Category: Travels

Tyler Cowen begs for hate mail

by  Tyler Cowen in

Twenty years ago I lived in Freiburg, Germany and I often crossed the border to Colmar for the smoked pork.  Mexican pork — corn-fed and free-range — knocks my socks off.  To put it rudely, I thought the pork at Lexington #1, supposedly the finest bbq in NC, was only slightly better than the carnitas at a good branch of Chipotle.  Yes, that is the Chipotle which is owned by McDonald’s and found in the Virginia suburbs.  Lexington pork was often too dry, a bit bland, and too frequently doused in sauce, albeit delicious sauce.

Only three or four of Lexington’s twenty or so "barbecue" restaurants still use the classic fired pit.  The sadder truth is that it doesn’t matter anymore.  The classic pit places will keep their pork either heated or frozen for at least a day and sometimes up to a week.  Lexington #1 proudly told me that they don’t let their pork sit any longer than a day…or, after slight hesitation, "sometimes overnight…sometimes we mix it with the pork from yesterday."  The pork is also a bit cold, since reheating it thoroughly would dry it out. 

Compare this to the best places in Lockhart, Texas, where they pull the meat out of the pit before your eyes and cut it with a butcher’s knife.  If they run out of their best dishes by 1 p.m., so be it, that is the price of quality.  Did I mention that first-rate barbecue is not always economical?

I can make tastier pork at home.  Take some pork ribs and rub in cumin, salt, pepper, and Mexican (not Italian) oregano.  Cook them in the oven with a cup of milk, a few cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of thyme, and perhaps a little water.  The ambitious will add a bit of fresh lard.  It depends on your cut, pot, and oven, but 1 1/4 hours at 300 degrees often works, figure it out yourself.  Take the pork out, and let it sit a while for the juices to settle.  Scrape the pork off the bone, and then cook it at high heat, using the residue from the ribs as the cooking medium.  Add more fresh lard if you want.  Cook it for a minute or two, until it starts to brown and get crusty.  Remove it immediately at that point; don’t let it get crusty.  Yummy, yummy, yummy.

Oh yes, the dipping sauce is to take one white onion, two tomatoes, two cloves garlic, and a few ancho chilies, fry them all a bit in a neutral oil and then blend them in a food processor.  If you have the time hydrate the fried chiles for thirty minutes in water before blending.  Fresh handmade corn tortillas can be added to this mix, they are increasingly easy to find in Latin markets.

Who needs Lexington?

How to ask for a hotel upgrade

by  Gary Leff in

I find that a fax is better than a call because when you phone your luck is dependent on who answers, whether they have time to deal with your request, and whether they even remember what you wanted once you hang up. A fax stands a better chance of going to the right person’s desk and the piece of paper can serve as a reminder. It’s not a silver bullet, but at nice properties it seems to work more often than not. And it’s one step in the process.

I’ll likely also have mentioned my upgrade request with my reservation. So combined with the fax and a conversation at check-in I have a pretty good success rate.

It happens most frequently though when you

    check in very late when all the other rooms might just be gone.

A single night stay, late check in, often means that they can give you the upgrade without tying up the room that they might otherwise sell to a higher paying guest. When the room would go empty it’s a costless perk for the hotel to deliver.

That’s when the great suites are most often given away — when the guest isn’t going to be around long enough to enjoy it!

Being entitled to an upgrade of some kind helps as well. If you travel a lot, focus your loyalty on a single chain and earn elite status. (Know the details of what the chain offers to elites when selecting a program.)

Even if you don’t travel enough to earn elite status, many hotel programs offer a low tier of recognition just for getting their co-branded credit card. The Marriott Visa comes with Silver status. The Hilton Visa and America Express come with Silver status. If you spend $20,000 on the Hilton Amex in a year you get Gold status. The Starwood American Express comes with ‘preferred plus’ status, which is basically Gold without the bonus points. The Priority Club program doesn’t offer status with their credit card, but even their top tier can be had without staying a single night — just earn 60,000 points in a year (12,000 can be earned opening a checking account, points can be purchased, bonus points count, points can be transferred in from other programs).

Taken together, these strategies won’t work 100% of the time, but they should help keep you out of the undesirable rooms and might just get you that great ocean view.

Airline ‘Outsourcing’

by  Gary Leff in

First off, thanks to Tyler for the generous introduction and to both Tyler and Alex for inviting me to guest blog. It’s a great honor, since I read Marginal Revolution each morning with my coffee. Hopefully I’ll have some interesting things to pass along, and I look forward to reader comments (gleff -at- yahoo.com).

Moving call centers to India is nothing new. On the whole, Americans seem to have a visceral distaste for it (though they may still opt for it if given the choice). So criticizing outsourcing, an effective rhetorical tool, has spread in its uses. In the battle between Northwest Airlines and its flight attendants, the Wall Street Journal uncritically picked up on the language. This Susan Carey piece (link is to a reprint of the Wall Street Journal article) offers a rather odd definition of outsourcing:

    Those intra-Asia flights are mostly staffed by nearly 700 Asian attendants from bases in Japan, China, South Korea, the Philippines and other countries. They operate under different pay and work rules but have language skills for Asian destinations as well as English. The current union contract allows this limited but longstanding outsourcing.

(Emphasis mine.)

According to Susan Carey (and the PR voice of the Northwest flight attendants union), staffing planes flying within Asia with flight attendants from Asia is outsourcing.

Northwest has significant operations in Asia, and operates a mini-hub at Tokyo’s Narita airport. The airline was formerly known as Northwest Orient Airlines. They maintain local crew bases for their Asian flights for several reasons, only one of which is wages. The airline saves on per diem and hotel costs. But mostly American union members don’t possess the language skills that local residents do.

The practice isn’t unique to Northwest and stretches back decades. Pan Am had a contingent of flight attendants from Kenya 50 years ago. And it works both ways – non-U.S. carriers generally outsource their US government relations function to Americans….

Guest blogger Gary Leff

by  Tyler Cowen in

We have another guest blogger this week, namely Gary Leff.  Gary is CFO at the Institute for Humane Studies and Mercatus Center.  When it comes to aviation, luxury travel, and loyalty marketing, he is without peer.  Inside Flyer magazine called him "one of five experts to listen to" on business travel.  The Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and The New York Times all have promoted his work.  And he’s Senior Moderator at airline megasite Flyertalk.com. 

Gary usually blogs at View from the Wing (http://blogs.flyertalk.com/blogs/viewwing/), which Gridskipper advises "true fanatics" to consult when seeking an airline upgrade.  He tells me that until a short Sydney-Melbourne segment in June, he hadn’t flown coach in
over two years.