New York Times Travel Show links

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Today I promised the standing-room-only crowd at my New York Times Travel Show seminar that I would post links on my website. They’re out of context, but they’re here, plus a few major points from my talk this afternoon. The booking engine resources can be found at my colleague Reid Bramblett’s site, ReidsGuides.com.

Learning about the latest scams:

Facecrooks.com
Snopes.com
Christopher Elliott’s Elliott.org
consumerist.com/tag/scams/
The work of Mitch Lipka

Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Information Blog: www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog

Cleaning up business access to your Facebook page:
Main page, left column, low down > App Center. On the next page, low left column > Your Apps. There, you can click “Settings” of each one to see what each one can harvest. Click little grey Xs for anything you don’t want to allow.

American Airlines’ warning on phishing emails and what to do:

USTOA (United States Tour Operators Association) Travelers Assistance seal. www.ustoa.com/ta

Drip pricing violators: www.dot.gov/tags/violations
Pending complaints: Regulations.gov Docket DOT-OST-2012-0002

Click here to read the story of how I caught Delta trying to charge me more when I signed in as a frequent flier.

You probably don’t need to buy rental car insurance. Many credit cards offer CDW insurance as part of standard benefits, and if you have car insurance at home, you probably have personal liability, too.

Your rental car company may try loading on fees for returning a car full, early, or driving it too little. These will only show up on the final receipt. Inspect it clearly.

Use several browsers and use a new one with each search
Clear cookies and cache between searches (use Options or Preferences to find the place to do that)
Try without signing in at all

Is that insurance company valid?
US Travel Insurance Association: www.ustia.org > Find a Member

Ultimate prescription:
— Always do “the check-around”, meaning never use the links you’re given. Verify on your own.
— DON’T USE THEIR LINKS. Find your own way to verify. Social media is far quicker than standard customer service.
— Check BBB.org
— Put as many hoops between you and the vendor as you can
— Use credit cards. Federal law requires refunds for services not delivered. No credit card? Visa TravelMoney has many of same protections
— Go through a known vendor or a site that accredits
— Hover over links to check where they go
— Block attachments for people not in your contact list
— Read the fine print
— Print everything
— Photograph plenty (including rental car when you pick it up)
— Keep a regular online backup. If you got malware, you may need it for a full software restore.
— NO MORE WIRE TRANSFERS, or PayPal, or debit unless the company is 100% reputable

If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out!

Scamming at the New York Times Travel Show

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imgresHey! Guess what? I’m speaking this Saturday, January 19, at 2 p.m. at the 10th anniversary New York Times Travel Show at the Javits Center in New York City. The topic will be online booking scams. I’ve got a dozen to warn you about, and alongside me will be my brilliant colleague and longtime friend Reid Bramblett, who’ll be supplying his own golden nuggets about how to save money while booking online.

Come to the show, browse the weird and inspiring fare at hundreds of booths from destinations and vendors from around the world. Here’s a link for $6 (half-price) tickets to get you moving.

As you know, I’ve done a ton of consumer reporting (many of the clips are linked on this site), so it’ll feel pretty satisfying to take down some of the nastier predators at such a well-attended forum.

Update: The links I referred to during my talk can be found if you click here.

The mass grave under Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park [WATCH]

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Jason CochranI am tremendously excited about this video that I researched and hosted for AOL On’s “What Remains” series. It takes off from my popular blog post about the mass grave in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. I think the broadcast-quality production these guys put together is phenomenal.

The short version is explained in my post, linked above. But the gist is this: There is a mass grave for 11,500 people under Fort Greene Park.

Here’s another disturbing fact that was trimmed from this telling of the story: The prisoners desperately wrote George Washington to beg him for help, to exchange them or free them. In response, Washington let them die. He didn’t want them to be released so they could spread smallpox to the general population.

There is a first-person account from one of the survivors: the riveting Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey by Thomas Dring. A really good version is currently in print.

I’m just hugely proud of the whole video, and the topic, as you can already tell, is dear to my heart.

Scenes from the dedication of the FDR memorial in New York City

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1,050 pounds of bronze New Deal (before kids could stuff gum up its nose)

This morning, I was lucky to be able to attend the dedication ceremony of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island off of Manhattan. The memorial was a long time coming. The island was named for FDR in 1973, and architect Louis Kahn whipped up a memorial for the southern tip, but then he dropped dead of a heart attack, and then Ford told New York to drop dead, too. So it didn’t get made.

But nine years ago, Kahn’s son Nathaniel, who was just a kid when his dad died, made a elegaic documentary called My Architect, which was a monument in film to his father, who made monuments in stone. The film was so good (it’s one of my favorite documentaries) that high society wags picked up the dusty Louis Kahn plans again and finished the job. In a way, the monument is as much to Louis Kahn as it is to FDR, as proven by how many times each of the speakers invoked both of their names. Former President Bill Clinton, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Tom Brokaw, Ambassador William vanden Huevel, Mayor Michel Bloomberg. All nodded to Louie. It’s odd: The son’s impetus to memorialize his architect father is what led us to memorialize our president. From small questions rise large deeds.

One guest told me another reason the rich came out to donate $34 million of the $53 million price tag: There was also a rival plan to build a hotel or another tower here, so backing this low-lying granite park meant they wouldn’t lose their East River views. The ceremony today let us know that, no, most of the reason this park was here is because America loves freedom, in particular the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt coined. Freedom of expression is one; as a member of the press, I was allowed to attend, but had to stand in a pen off to the side. As you can see, it didn’t hurt my ability to participate.

The park has more than a twinge of early ’70s brutalism to it, and had Kahn lived, I would like to think he would have made it a little more inviting. After all, the other FDR monument on the Tidal Basin in Washington even has a sculpture of FDR’s beloved dog, Fala. Here in New York, the disembodied head of Franklin Delano stares down the granite bowling alley of his namesake park, daring your approach like the Great and Powerful Oz. (And this from someone who loves what FDR did.)

At least it has a view of the United Nations, which he helped found. And also the FDR Drive, which he would want nothing to do with. And Roosevelt Island, which used to be where New York stashed its insane and infirm.

Audra McDonald was supposed to sing. She called in sick. So we got a president, two governors, two mayors, an anchor, an ambassador, and a Master of the Universe (that was Henry Kissinger, who didn’t speak). But no diva. Unless you count Kissinger.

A gallery of images comes after the jump:

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Jutta Levasseur, Epcot’s egg painter, has died

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Jutta Levasseur in her studio inside the store in the Germany pavilion. (Credit: Issysue.Blogspot.com)

I was at Epcot in Walt Disney World last week, and I learned the sad news that Jutta Levasseur has passed away. The German-born Levasseur had hand-painted egg  ornaments in the Germany pavilion since the park’s opening day in 1982.

She was such a fixture that the park gave her the great honor of setting aside a studio nook overlooking the World Showcase Lagoon. Her eggs, which were Disney riffs on an old Germany Christmas tradition, were meticulous work, many taking up to three weeks to complete, and were prized by Disney collectors. Most of her eggs are now gone except for a few large ones costing well over $1,000, but her name plate remains on a shelf above her desk in tribute.

I have not been able to find an obituary for her, but I have reached out to Walt Disney World to see if it can confirm this sad news. (Update: It confirmed the news but had no other details.) A few years ago, other cast members told me that she was battling cancer, and it’s true that Jutta was not in her usual station very often for the past few years. Five years ago, she was only working Fridays and Saturdays, but her handiwork was considered by many to be a symbol of Epcot.

I first met Jutta when I was writing my first guidebook to the park for Pauline Frommer’s series (I teasingly called her little oblong canvasses “chicken roe”) and I made a decision to spotlight some of the cast members who have been part of Epcot since the very beginning. There are a few cast members at Epcot who are true fixtures, including Miyuki the candy sculptor in Japan, the Hat Lady (now Hat Ladies) of the United Kingdom, and the brothers in the mariachi band in Mexico (I shot a video feature on them a few years ago). I am sorry to see her depart, and at a relatively young age.

I have a new reel

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Jason Cochran

This clip isn’t in the reel. Man, are you missing something.

Well, it’s an old but decent reel that’s been re-stuffed with my CBS stuff and some Shark Tank tidbits. Solid upholstery given a new fabric.

Video editing is not my forte but apparently being a camera hog is, because I had hours of stuff I rejected to boil my media appearances into this fast-paced somethin’ that covers live network stuff, live IFB hits, location shoots, and hosting.

 

I am sort of stunned by the amount of stuff I have done, actually. And I thought this kind of thing made me nervous. Guess not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_faxQqNopA

I have permanently embedded this sucker in the sidebar to the right, so if you don’t watch it now just feel free to ignore it there.

The night I jilted Gloria Steinem

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Gloria Steinem and David Bale

I don’t have many regrets in my life, and I’m thankful for that. But I have one enormous one, and if I could take it back, I would. However, like all regrets, it is indelible.

I was a young reporter for Entertainment Weekly, spending my days jockeying for space in cubicles left empty by vacationing assistants and hoping I could fly under the radar long enough to be noticed and get a promotion that would make my parents proud. Whenever I wasn’t fact-checking, I spent my time hunting for the clever story angles that were too big for the staff writers, who were handed the big movie star feature interviews the way raw fish is hand-fed to Shamu.

Trawling one day over the Usenet message boards — the Internet’s messy afterbirth, soon to be tidied up — I noticed a mostly unknown young British actor named Christian Bale had a disproportionately large number of message threads devoted to him. Mel Gibson, three; Chris O’Donnell, two. But Christian Bale had eight. I had discovered the first male Hollywood actor with a major online following. (more…)

Who’s leaving smiley faces beside celebrity graves?

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I swear it’s not me. Someone else is leaving water-smoothed rocks with painted-on smiley faces by the eternal resting spots of the stars of yesteryear. I’m just the first person to notice.

I keep running across them in Los Angeles. These are from Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Forest Lawn Memorial Park Glendale.

They’re not just on classic film stars’ graves. There’s even one on Playmate Dorothy Stratten’s.

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Errol Flynn

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Beggars denied at Labadee, Royal Caribbean’s private paradise in Haiti

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Labadee Island beggar

Do not feed the humans: Royal Caribbean’s staff asked us to ignore this beggar

Cruise ship corporations are capable of treating others with dignity and kindness, as I wrote about in yesterday’s post about Oasis of the Seas‘ discovery of a raft of Cuban refugees, and they are famous for providing economic opportunities for workers from disadvantaged nations. But just as often, they seem to be caught up in murkier accusations of unleashing environmental mayhem, obscuring independent investigation, and exploiting poorer economies in order to staff their megaships at a cheap price.

Those horror tales have been well documented, and the lines often counter the accusations with reminders that they adhere to the laws as currently written. An excellent place to find sourced documentation of watchdog stories in the cruise industry is CruiseLawNews.com, a site that happened to notice my Cuban refugee tweets two days ago.

Royal Caribbean came to Labadee, a somewhat isolated coastal town on the north coast of Haiti, in 1985. On a lease, it converted a peninsula of jungled farmland into a beach paradise sealed by a fence from the rest of this desperately impoverished nation. The cruise line affixed an SM service mark to the name of the village to protect its investment. It’s now in the first years of a renewed, 99-year lease on the property.

Other cruise lines, including Disney, Norwegian, and Carnival in the Bahamas, also maintain contracted areas in the Caribbean. By scheduling a day at one of these areas instead of a public port, cruise lines can control the beach experience while keeping most of the passengers’ expenditures for themselves. Going to ports with poor free foot exploration options (for example, Falmouth, Jamaica, the next stop after Haiti for Oasis of the Seas) is a clever new method cruise lines are using to keep tourists either on board or on shore excursions, both of which keep profits in the family.

In the notoriously corrupt nation of Haiti, 80% of people live below the poverty line, and two-thirds of the population has no job. Port-au-Prince, recently obliterated by an earthquake that killed tens of thousands, may be 85 miles away as the crow flies, but the twisting and poorly maintained mountain roads place it more like 140 miles distant. Not that Royal Caribbean’s tourists have the option of seeing it, or even the smaller city of Cap-Haitien, which is just six miles from Labadee. Armed guards patrol the cruise line’s idyll just out of sight of the pampered cruisers. (more…)

My cruise ship intercepts a raft of Cuban refugees [WATCH]

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cuban refugee boat found by royal caribbean 29 june 2012

Most of the passengers believed the Cuban refugees were cruising to Mexico. Because, ya know, the Oasis just went to Cozumel and Señor Frog’s was totally off the chain.

Yesterday, I was ending a week-long voyage on Royal Caribbean’s mighty Oasis of the Seas (travel writing, yo) with Nomadic Matt, and as our mammoth ship crossed the 90-mile distance between Havana, Cuba, and Key West, Florida, we encountered an inflatable raft packed with 18 refugees. They were in distress.

Something about travel and me places me where news is happening. Just as I did when Virgin Atlantic negligently stranded passengers without food for nearly two days at JFK, I turned to Twitter to report the story as it unfolded. Websites started picking up my coverage; CruiseInd.com generously said “Thank social media for this, and the people who actually know how to use it.”

So here is the short video I took when I wasn’t tweeting — which, given the slow upload speeds at sea, was the only way I was going to get word out quickly. (Read many of my live tweets at the CruiseInd.com link above, or in my stream.) I did not see this covered on the news later — Fox News was too busy lamenting over the word tax — and I don’t know what happened to these desperate souls.

No one except my fellow Royal Caribbean passengers seemed fooled by the rafters’ ridiculous claim that they were actually headed to Mexico. Even in the video, the rafters are making a half-hearted and impossible attempt to head west even though they were clearly making their way north, toward the Keys. America is so near Cuba at the location of this video that yesterday, a 49-year-old grandmother, Penny Palfrey, began a marathon barefoot swim between the two coasts in the same waters.

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