Avoiding Baggage Fees/Busiest Flight Routes/Places You Can’t Visit
Nomadico issue #85
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
Avoiding Baggage Fees on Budget Airlines
There are plenty of ways to get bag fees covered on legacy airlines with the right status or credit card. Or you can fly Southwest. For the many budget airlines though, you either pay up or you pack super light, using some kind of “underseat bag.” I pulled it off on 3 recent international flights and saved the equivalent of a whole luggage set at Costco. Here’s how it worked out, plus some suggestions for a personal item bag that fits under the seat and in the sizers. Here’s the cheapest option if you’re not sure you can travel like this more than once.
The Busiest Flight Routes This Year
OAG released their list of the world’s busiest air routes for 2023 and the #1 combo is a short one: Singapore-Kuala Lumpur. Turns out that 7 of the top 10 are in Asia and most are short, but #2 was Cairo-Jeddah and #6 was Dubai-Riyadh. The only western route was #8 NYC-London. Bangkok, Seoul, and Singapore each showed up twice. The busiest domestic route in the world? Seoul to Jeju (Cheju), in Korea, which has held the crown for years.
Robots Aren’t Good Travel Agents Yet
If you’re not sick enough of reading about Artificial Intelligence on all the year-end news lists, here’s a fun and detailed look at how it’s working out so far in the travel world. CNET’s Senior European Correspondent asked a bunch of AI travel planning tools to arrange a trip in her city of Edinburgh and…let’s just say she’d be doing a lot of pointless driving around, sometimes to places that have been closed for years.
Places You Can’t Visit in 2024
I liked CNN’s departure from the usual crappy “places to go next year” lists to run down lots of places we can’t go instead. These range from a collapsed rock formation to a Star Wars-themed hotel that failed spectacularly to the restaurant that closed after being tagged as the best in the entire world. See the list here.
01/4/24
