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.

Are You Backed up?

I am so dedicated to you dear readers that I am typing this at a chain hotel business center. My laptop suddenly won’t boot up and it is now sitting in a Costa Rican repair shop. I am praying to the computer gods, who are surely artificial beings, that I haven’t got a dead hard drive. I think I’m mostly okay if that happens because I back up photos from my camera to Amazon (a Prime benefit) and a lot of things are in the cloud these days via LastPass, Google, and Dropbox, but I haven’t backed up article documents and the like to my external hard drive for…not sure how long. Use this lesson as a reminder to back up often, preferably in more than one place!

The Onward Ticket Problem

I am in Costa Rica right now and for only the third time in my life, I got asked for an onward ticket before I could board the plane. This just ended up costing Volaris money because it wasn’t really required by immigration and I cancelled the refundable ticket I had to purchase as soon as I landed. If your airline doesn’t offer this though, there are services like OnwardTicket.com that will basically rent you an online ticket that goes to your e-mail or can be printed, then you’ve got your onward ticket to show when questioned. You will only be out $10 to $20 for the service.

Be Nice to Immigration Officers

While I did get a little testy with that airline gate agent since this was not my first time to Costa Rica without having a ticket out and they give you 180 days now anyway, I do always put on my best face and behavior forward for immigration officers. The latest reminder of why that’s important is the story of an American real estate investor who has been banned from the Philippines for life for causing a scene and supposedly writing profanity on his immigration form. Details are sketchy, but it’s a good reminder to remember who’s in charge and that you don’t get entry to the country without passing that gate. “According to the immigration bureau, it has excluded and blacklisted 44 foreign nationals it deemed ‘disrespectful’ in 2023.”

About that Live-aboard Cruise Ship…

Just because you read about something in 50 places and saw it 100 more times on social media doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. That cruise ship where you could buy a cabin and spend three years traveling the world? There was just one tiny detail they hadn’t worked out: they did not actually have a ship locked down and in their possession. So never mind, all you people who sold your condo and put everything in storage. Details here.

12/7/23