location and cost, taking into account any points balances, free award nights, and credit card promotions. Which is why I was so surprised by the totally different practices at the two Hyatts Place we stayed in the same state during the same week.

Hyatt Place Dewey Beach versus Hyatt Place Wilmington Riverfront

To get it out of the way: these are two different properties in different parts of the state, they opened 6 years apart, and they have different ownership groups. Obviously the properties are going to be different. Dewey Beach is a party town just south of Rehoboth Beach, and relies on summer vacationers and hard-partying future Supreme Court Justices. Wilmington is a financial center that brings in conventions and business travelers year-round (until this year).

The Hyatt Place Dewey Beach was happy to sell us some beers to take out back and watch the sunset over the bay, but they didn’t have a kitchen, instead offering a few packaged snacks next to the reception counter. The Wilmington Riverfront had a “grab and go” pantry, but also a bar and restaurant, which served both lunch and dinner until March (they now open at 4 pm and close at 9:30 pm for an extremely limited dinner menu only).

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the stuff that goes to the core of so-called “brand standards,” and three things stuck out to me:

  • Coffee. In Dewey Beach, the Hyatt Place had removed coffee makers from the rooms. This seemed perfectly reasonable: coffee makers are high-contact surfaces and relatively difficult to thoroughly clean (we occasionally run vinegar through our home coffee maker and it doesn’t work particularly well). Instead, they offered coffee all-day in the lobby, which worked fine for us. Imagine our surprise when we arrived in Wilmington and the coffee makers, difficult to clean and all, were still in the rooms.

  • Breakfast. Stays at Hyatts Place include breakfast, and when we checked in at Dewey Beach the receptionist informed us that they were offering one “hot item” and one “cold item.” The next morning I went down and discovered that the hot item was a Jimmy Dean sausage sandwich. Not a Jimmy Dean-style sausage sandwich — it was literally still in its microwaveable Jimmy Dean wrapping paper. When I mentioned this to the receptionist in Wilmington, she was shocked, since they have someone come in every morning exclusively to cook breakfast in order to meet “brand standards,” a rotating cycle of french toast sticks, oatmeal, and something else.

  • Toiletries. Another weird one: our bathroom in Dewey Beach was set up with shampoo and conditioner, but not skin lotion, which I’ve come to expect at even the most basic chain hotels. And sure enough, the Hyatt Place in Wilmington provided it.

None of this would have been of more than passing interest for me at all, except that while I was waiting to pick up a few things for dinner in Wilmington, the receptionist wandered over and I told her I was surprised by the difference between the two properties. She got more agitated than I was! They had worked so hard to meet “brand standards” since they opened in October, and this other property in the same chain 90 miles away was just phoning it in. I guess I’d be upset too.

Conclusion

Nothing on Earth could convince me to learn the differences between the 28 post-merger Marriott sub-brands, and in general I’m going to stick to booking the cheapest properties in the locations that best suit my needs. But the fact that two properties in the same sub-brand, in the same state, could have such different interpretations of “brand standards” has at least given me pause. Where prices and redemption costs are similar, I might start occasionally picking up the phone to find out in advance how individual properties are implementing them.

Virginia's Eastern Shore: our first road trip out of quarantine

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The pandemic has caused different kinds of pain for different people. For the very social, the pandemic has meant losing the ability to visit with friends and family in person. For the unemployed, it has meant the loss of income, health insurance, and experience. For those in nursing homes and prisons, it has meant the loss of contact and physical and emotional support. And for people who love to travel, it has meant the shrinking of the world down to a few grocery stores, restaurants, and hardware stores within driving or walking distance.

Over the last 3-4 weeks I’ve seen more and more people I follow in the travel hacking community venturing outside those narrow limits. Usually by car, or by short, non-stop, masked, socially-distanced flight, people are trying to see whether travel can be safe again. After reading and listening to a number of reports, last weekend I put together a short road trip to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Renting the car

In the past when we needed to rent cars, the most convenient location was a Hertz desk at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, a short walk away. Whether due to the pandemic, Hertz’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, or both, that location is (at least temporarily) closed, and the best option Autoslash came up with was Hertz’s Union Station location.

I ended up making a week-long reservation from one Wednesday to the next, although we only planned to use the car over the weekend, since it turns out the breakeven point was just around 3-4 days, and we thought the car might be nice to have to run errands on either side of the trip. We did end up using the car to pick up a takeout order on the other side of town on Tuesday, so I think the extra couple bucks turned out to be money well spent.

I hate renting cars, but the experience wasn’t noticeably different from before the pandemic. After going through the tax/gas/insurance rigamarole, the agent told me where the car was parked, and I found it had two “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” stickers “sealing” the front driver and passenger side doors, so to open the door you’d “break” the seal. The car certainly looked clean, but I still couldn’t help but laugh — does that mean they didn’t clean the back seats?

Getting there

I’ll be honest, I grew up in Montana, so the whole “toll road” thing has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Back in Wisconsin we had an “I-Pass” transponder for trips to Illinois, but it disappeared in one of our recent moves, so when Google Maps warned me that our route to Virginia “included toll roads,” I went to the change drawer and put together a formidable stack of quarters, safely stuffing them into the driver side door.

It turns out, the route to Virginia’s Eastern Shore does not include “toll roads.” It includes a single toll bridge, which hilariously only charges for eastbound trips, and not at all hilariously no longer accepts cash. As we neared the bridge and the signs for the toll bridge became more and more frequent, I got more and more anxious. It turns out there’s some way to pay your toll after the fact by mail, and presumably Hertz is going to get a bill sometime in the next year and come after me for it.

My recommendation is just to pick up an E-ZPass transponder. Each state that participates in the E-ZPass system sets its own charges for these things. They’re currently free for Maryland residents and appear to be free in Virginia as well (with a $35 prepaid balance) so if you know anyone you can have one mailed to in those states, that’s probably your best bet. Other state charges are:

Staying there

There are a number of larger tourist towns on the Eastern Shore, including Ocean City in Maryland and Chincoteague in Virginia, but we weren’t comfortable staying there, so we opted for the Hampton Inn & Suites in Exmore, Virginia. At 30,000 Hilton Honors points per night, that ended up being a phenomenal redemption at 0.6 or 0.7 cents per point. Due to a coding error (or one of Hilton’s overlapping promotions) I also got a rack of points back at the end of the stay, which brought the total cost down to just 55,000 points — a great deal.

Just as with the car, the housekeeping staff had placed a tearable sticker on our door before arrival, which one assumes was supposed to indicate that no one had entered the room after it was cleaned. Unfortunately for the pandemic theatrics, the sticker simply fell off, instead of tearing, when I opened the door.

The hotel was by far the place we felt least safe during this trip. Our room was fine, and they proactively asked at check-in whether we wanted to skip housekeeping during our stay, but other than the actual hotel staff themselves (who were great), no one was observing any of the practices we’ve become used to in preventing the spread of the virus. The situation finally reached peak absurdity when I noticed what the unmasked workmen were doing in the lobby on our second day in town: installing the virus prevention signs the hotel had undoubtedly been shipped from Hilton headquarters. Guests were also congregating, eating, and drinking throughout the day in the hotel’s common dining area.

After our first night, we just used the stairs on our end of the building to exit and avoided the lobby area completely.

Eating there

We ordered dinner takeout from two Exmore restaurants, the Exmore Diner and the the Great Machipongo Clam Shack. Both are local institutions that are surely swamped during normal travel seasons. Both are now offering only takeout and drivethrough, and when we called our orders in ahead of time we had a 15-25 minute wait time at each.

Annoyingly, the Exmore Diner has a vast daily specials menu they only post on their Facebook page, so I ordered a serviceable but boring burger instead of the daily steak or pasta dish I would have ordered if the person taking my order had thought to mention it.

The Great Machipongo is one of the weirdest places I’ve ever eaten, which I will illustrate with the following image. This is the “2 Baked Stuffed Clams” listed in the “Sandwiches” portion of their menu:

These are, clearly, two baked stuffed clams. Then they are served, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, on clam shells.

Besides the perfect hush puppies (pictured above), the “She Crab Soup” was a fascinating and delicious twist on clam chowder based on Maryland’s official mollusk (I have no idea if the crab is actually Maryland’s official mollusk, but go with me here).

Chincoteague and Assateague Islands

On Saturday, we drove about an hour north from Exmore to Chincoteague Island and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. Besides what I would call an “excessive” mosquito population, this part of the trip was great. The Refuge had a $10 per vehicle entrance fee, which gave you access to the entire Virginia side of Assateague island (I’m not sure if the Maryland side is accessible from Chincoteague or whether you have to drive around), including hiking trails, scenic turnoffs (there’s a herd of feral horses managed by the Chincoteague fire department), and Assateague Beach. A number of locations are designated as approved fishing and crabbing spots, for enthusiasts of the region’s famous soft-shell crabs.

We spent an hour or two walking around the beach, and it gave me a chance to reflect on one of the stupid fights people insist on having online about social distancing during the plague. There is a certain faction of online scolds who insist that newspapers showing large groups of people gathering outdoors are misleading people about the relative risks of indoor and outdoor socializing. But that’s not the actual experience anyone has of going to the beach.

On a windy, rainy day, all the groups of people I saw had plenty of space to separate themselves. I can’t imagine any virus transmission happened on Assateague Beach itself. Even the restrooms seemed to have been recently cleaned and were stocked with plenty of hand sanitizer. But the thing beach truthers can’t get their heads around is that “beach” transmission doesn’t happen at the beach. It happens in the car you fill with your friends to drive to the beach.

If we can get groups of people to isolate themselves, we can contain the virus’s spread. If people continue to socialize, they’ll continue to spread the virus. Whether you’re driving to a movie theater, a restaurant, a beach, or a doctor’s appointment doesn’t make the slightest difference to the virus.

Two Chincoteague highlights

After meandering around Assateague Beach, we passed back through Chincoteague proper and got some lunch. Pico Taqueria had awesome vegetarian and fish tacos, and a much better “vibe” than Lily’s Little Mexico, the first place we stopped before being discouraged by the astonishingly slow line and limited menu.

The Black Narrows Brewing Company is also located on Chincoteague, and we enjoyed stopping in for a few sips of beer. They have outdoor seating, where we split a cup of their Weathered Together pale ale, but were not currently selling cans to go due to the now-years-long “aluminum shortage.” The front deck was more crowded than we were comfortable with, but on a rainy afternoon we enjoyed a break on their back lawn, which had some ornamental cover.

How I did on the American Express Hilton Aspire card

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I wrote previously about using the American Express Hilton Aspire card to cover most of the cost of my honeymoon in Hawaii at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort. Since I cancelled the card as planned earlier this year, I thought I’d give a rundown of the total value proposition I ultimately got from it.

Signup bonus

For signing up for the card using my referral link, my partner received 150,000 Hilton Honors points and I received another 20,000 (we also got another 12,000 from meeting the minimum spend requirement for the card, but that’s less than I’d earn putting the spend on my own Hilton Surpass card, so we can set that aside). Hilton now allows you to easily and (relatively) quickly combine points from multiple accounts, so we pooled those points to pay for about 45% of our five-night stay, which I value at $1,900 (half a cent per point).

Total value: $855

Free night certificate

The Hilton Aspire card also comes with a free weekend night certificate on approval. To be honest, we did so much traveling in 2019 that I don’t remember which specific night we redeemed this award for, but since we typically stay in 40,000-point-per-night properties, I’ll assume we redeemed the certificate for “about” 40,000 points.

Total value: $200

Resort credit

If you’re a travel hacking junkie you may have recently read that American Express was issuing $250 resort credits to folks who had not completed eligible resort stays in 2020. There seems to be some confusion over exactly what’s going on, but this wasn’t news to me: after completing our stay in early January, 2019, our $250 resort credit posted automatically a week or two later. Then, in roughly April of 2019, a second $250 credit posted without explanation.

The most obvious explanation to me is that since the card was launched so recently, there were some early coding errors which kept some resort credits from posting automatically. When they discovered the error, American Express then manually applied an additional $250 credit to all accounts that had eligible resort activity, whether or not they had received an automatic credit.

I value the first, correct $250 resort credit at about $125 (we wouldn’t have run up the charges we did if they weren’t going to be reimbursed), and the second, incorrect credit at full value.

Total value: $375

Airline fee credits

If all the above makes it sound like I’m bragging, here’s the part where I prove that’s not true: I blew it on maximizing the card’s airline fee credits. The plan was to receive 3 years’ worth of airline fee credits while paying a single annual fee: in late 2018, in 2019, and in early 2019 before cancelling the card.

2018 went according to plan: we received the card in late 2018, quickly designated American Airlines as our airline, and bought 2 $100 electronic gift cards. The credits posted quickly, but we forfeited the remaining $50 in credits. Fortunately, the cards were used for flights my partner would have otherwise paid cash for, so I assign them the full $200 in value.

The right move in 2019 would have been to immediately buy another $200 in cards. But with our January travel, it just didn’t happen, and then I saw reports that gift cards had stopped triggering credits. Other options (JetBlue pet fees, etc.) still worked, but that would have involved switching the designated airline, learning the new technique, and monitoring the account all over again. So I did…nothing. We used the card for a few American Airlines checked bag fees in 2019, but I believe we received a total of $40 in 2019 credits.

For much the same reason, 2020 was a complete write-off, before we cancelled the card in late January.

Total value: $240

Unlimited Priority Pass membership

This is definitely the benefit that I was most surprised by: it turns out there are a lot of Priority Pass lounges! One issue when you have free lounge passes, whether through elite status, SkyBonus redemptions, or the 10 annual visits through the American Express Hilton Surpass card is that you constantly have to weigh whether you’re going to be laid over in an airport long enough to justify burning one of your lounge passes.

But with an unlimited membership, you can just pop in for some celery sticks or cheese cubes; it’s kind of an awesome feeling. It’s hard to put a value on something you would never pay for, but in a heavy travel year like 2019, an unlimited Priority Pass membership was very conservatively worth $100 to me.

Total value: $100

Diamond status

Worthless, I already have it and can book reservations for my partner when she’s traveling without me.

Total value: $0

Conclusion

The basic math here looks pretty good: I paid a $450 annual fee for what I have tried to conservatively calculate as $1,770 in value. Of course, part of that was a fluke: it would have been $250 less if American Express hadn’t awarded us two resort credits. Likewise, part of that was human error: it would have been $510 more if I had been able to trigger all 3 airline fee credits.

If you’re wondering whether the card is worth getting, the obvious answer is yes, if you can:

  • get it at the end of the year;

  • through a referral;

  • with a plan to use your points for a high-value stay;

  • and a plan to use your weekend night;

  • and a plan to use your resort credit;

  • and a plan to use your airline fee credit.

If you meet all those requirements, you can easily get several thousand dollars in value for a single $450 annual fee.

But this is the first card I had my partner sign up for in what Frequent Miler calls “two-player mode,” and let me tell you, it is absolutely exhausting. We ended up doing ok this time, but I’m not planning to try it again any time soon. You probably already know whether your partner has any interest in travel hacking, and if they don’t, you’re not going to convince them with some free cheese cubes in an Alaska Airlines lounge.

Chase's missed opportunity to do the right thing

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I mentioned in Friday’s post that the airport transfer I ordered through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal to pick us up at the Sofia airport never arrived, and that we ended up taking the (cheap, convenient) subway instead. I wrote, “I have a request in with Ultimate Rewards to refund the points, so hopefully this mistake will end up being free, but overall it was a silly experience and waste of time.”

Oddly, that’s not how it worked out.

Chase wanted the transfer company’s permission to refund me

On my first call with Chase, on Thursday, October 10, I was placed on hold several times as the representative tried to contact the transfer company, but wasn’t ultimately able to. She told me they would contact the company and be in touch by phone or e-mail once they’d resolved the issue.

I received the first e-mail followup on Saturday, from the e-mail address “VNA-INTL.chasetravel@customercare.expedia.com,” which is obviously the e-mail address for the person at Expedia that handles Ultimate Rewards reservations:

“Thank you for contacting Chase Travel about Refund Request for your Budapest Express - Transfers on travel in dates Sep 08,2019 and travel out dates Sep 28,2019 .

“We have made multiple attempts but are still in the process of making contact with [Budapest Express - Transfers] for your Refund Request. Please expect an email update from us within 24 hour.

“Thank you for choosing Chase Travel.

“Sincerely,
”Arnold Fajardo
”Travel Consultant Supervisor
”Chase Travel”

Ignoring Arnold’s grammar, this is a very strange e-mail for multiple reasons: the dates of my trip were not September 8-September 28, they were September 27-October 9. The name of the transfer company is given as “Budapest Express - Transfers,” when the pickup was at the Sofia airport in Bulgaria, and the company in my original reservation was “P-Airbus,” which is obviously a nonsense, but it’s a different nonsense than “Budapest Express - Transfers.”

The transfer company didn’t give it

The next e-mail, from the same Expedia e-mail address, tried to break the news to me gently:

“Thank you for contacting Chase Travel about your cancellation request for your reservation at Budapest Express - Transfers.

“We have advocated your case with Budapest Express - Transfers and due to their policy in relation to your reason for cancelling your reservation, they have unfortunately denied your request.

“We apologize that their response was not more favorable.

“We apologize for the delay in answering your e–mail. We are currently experiencing an extremely high volume of e–mail requests preventing us from responding within our normal standards.

“Thank you for choosing Chase Travel.

“Sincerely,
”Alvin Elona
”Travel Consultant Supervisor
”Chase Travel”

Again, obviously I did not cancel my reservation for any reason. They simply never showed up.

I’m not mad about the points, I’m confused about the missed opportunity

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, 2,000 Ultimate Rewards points aren’t that big a deal to me, and they certainly aren’t that big a deal to Chase. But in its own way, that makes the situation more, not less, confusing. I understand Chase doesn’t have any way to exercise control over the service providers Expedia uses. But when you’re putting your customers, with whom you have a direct relationship, completely in the hands of your partners, the obvious way to resolve partner disputes is to err on the side of caution. Instead, Chase decided to very mildly annoy me in order to save $25 because they’re not willing to stand up to their partner.

Like I say, I’m not mad, I’m just confused.

I would have been better protected using a credit card

The final piece of this microdrama is that if I had simply booked an airport transfer with a credit card, and they didn’t show up, my credit card company would have cheerfully reversed the charge within minutes. By putting customers through this absurd three-step dance, where Chase contacts Expedia, Expedia contacts their in-country partner, and then it’s up to the partner whether or not to grant a refund, Chase may save 25 bucks here and there, but also sends a loud and clear message not to trust them with third-party reservations.

It’s not going to bankrupt them, and it’s not going to bankrupt me, but that doesn’t make it a good business decision.

Balkans travel: don't make my mistakes, learn from them!

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When I wrote up my then-upcoming trip to the Balkans, I was still a bit vague about how I planned to get around once we were there. I had previously traveled between Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade by train, so my hope was that we’d be able to do as much travel as possible that way. Ultimately, that’s not how it worked out, and the result was two pretty expensive mistakes (and one cheap one).

In the interest of making sure nobody else makes the same mistakes I did, here’s my guide to how I’d suggest putting together our trip the right way.

Sofia airport transfer

The right way to do it: Sofia’s international airport has a subway station just steps from the arrival hall. Simply follow the blue line marked with a capital “M” to either of the two exits it leads to (you’ll see what I mean when you get there). Tickets cost 1.60 leva each, and there’s a vending machine that accepts credit cards in the station so there’s no need to change money at extortionate airport rates.

What we did: remembering that Robert Dwyer at Milenomics had recently written about using Ultimate Rewards points for airport transfers, I thought it would be a nice treat to have a guy waiting in the arrival hall for us, given our late night arrival and unfamiliarity with the city. As Robert explains, the Ultimate Rewards booking process is a bit complicated, and I think I ultimately had to disable some security settings to complete the reservation, but I was ultimately able to pay about 2,000 Ultimate Rewards points for a $25 transfer. When we arrived around 9:00 pm, we dutifully followed the instructions to find the meeting point. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. Then we took the subway. I have a request in with Ultimate Rewards to refund the points, so hopefully this mistake will end up being free, but overall it was a silly experience and waste of time.

Sofia-Belgrade

The right way to do it: there are three ways to get between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Belgrade, Serbia.

  • There is a train once per day, departing Sofia at 9:30 am (and departing Belgrade at 6:10 in the off-season and 9:12 during the summer). Tickets can only be bought with cash, and are about 40 leva each. In the summer (between roughly mid-June and mid-September), there is a direct train, while the rest of the year requires two transfers. The transfers are at the tiny stations of Dimitrovgrad and Nis and are very simple, since everyone is going to the same destination as you — just follow the most confident-looking person. The direct train takes about ten hours (there’s a one-hour time change), and the off-season trip takes about 11 and a half due to the added wait time. Unfortunately, the direct train terminates at the less-convenient Topcider train station in Belgrade, so while we were able to walk to our hotel from the Beograd-Centar station, you will probably need to take a cab from Topcider (unless you’re staying in that neighborhood).

  • There is a bus company called Florentia Bus that operates one, non-stop bus per day between Sofia and Belgrade (continuing on to Zagreb, Ljubljana, and ultimately Italy). It departs Sofia at 2:30 pm and arrives in Belgrade around 10:00 pm local time (remember the time zone change). Tickets cost between 20 and 30 euros. However, and I cannot stress this enough, you must book these tickets in advance. If you do not book your ticket in advance, you will not be able to buy a ticket, and you will not be taking this bus from Sofia to Belgrade. Every bus is sold out, every day, so if you think you might want to take this bus, book your ticket at least a week ahead of time. If you’re not sure which day you will want to travel, book tickets for multiple days. Just don’t try to buy tickets in person, because an extremely impatient woman who speaks exclusively Bulgarian is not going to sell you tickets in person. Trust me on this.

  • The right way to get to Belgrade, however, is to book a door-to-door minivan shuttle. There are a ton of “companies” that offer this service, but your best bet is simply to ask the concierge at your hotel in Sofia to arrange it for you. The cost shouldn’t be higher than 50 euro per person, so if it’s higher than that, ask at somebody else’s hotel.

What we did: as you may have gathered by now, we took the train. We arrived in Sofia Saturday night and planned to go down to the bus station Sunday morning to buy bus tickets for that afternoon. When we got there around 10:00 am (after the morning train to Belgrade had already departed, unfortunately), the woman at the Florentia Bus desk said that while the bus was full, we could come back at 2:00 pm to see if everyone with reserved seats had checked in. This, and I cannot stress this enough, was a lie, and you should not believe her if she says this to you. This fiasco meant that we had to spend an extra night in Sofia (fine), no-show the first night of our Belgrade reservation (expensive, although the Hilton Honors points I redeemed for the reservation were eventually automatically refunded), and take the indirect train the next morning (long, hot, and boring, although cheap).

Belgrade-Sarajevo

The right way to do it: in the recent past, minivan operators offered door-to-door transportation from Belgrade to Sarajevo as they do between Sofia and Belgrade, but apparently Bosnia and Herzegovina has now banned those transfers, so the best way is the once-a-day bus. It leaves Belgrade’s central bus station at 4:00 pm and arrives at a poorly-lit parking lot in Sarajevo around 10:45 pm. Tickets cost 2,630 Serbian dinar each, about $25. The bus ride is fairly unpleasant, especially in October when you’re taking narrow mountain roads in the dark, so the truly ambitious might consider renting a car and driving themselves.

What we did: fortunately, we got this one right. The morning after we (finally) got to Belgrade, we sauntered down to the central bus station and were able to easily buy tickets for the next day. For some reason in order to reach the busses themselves, you need to go through a turnstile, so when you buy your ticket the cashier will give you one turnstile token for each ticket. I have no idea if this is supposed to be security theatre of some kind, or simply a way to keep the loading and unloading area from getting too crowded with friends and family, but that’s what the token she gives you is for.

Sarajevo-Mostar

The right way to do it: there are two daily trains from Sarajevo to Mostar, leaving at 7:15 am and 4:49 pm and arriving about two hours later in each case. Tickets cost 11.90 Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible marks, or a bit less than $7. You can book tickets in person, or make a reservation online and pick up your tickets at the station, from the window with an “online tickets” sign barely taped to it. There, an elderly gentleman will go through dozens of loose-leaf sheets of paper looking for your reservation until he eventually asks for help and finds it and hands you your ticket. Then you’re good to go!

What we did: we got this one right. The train between Sarajevo and Mostar was easily the most modern and comfortable piece of transportation we used during this entire trip. The train even supposedly had wifi on board, although I was never able to get it to work. I have no idea whether Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entire train network has been retrofitted with these trains or if only the Mostar route got them, but the whole region would be well-served if they followed this example.

Mostar-Dubrovnik

The right way to do it: unfortunately, Mostar is the end of the train line, so if you’re traveling onward as we were, you need to take to the roads. There are several busses a day departing Mostar’s main bus station for Dubrovnik, with the latest departing at 12:30 pm during the off-season (there’s also a mid-afternoon bus during the summer). Due to the political geography of the Balkans, the bus crosses the Croatian border twice, and makes a stop in Neum, so a lot of the trip is spent waiting at international borders. Busses are apparently forbidden from taking the more direct route that crosses the Croatian border only once at Orahov Do. If you want to take the more direct route, you’ll need to rent or hire a car.

What we did: we got this one right as well. There was plenty of space on the bus and I booked our tickets the morning of our departure. Importantly, the Mostar-Dubrovnik bus does not stop at the location labeled in Google Maps when you search for “Dubrovnik bus station.” Instead, it stops at the “Autobusni Kolodvor” shown here. This is walking distance (we walked it) from central Dubrovnik, but it’s a pretty intense walk so if you’re staying near the Old City and have any mobility or health issues I’d strongly consider taking a bus or taxi instead.

Dubrovnik-Sofia

The right way to do it: at the most basic level, the right way to do it is to not do it at all. The only reason we needed to get back to Sofia is that due to procrastination I’d waited too long to book award tickets and was stuck booking a paid (albeit cheap) round-trip itinerary: since we flew into Sofia, we needed to fly out of Sofia as well. What you want to do is plan far enough in advance that you can book award tickets into Sofia (or Dubrovnik) and out of the other. That would let you follow the same trail through the Balkans we took, without having to double back in order to catch your return flight. Alternatively, this is an itinerary tailor-made for United’s “Excursionist” routing rules: if you are already booking an award itinerary between the US and Belgrade, it doesn’t cost any more Mileage Plus miles (although there will be some additional taxes and fees) to add an additional award leg between Dubrovnik and Sofia. If you are on a paid reservation like we were, then your only option may be a paid flight, but that can also be fairly cheap if you’re able to book it far enough in advance.

What we did: this was easily my most expensive mistake of the trip. I did end up booking a paid one-way back to Sofia, where we ended our trip, but I booked it so close in that it ended up costing an embarrassing amount of money. Don’t be like me.

Conclusion

I’m going to squeeze this trip for some more content next week, but I want this post to stand alone as a beginner’s guide to the logistics of Balkans travel. It is cheap to travel around the Balkans, which is great, but it is not fast and it is not particularly comfortable. You can pay more to get somewhat more comfort, and somewhat more speed, but it’s not a place you should try to visit in a rush.

And obviously, the fewer dumb mistakes you make, the cheaper and more comfortable your trip will be.

The great, good, weird, and apologetic about the Grand Wailea, a Waldorf Astoria Resort

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What a week! I bring you alohas (that means “hello”) from Maui, the second largest island in the state of Hawaii (or as the locals call it, “the aloha state”). As a reminder, I organized this trip as a belated honeymoon taking advantage of a few interlocking opportunities:

  • Hilton Honors offers the fifth night free on award stays to all elite members (everyone, in other words), which is naturally most valuable on stays of exactly 5 nights at top-tier 95,000-point properties;

  • the new American Express Hilton Honors Aspire card offers a $250 statement credit for charges made at “participating Hilton Resorts;”

  • there’s also currently an Amex Offer for a $70 statement credit when you spend $350 at Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts in the US, Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, and Paris and Conrad Hotels & Resorts in the US;

  • and the Bank of America Alaska Airlines companion ticket can be used to book moderately complex multi-city itineraries with a stopover, so we were able to use it to fly from my partner’s family in Indiana, to my family in Oregon, onward to Maui, and back to the East Coast, all for the price of a single Alaska Airlines ticket, plus taxes and fees.

There are a few ways the deal could have been stretched a little further. For example, I booked all five nights from my Hilton Honors account, including this weekend, while it would have been technically optimal to book a 5-night stay ending on a Friday night, then use the Aspire card’s free weekend night certificate to book a free 6th night and my Ascend free weekend night certificate for a 7th night, but that would have required my partner to take a lot more time off work, and we’ve already been traveling since before Christmas. As a rule I try to avoid organizing my travel around stunts unless I think I’m going to get a particularly good blog post out of them, and the free weekend night certificates will certainly get used, hopefully at a good redemption value.

The Grand Wailea breakfast mystery, solved

When I first wrote about this trip, I explained that I’d been told the Diamond breakfast benefit was “a daily $15.00 per day up to 2 person a in room dining credit. Unfortunately the $15.00 in Only for in Room dining” [sic]. But I’m now happy to be able to share the actual letter describing the benefit I was handed when checking in last Wednesday:

Breakfast, revealed!

Now, a civilian might think this letter is as clear as day: a $30 per day credit for food and beverage. But if you’re a travel hacker, you know this raises just as many questions as it answers. What’s a “day?” We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and departed on Monday; do we get six $30 credits, one per “day,” or five $30 credits, one per night of our stay? Is the credit “use it or lose it,” so we have to spend $30 per day, or can we splurge on one day?

I asked all these questions to our check-in clerk, and was told, “I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, we’ll just take $150 off your bill when you check-out.” And sure enough, when we checked out yesterday the front desk agent was happy to remove $150 from our room charges (although I did have to remind her, possibly due to the chaos the night before — see below).

The property is spectacular, but starting to show its age

Before arriving, I requested a quiet room, and we were given a ground floor king room in the “Chapel Wing,” with a balcony overlooking one of the resort’s many koi ponds. The room was indeed quiet, except for in the mornings when housekeeping carts rattled by on the tiles outside and the sprinkler system turned on to water the gardens. The room had a small refrigerator instead of a minibar, which was great for storing food, leftovers and drinks, which we found very convenient.

While everything in the room was great, it was the first place we started to notice wear and tear on the property, which opened in 1991 and underwent a major renovation as recently as 2017. At some point the door handles were replaced with longer, curved handles (possibly as an ADA compliance measure?), but the raised decorative designs on the doors were not taken into account. That means our door handle didn't have a full range of motion, and the bolt didn't fully withdraw when we turned the handle from the inside. Nine times out of ten, this doesn’t matter and the door closes anyway. The tenth time, the bolt catches against the doorframe and the door stays open. We noticed this happen one time and pulled the door shut on our way out, but the second time it took a a security guard to notice it, who promptly scared the daylights out of us when he walked into the room to make sure we were ok! Other than that, we mostly noticed small things like missing tiles in the swimming pools and chipped paint on the waterslides, but nothing that interfered with our fun.

Speaking of fun, the main attraction at the resort is its network of swimming pools and hot tubs, most of which are connected by waterslides, so you can start at the top level and slide down from one level to the next, or take one long fast ride all the way to the bottom. I don’t know why some people don’t like resorts with kids, but if you’re one of them, you are not going to like this place. There is one "adults-only” pool, but it’s right in the middle of all the other pools so there are still kids walking through all the time to get between the waterslides and the guest rooms. I guess they’re just not allowed to actually get into the water. Compare that to the Hyatt Zilara, where it was someone’s full-time job to keep kids from stepping over a rope onto the “adults-only” portion of the beach.

The adults-only Hibiscus Pool

Paying for (and eating) the food

I had my partner sign up for an Aspire card before this trip, so we had a $250 American Express credit (remember: this is a cardmember year, not calendar year, benefit) to spend in addition to the $150 food and beverage credit. Plus, since she had the $70 off $350 offer on her card, if we spent a total of exactly $500 we’d end up owing just $30 after the $150 property credit, $250 Aspire resort credit, and $70 Amex Offer credit.

Based on our experience at the Hyatt Zilara Rose Hall in Jamaica (an all-inclusive resort, so we didn’t actually spend any money there), I assumed we’d be spending a lot more than that, so I planned to charge any amount over $350 to my own Hilton Honors Ascend American Express to trigger another $70 credit. That ended up not being the case, for two main reasons: the food at the Grand Wailea isn’t very good, so we didn’t eat very much of it, and the Grand Wailea isn’t nearly as isolated as the Zilara.

In fact, there’s a shopping mall with a pair of grocery stores (same company, but with slightly different selections) just next door, so we were able to stock up on drinks, snacks, and even things like salads and sandwiches there and pay perfectly reasonable prices. Many of the prices didn’t even seem inflated compared to prices on the mainland, and Hawaii has a state sales tax that’s less than half what we pay at home.

Ultimately, when we woke up Monday morning, we still had over $50 left to spend to get up to $500 total, but we went for a morning swim and managed to run up a bill poolside to cover the difference.

Before I go any further, let me be clear that it’s perfectly possible to spend as much as I had expected to at the Grand Wailea. Importantly, we didn’t take advantage of the four luxurious options on the property: the fine dining Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, the Sunday brunch at the Grand Dining Room Maui, the Luau, or the “sunset cabana dining” option. We also didn’t order room service, which has both a $7 delivery charge and a 20% service charge. If you do any combination of those things, you’ll have no trouble triggering as many statement credits or minimum spend requirements as you please; entrees at “Humuhumu” are between $34 and $95, and sunset cabana reservations cost between $685 and $2,235 per couple (which at least is inclusive of taxes and tip). I don’t have anything to say one way or the other about whether you should try one or all of those options, I can only say I didn’t save $8,000 on my stay in order to spend it on food and drink; I saved $8,000 on my stay because I don’t have $8,000.

With that out of the way, we did eat at three on-site restaurants:

  • Café Kula. This was our go-to for breakfast, and we also ordered one lunch and a couple dinners there, all of which were basically a mixed bag. The "avocado toast” was guacamole on stale bread and the “kale burger” was a vegetarian burger patty on a bed of raw kale leaves. On the flip side, the "Wailea burger” was the best thing I had at the resort (I ordered it again our last night just because I was tired of being disappointed), and the “wild mushroom pizza” was very weird but not in a bad way at all, and if we return I’d happily try out some of their other pizzas.

  • Bistro Molokini. We had our only sit-down dinner of the trip here, and my partner thought her tofu dish was pretty good, but the real stars were the sides of asparagus and mashed potatoes we ordered. My “Hamakua Springs Bibb Lettuce” salad was a disaster, first because they gave me the identically named salad off the regular menu instead of the vegetarian menu, which wasn’t a problem, except the chef also forgot to put avocado on it, which was literally the only ingredient costing more than $0.50 in the whole $20 dish. When I pointed this out to our server she first tried to tell me that “sometimes the chef cuts the avocado so small people don’t know it’s there," but finally had to concede that there was obviously no avocado on my salad and took it off our bill.

  • Hibiscus Pool. Our final morning we ordered some onion rings off the adults-only Hibiscus Pool menu, and not only were the onion rings pretty good, once I’d taken a look at the menu I decided it might be the best “restaurant" at the resort! On the flip side, one day at the pool I overheard a waitress enthusiastically apologizing to another guest because his burger had tomato on it, which he had asked to be left off.

And that’s the vibe I got from virtually all our interactions with staff during our stay: enthusiastically apologetic. The security guard was apologetic our door was broken, the maintenance guy was apologetic our door was broken, our waitress was apologetic my salad was broken, the bartender was apologetic my cup was broken, the morning of our departure the housekeeper was apologetic for barging in on us (the one time I almost lost my temper pointing out the privacy sign on the door to her), and everyone worked hard to try to make things right.

And of course everyone was apologetic on our last night when a nearby transformer exploded and wiped out power to the entire area, with the convenient exception of the Grand Wailea’s Chapel Wing, where we were staying. When we walked up to the lobby bar for a nightcap we discovered folks were making the most of it, and the hotel was accommodating everyone with some portable emergency lighting equipment, seen here:

Desperate times = desperate measures

A note on transportation

I bounced around several times when deciding on what to do for transportation on the island. My preliminary plan was to rent a car for our entire stay at the airport and pay for parking at the hotel. Ultimately things ended up a lot simpler than that:

  • I paid $49.50 for a “shared” SpeediShuttle reservation for two from the Kahalui airport to the resort (although we were the only passengers);

  • On Friday, we paid about $34 each way to take a Lyft to and from Wailuku for the Friday Town Party;

  • On Sunday I paid $150.20 to rent a Jeep for the day from the Enterprise rental car desk at the Grand Wailea to drive up to Haleakala National Park;

  • Finally, on Monday I paid $38.13 for an Uber back to the airport.

There are two tricky things to note here. First, Lyft and Uber can drop off at the airport, but can’t pick up passengers there, so you slightly overpay for a shuttle to the Grand Wailea compared to the ride back.

Second, as convenient as it is to be able to pick up a rental car directly at the hotel, be careful when making an Enterprise reservation. The desk opens at 7:30 am, so I made a reservation for 7:30 am each morning we were there, assuming we’d only end up using one or two of the reservations. On Saturday we stopped by the desk around 9:30 am and were told they’d given our car away (which I was expecting) and that they’d have to give us a different vehicle (which I was expecting) and that they’d have to charge us $60 for the upgrade to a Jeep (which shocked me). I turned down the offer, went back to the room and changed my Sunday reservation to 9:30 am (for the same price).

Sunday morning we went by the desk at 9:30 and not only did they still have the car we reserved, but offered to upgrade us to a Jeep for $20, which I gladly accepted. I know rental agencies famously operate on slim margins, and I’m not even really upset they tried to gouge me on Saturday, but my word of warning is to make your reservation for the time you actually expect to get going in the morning, instead of the time the rental desk opens, so they don’t have an opportunity to rip you off.

One fun thing about myself I learned on this trip is that I thought I hated driving, but it turns out that was just because I’d never driven a Jeep before. They’re extremely fun.

We be wrangling

Conclusion

I hope this doesn’t sound like a “negative review” or anything like that. Our room was great, the weather was perfect the entire time we were there (until it started to drizzle on our way to the airport, just in time to help the firefighters working on the blaze started by the aforementioned transformer explosion), and we got to spend hours swimming, reading and playing in the resort’s terrific waterpark. But, we also made some obvious mistakes (“kale burger”) that hopefully this post will help readers avoid if they ever decide to check out this top-tier Hilton Honors redemption for themselves.

I’m not a tour guide, but we did spend a couple days exploring outside the resort, so I’ll try to write up a few brief suggestions for other things to consider checking out if you do find yourself at the Grand Wailea anytime soon.

Just another day in paradise

My experience with the current Atlantic City status matches and promotions

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I just got back from a weekend in Atlantic City, where I took advantage of the status match promotions I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Getting there and back

Once I made my reservation I looked into train tickets to Atlantic City, and found they were somewhat more expensive than I usually pay. Leaving Friday evening left us only a few Amtrak departures that would allow us to connect to New Jersey Transit, and I ended up paying $249.50 for two tickets from Washington Union Station to Atlantic City, and $228 for two tickets from Philadelphia 30th Street Station back to Washington.

Note that Amtrak will sell tickets to Atlantic City, including the $21.50 fare from Philadelphia, but it won't sell return tickets originating in Atlantic City unless you're willing to pay a $15 "express delivery fee," I assume because New Jersey Transit conductors aren't able to accept Amtrak eTickets, so your trip needs to originate somewhere with an Amtrak ticketing kiosk.

Note that beginning Wednesday, September 5, 2018, and continuing "until early 2019," the Atlantic City Line will not operate between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. They apparently plan to replace train service with comparable bus service, but it seems to me most people would be better off simply renting a car and driving or taking a bus straight from their origin to Atlantic City while the maintenance work is being done.

If you want to take the train, go soon!

Both the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and Ocean Resort Casino wanted a physical, unexpired status card

When I status matched to Borgata Black Label status in 2016, they were happy to accept a screenshot of the status page on my account, but this time both the Hard Rock and Ocean loyalty desks insisted on seeing a physical, unexpired elite status card (I only had a card showing a 2017 expiration).

Fortunately, the Borgata has gotten rid of their bespoke loyalty program and aligned with Mlife status tiers, so I was able to get a physical Mlife Platinum card printed there.

Unfortunately, the Borgata is located in a weird corner of Atlantic City that took probably 20 minutes to get to on one of the city's "jitney" microbusses, and cost $4.50 to boot. The Uber ride back cost $9.03, which I strongly recommend doing instead. As far as I can tell the property is inaccessible by foot.

As I mentioned on Twitter, everyone who opens a Ocean loyalty account gets $15 in slot play, so you'll probably want to open an account and then match to Ocean Black, for a total of $115 in free slot play.

For my troubles, I got $150 in free Hard Rock slot play and $115 in free Ocean slot play, which I was able to convert into $147.50 in folding money. I also scored another $40 playing craps, but obviously that doesn't count.

My comped stay was, in fact, comped

As I wrote earlier this month, when I called to ask about the Hard Rock status match I was offered a free two-night stay, apparently just for calling. That free stay was the one I used on this trip, and I ultimately owed something like $46 in resort fees.

When I successfully completed my status match, I was then given another free two-night stay, as I'd anticipated. While I was a bit unclear initially about the expiration date of the free stay, the loyalty desk told me that while I had to book the stay by September 3, the stay doesn't have to be completed by September 3; I can apparently book it anytime in the future.

The Legends Lounge is nice

As part of the status match to "Rock Royalty" I also received entry for 2 to either the buffet or the Legends Lounge, which is Hard Rock's smaller, more "exclusive" lounge, and which normally costs 10 comp dollars to enter. It was honestly pretty great. I assume it has a much smaller selection of food than the buffet, but I've never really enjoyed casino buffets anyway, so the limited selection worked fine for me, balanced as it was with a very open bar.

There was a selection of 2-3 salads, hot sliced ham and New York strip steak, sides like mashed potatoes and mushrooms, and a dessert bar. If you get a waiter like ours who had no idea what he was doing, I'd recommend just ordering cocktails at the bar and cutting out the middle man.

When I completed my status match to Ocean Black, I was also given (possibly unlimited?) access to the Ocean Premier Player's Lounge, but we didn't actually make it in there so I can't say how it stacks up. Oops.

The Hard Rock is a dump, but what kind of a dump depends on how lucky you get

Since the Hard Rock took over the building of the former Taj Mahal, naturally the remodel was constrained to a large degree by the existing architecture. Our first night we were assigned a room in the "North Tower," which judging by cultural cues I would assume is the nicer, newer tower. It had double sinks in the bathroom, a walk-in shower, separate toilet, a full desk, etc.

Unfortunately, it also was an adjoining room, and the doors to the adjoining room were apparently thin as tissue paper, so when the psychopaths next door turned on Cartoon Network at 3 am at maximum volume, it was like Hank Hill was screaming directly at us. I even called the front desk to see if there was anything they could do, but after a security guy went to their door, knocked politely, and waited around for a few minutes, he left without even speaking to our neighbors, let alone resolving the noise issue.

The next afternoon I went down to the lobby to see if we could move to a non-adjoining room, and was told, "no, they're all adjoining." Nonetheless, she was able to relocate us to the "South Tower," which I gather must be the older, original hotel building. We were given a room on the fourth floor of the South Tower, which happens to be the same floor the pool is on. 

The thing is, it was actually nicer and more comfortable in many ways than the flashier North Tower. The bedroom was larger, or at least configured in a more comfortable way, since the bed wasn't wedged into a corner and jutting into the middle of the room. The bathroom had a single sink and bathtub, which if you like taking baths is of course a feature, not a bug. And while the furniture seems "dated," it also had a kind of classic aesthetic I didn't mind at all.

Our South Tower room also did have an adjoining room, but fortunately they seemed to get to bed earlier than us and I didn't hear anything from next door until 9:30 or 10 in the morning.

Conclusion

I am, in general, quite fond of Atlantic City and its overall seediness and degeneracy, so I'm not likely to turn down an opportunity to pop up for a weekend whenever the price is right. That was even more true when I lived in Philadelphia and Atlantic City was a day trip, and before gaming expanded to more cities and states on the East Coast.

Now that the MGM National Harbor and Maryland Live! have opened nearby, the cost of getting to and from Atlantic City has made it more of a special occasion destination for me, which makes it unfortunate the Hard Rock isn't better; it's hard to justify a special trip to a place where you can't sleep because of your neighbor's TV!

But, if I'm able to plan a trip before my Ocean free stay expires, I'll give them a try and report back if the experience is any better.

How Prague has (and hasn't) changed in the last 12 years

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I first visited the Czech Republic for a semester in the spring of 2006, and I've returned frequently ever since then, completing my English-language teaching certificate, enrolling in three summers of Czech language study, and vacationing there whenever possible. This does not, I think, give me any insight into the Czech soul, but it has given me a little perspective on how the country has changed in the last 12 years.

Now that I'm back from this summer's adventure, I thought I'd share a few reflections.

Central Prague is an amusement park

This has been true as long as I've been visiting, but the amusement park has been increasingly professionalized over the years. To give a very simple, very absurd example, there's a traditional Czech (or possibly Slovak) dish called a "trdelník," which is a grilled bread tube rolled in a crushed nut mix. When I first started visited Prague, trdelník was sold in the Christmas markets for a month or two every year. Today, trdelník is sold on every street corner, year-round, and is adapted in all sorts of ways for the tourist market, rolled in sugar, and stuffed with ice cream.

We had one very bad trdelník and one very good trdelník during the trip, so I'm not claiming the quality of trdelník has dramatically declined, only that the market for it has changed over the years as it has become more of an amusement park treat, so the mass-market trdelník today resembles a kind of Czech-inspired churro more than anything else.

The neighborhoods are still distinctive

The amusement park basically extends west from the main train station across Charles Bridge to Prague Castle, and I think the amusement park is well worth visiting. But stepping even a little bit outside of the amusement park gives you immediate access to a completely different vision of the city.

Minutes outside the city center we stumbled onto Štvanice island and walked around and relaxed by the river totally undisturbed by the city surrounding us on all sides, enjoying the 2018 Landscape Festival exhibits that had been installed there.

It's just a short hike up from the city to Letná, where you can sit all day at a sturdy beer garden overlooking the city.

Another hike up to the National Monument in Vitkov is a way to explore Czech history with barely another soul in sight.

Vyšehrad is the site of the Slavín, where prominent Czech artists and cultural figures are interred, and the cemetery surrounding it is well worth exploring, along with the grounds and statuary.

None of this is to disparage the amusement park at all, since I love it there, but rather to suggest that Prague is the kind of city where stepping just a few feet off the beaten track can be incredibly rewarding.

The National Museum is still closed

This is more of an inside joke for me, since as long as I have been visiting Prague the majestic main building of the National Museum has been closed for renovations. I take it they're finishing up soon.

However, the new building of the National Museum is open, and typically offers several exhibits, at least one of which draws on the collections of the National Museum. We enjoyed the current exhibit on the Celts, who apparently settled Bohemia long before they made their way to Britain.

Prague has always been hip, but it's getting hipper

Taking advantage of the fifth-night-free benefit of booking an award stay with Hilton, we stayed at the Hilton Prague Old Town for our last five nights in the Czech Republic. Out for a walk our first evening in town, we discovered just a few blocks away something called "Manifesto."

Literally a pop-up beer and food truck space built out of repurposed shipping containers, Manifesto wouldn't raise an eyebrow in Brooklyn, Austin, Seattle, or Portland. But here it was in the Czech Republic, constructed in the shadow of a freeway overpass.

Prague has featured hip institutions like Radost FX, the vegetarian restaurant and music club, almost since independence, and the city has attracted like-minded entrepreneurs and customers ever since. But it seems to me the pace has somewhat accelerated, with more farmers markets, local crafts, and microbreweries than existed even a few years ago.

Visit Prague, and give it some time

My main recommendation for any visit to the Czech Republic is to give yourself enough time to both enjoy the main tourist attractions and to explore further afield, either by foot, streetcar, or subway. You can pack a lot into a day or two, but I think Prague is a place that uniquely rewards stepping away from the tourist groups and letting yourself breathe in the myriad nooks and crannies of the city.

Reflections on Karlovy Vary and my first film festival

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Having concluded the first part of this trip, and safely ensconced in the Executive Lounge at the Hilton Prague Old Town, I thought I'd share some reflections on the Karlovy Vary and the 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Getting to Karlovy Vary

This was the easy part. We booked bus tickets with Student Agency ahead of time, and they took us directly from the airport to the main Karlovy Vary train station in about 2 hours. If you are leaving from Prague, you can also take the train, which takes 3 hours 15 minutes, and according to wikitravel has excellent views.

The original plan was to take that train back from Karlovy Vary to Prague, but the Czech railway website was showing a strange error message about requiring a bus connection so out of an overabundance of caution we decided to take the bus back to Prague as well, which ends at the main bus station Florenc.

Staying in Karlovy Vary

An important thing to know about Karlovy Vary is that it is built into a fairly narrow valley or canyon, and the city climbs out of the valley up the adjacent hillsides. I bring this up because if you don't inspect a topographical map, you might find yourself staying at the very top of one of those hills, like we did.

This didn't matter once we had settled into our hotel (except that we got a lot of exercise walking up and down the hill multiple times every day), but if I had known in advance that we'd have to walk our suitcases up multiple flights of stairs and steeply inclined streets, I might have ordered a taxi or booked a hotel on the floor of the valley instead. If you have mobility issues, you'll want to stick to the area immediately surrounding the Teplá river, ideally between the Hotel Thermal and Grandhotel Pupp. Even a block away could represent several hundred feet in elevation change or dozens of stairs.

There are no chain hotels in Karlovy Vary, but there are a lot of hotels, lining virtually every street in the city, mostly stately 4-6 story buildings that appear (to my untrained eye) to date back to the height of the Austo-Hungarian empire. Virtually all of them are available through one or more online travel agencies, but be sure to shop around since availability and price can vary enormously from one site to another. I used Booking.com for our reservation instead of Hotels.com because the price difference was much greater than the better rewards the Hotels.com reservation would have offered.

Our hotel was called "Villa Charlotte," which does not even seem to have its own website. The price was right and the breakfast was pretty good, so I don't have any particular complaints, but if you've ever stayed at a boutique European hotel you've stayed there: thin, useless towels, confusing plumbing, two double beds shoved together to make a "queen" bed, etc.

Eating in Karlovy Vary

There are a ton of replacement-level Czech restaurants in town, but I'll point out a few places that stood out:

  • Yeleny Skok is about a third of the way up the Southwestern canyon wall, and has great views of the valley floor and a solid venison goulash. You can hike up there by foot (the trail conveniently started across the street from our hotel), or take a funicular from immediately behind the Grandhotel Pupp.
  • Ristorante Italiano da Franco is a tiny hole in the wall where we had our "nice" meal of the trip (i.e. $15 entrees instead of $4 entrees — the Czech Republic is very cheap). It's a little off the beaten path but had some of the best Italian food I've had in Eastern Europe. It's unclear to me if the owner, who along with his wife seemed to be the only person working, speaks any language other than Italian, but the menu was descriptive enough in several languages.
  • When you want to really get away from the crowds, Kebab House on náměstí Dr. M. Horákové seemed like a popular choice with locals and offered straightforward kebabs with lots of fresh veggies, which are not exactly a staple of Czech cuisine so made for a nice change of pace when you'd like something besides bread, meat, and cheese.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

KVIFF is a really big deal in Karlovy Vary, but it seems like it's a pretty big deal in the movie industry as well, serving to both exhibit the world premier of movies that (I assume) weren't accepted into the more famous festivals and as another stop on the festival circuit, with producers continuing to shop their films around for distribution.

The operation of the festival is a bit curious, at least to me (maybe all festivals work this way). Each morning at 8 am, the box offices (located at Hotel Thermal and Grandhotel Pupp) open and you can purchase tickets for showings taking place the next day. If you have a properly configured mobile phone, you can also text your ticket order for the next day's screenings starting at 7 am, which seems to give Czechs and other Europeans an hour's advantage in booking the most in-demand tickets since most (all?) American phones won't have this functionality.

The most popular option seemed to be festival passes, which is what we bought. Passes include 3 tickets per day, and also allow you to stand by for seats 5-10 minutes before screenings begin.

We arrived Monday, and by the time we worked our way to the Hotel Thermal in the evening to buy our passes, there was only a single screening with tickets still available for Tuesday, a French heist movie directed by Romain Gavras called "Le Monde est à toi." We tried to wait in line for another movie Tuesday morning ("Putin's Witnesses"), but they ran out of seats just as we got to the front of the line. Having wasted 90 minutes on that, we didn't try last-minute seating again.

We got a full set of screenings in Wednesday:

Thursday morning before leaving town we also saw the 1967 Russian film "235,000,000."

So, we paid 600 Czech crowns each, about $27, for 5 movie tickets, which seems like a pretty good deal even if we didn't get the maximal film festival experience.

There is one final wrinkle: between 10 am and midnight on June 25 (four days before the start of the festival), KVIFF also released 10% of the tickets to each screening for online reservation. So if you have particular screenings you're particularly interested in and don't want to take your chances competing against everyone else at the festival, you could log in at 10 am (4 am Eastern time?) and frantically book tickets until the extremely limited supply is exhausted. This also might be worth doing for screenings the day of your arrival, since most screenings will have already sold out the day before.

Conclusion

If you're interested in the film festival experience but can't afford to spend a week in Cannes or Venice, then KVIFF is a very affordable chance to see movies that haven't been released theatrically (and may never be released theatrically at all!). Karlovy Vary itself is tucked into a beautiful landscape and offers lots of options to hike and, of course, take the waters that are the original reason for the town's existence.

For fun, check out some of the gag reels that were shown before the screenings we attended, featuring Casey Affleck, Zdenek Sverak, Milos Forman, and John Malkovich.