Unexpected Encounters, Navigating Visa Changes, Car Rentals, and Wellness Journeys

Today we explore the magical moments that make travel unforgettable. In this episode, we'll share our personal anecdotes of unexpected connections, serendipitous encounters, and the quirky surprises that await the adventurous traveler. From finding Carolina Reaper Cheetos in Scotland to meeting New York City's Mayor in Hong Kong, our stories highlight the world's interconnectedness. Beyond the anecdotes, we dive into topical issues like the upcoming visa requirements for the EU and the UK, offering insights into what these changes mean for travelers. Ever considered wellness travel? Our Deals Guru Jessica Deverson gives us the lowdown on this growing trend, from spa cruises to meditation retreats. We'll also get under the hood of the car rental industry, providing practical advice on getting the best deals.

Announcer: Welcome to No Tourists Allowed, a podcast where two recognized travel industry executives with a combined 71 years on the inside of travel and technology give up their secrets to the thing everyone wants to do: travel better, pay less, and see more of the world. Here are your hosts, Mike Putman and James Ferrara.

Mike Putman: Good day, everyone. I'm Mike Putman.

James Ferrara: And I'm James Ferrara, and I'm on time this week, mate.

Mike Putman: Well, you might be on time now as we've begun recording, but the truth to our listeners is you're late again. I can have Nathaniel, our prestigious producer, vouch for me on that one as needed, so I wouldn't go there.

James Ferrara: I'm sorry, but better late than never. So welcome everybody. Great to be with you another week. Mike and I have a series of topics we want to share with you this week. This is one of our special podcasts, and I'm so glad you wound up listening in on this one.

The Serendipity of International Travel

Mike Putman: Absolutely. You know, one of the things that's always interesting as I travel around the world, and I'm sure you too, James, is you run into these events, people, and things in other countries that you've got some previous relationship to. It could be some kind of small manufacturer in your local town or something regional to the US, and all of a sudden you see it in Scotland.

I was in Scotland last month and I was in a very remote part of Loch Lomond. I pulled into this very small grocery store and lo and behold, they had Carolina Reaper Cheetos. For those of you who don't know, Carolina Reaper was the hottest pepper in the world and it was here in the Carolinas. It has since been overtaken.

But they had Cheetos—not the brand Cheetos, but these puffy orange things—with Carolina Reaper, which I thought was pretty strange. Halfway around the world, and you've got Carolina pepper Cheetos.

James Ferrara: I guess we'll call this the serendipity of travel. It happens with people too, Mike, where you're halfway around the world and you run into someone from home or from your past in the most unexpected, unusual places.

One time when I was very young, I went to one of my dad's business events. They used to happen all around the world, and this one happened to be in Hong Kong. It was my first time in China. It's an incredible place to visit, though it's a really long flight with a twelve-hour time difference. You really do feel like you're on the other side of the planet.

I walked into the event and, as many of you know, I'm from New York. I walk in and who is the guest speaker at the event but Ed Koch, the then-current mayor of New York City. I never met Ed Koch in New York, but I got to shake hands with him and take a picture with him in Hong Kong.

Mike Putman: I was in London one time and I had been to a business meeting and met this guy who went on to actually work for me, oddly enough. I met him in London and I was walking around the city a couple of days later and I saw the guy getting out of a Mercedes limousine right behind Piccadilly Arcade. I went up and tapped him on the shoulder and it was him.

James Ferrara: We went on our honeymoon in Paris—two weeks in Paris, a week in London. It was a big grand affair. We showed up at the hotel, not with a lot of travel experience by that point. We arrived at a grand historic hotel in Paris after our long flight and drive from Charles de Gaulle airport.

We walked into the lobby of this imposing hotel with a nineteenth-century listed historic interior and walked right into the mother of my wife's best friend. Now, she was a private flight attendant on private jets, so finding her elsewhere in the world is not surprising. But at that moment, with my wife on our honeymoon, in the same hotel and the same lobby at the same time—it makes you wonder a little bit, doesn't it?

Mike Putman: Yeah, maybe Juliette's family had some spies to make sure you were behaving properly.

James Ferrara: Could be. I kind of have the reverse of this too, before we move on. While in Paris on another visit, I found a beautiful seventeenth-century perfumery. It's been there for three or four hundred years, a historic brand nowadays, but back then it was known really just in France.

The bottles were beautiful and I bought a bunch of them and filled a flight bag with them to bring back—like thirty bottles of perfume as gifts for family and friends. We lugged the bag around that day, lugged it to the airport, and carried it on the plane because the bottles were so fragile.

We drove from the airport to our home out in the country in the middle of winter. We drove down the main street of Sag Harbor, the little village that we lived in, and it looked like a black and white Bergman movie. The snow was driving sideways and there was nobody to be seen.

As we drove up this deserted main street, one window was all lit up. It was the local pharmacy, the little old drugstore, and the lights were beaming out of the front window. What was in the front window but a big display of Annick Goutal perfumes? It is the reverse of what we're talking about, but it really made me think for a moment how small the world is getting.

That brings it back to our theme here at No Tourists Allowed. We want to make sure we're looking for the places and finding the things that are not like home, finding the things that we can't get so easily. Those places in the world are plentiful. Those unusual handicrafts and products are out there if we just push ourselves a little bit to look for them.

Mike Putman: Absolutely. You've been in the travel business your entire life and even before you were in the business, your mother was in the travel business. You've traveled your entire life. People ask if there is any place I haven't been and I tell them I haven't scratched the surface of places I have been. There are so many opportunities and new experiences out there.

It's my hope, and part of the drive of why I stay in this business, is to motivate or help other people take advantage of these destinations. I want them to enjoy a different culture, something far from their comfort zone, and really let loose and live a little bit. That's my hope for our listeners.

Identifying AI Travel Guides and Digital Scams

James Ferrara: Absolutely, Mike. One of the things I wanted to share with our listeners, too, is some things to be wary of. We want you to be adventuresome, but also be wary. There's a whole new business of home-grown, written, and published travel guides.

There's Frommer's, Fodor's, Lonely Planet, and all these existing brands, but there's a whole suite of new travel guides. I actually saw a picture of all these guides side-by-side—all with different brands and flashy covers—and reports show that a lot of these were simply written by AI.

You might find them in the airport or your local bookstore, but unfortunately, they're not human-curated; they're actually powered by AI. While there might be some good information there, who knows if it's accurate? There is some degree of issue with the accuracy of AI and it's just something I'd like for all of our listeners to be careful of.

Mike Putman: Absolutely. I think that extends even to something a little closer to home, which is being contacted on dating apps by a bot powered by this more human-feeling AI. With ChatGPT and new text and language recognition software, you really have to be careful.

But if your radar is up, whether it's about these guides or being contacted digitally, it becomes pretty easy to spot. All you have to do is ask questions that a human being could answer, but maybe the chat would not.

James Ferrara: If you look in a printed guide, look for things that don't sound right. A lot of information that comes through in these AI-powered scrapers tends to be old and outdated because the programs haven't caught up with the most current information in the last couple of years. That's a giveaway too. We want you to have a good time, but always have that little bit of street smarts and keep your antenna up.

New European Entry Requirements

Mike Putman: Absolutely. For many years, we as US citizens—and I realize we have an international audience here—have not had to apply for a visa for tourist travel to Europe. The new visa requirements are scheduled to go into effect in 2024.

For anyone keeping score, that's next year. The exact date next year is still undetermined. I've heard some people panicking a little bit as if it were already in place. It's not. But even when it is in place, it turns out it's just a simple online form. It takes about two minutes to fill out. I think what's going on here is something less like a visa and more like a tax.

James Ferrara: Yeah, more like a travel tax, basically. It's kind of a money grab on the part of some governments. I think there's a little bit of retaliation there because the United States has required people visiting from most countries to obtain a tourist visa, which is a pretty perfunctory idea for most countries. It also acts as kind of a tax. I think this is the EU saying, "Well, if you're going to do it to us, we're going to do it to you."

I do think some people will trip over it. They'll trip over anything, like being asked to fill out a form and not doing it right or forgetting to do it. There might be a little bit of friction that comes from it. It's just one small inconvenience.

Mike Putman: Let me self-correct too. I mentioned this in the context of US citizens, but this is for citizens of other countries as well. They're actually bringing in some Middle East countries to begin the process of requiring visas for the UK version in early 2024.

James Ferrara: Borders are a thing that we have to deal with, but it's the kind of thing that when you step back and think about it for a minute, it's such a crazy idea. If you get in a plane and you fly over the European continent, you don't see any borders. They are a human construct and there's so much complication that comes from them. This is a very minor example. There are much more significant repercussions from the idea of borders, but it really is something that we've created for ourselves. Borders really only exist in our own minds.

Maximizing Savings on Car Rentals

Mike Putman: That's very true, but we have to have things to keep politicians busy. Let's also talk a little bit about some tips and ways that we can make our listeners' travel more enjoyable.

Last episode we talked about tips on how to find the best hotel and how to get great rates. This week we want to talk about car rentals or car hire, as we call it in the UK. There are ways to save money, make the experience more enjoyable, and limit your exposure when renting a car.

I'll share one quick story. My most recent trip to Scotland required a rental car for two weeks because we were going to travel around the country extensively. I began looking at prices at the airport in Edinburgh. They seemed higher than I was expecting. I did a little more research and found that rentals in the city of Edinburgh were significantly less expensive.

In Edinburgh, there is a tram that runs directly from the airport to the main train station. It's very inexpensive, efficient, and runs pretty much all day. From there, it was about a three-block walk to the car rental company. I rented a Mercedes SUV for eight hundred pounds for two weeks, which saved about six hundred pounds versus renting it from the airport.

James Ferrara: That's because the airport typically has levies on their vendors. If you rent a car from the airport, you're generally paying a surcharge of ten to twenty percent depending upon the airport. Car rental companies used to eat that, but now they're charging that back as a line item on your bill.

If you're renting a car for more than one or two days, it's probably not worth the hassle of getting transportation to a city location. But if you're renting for an extended period of time, you can save some serious money by following that tip.

Mike Putman: Taxes and airport fees are definitely part of the problem. There are some markets where the taxes and fees are actually a hundred percent of the base rental cost. Las Vegas comes to mind. If the base rental of the car is fifty dollars a day, after the taxes and fees at the airport, it's a hundred dollars a day all in.

I think the car rental companies also know that people coming into the airport need a car. For the most part, they're tourists or business travelers, whereas a city location caters to a more local clientele. They choose to make the pricing different to capture more of that business. City locations are a really great strategy for car rentals.

James Ferrara: The whole car rental industry mystifies me a little bit. You would think after the rise of Uber and Lyft, and the push towards mass transportation, that we would have seen the death of the car rental industry. Yet, here it is actually growing year over year.

A lot of it is fueled by younger generations. They move around so much that when they're hiring a car, the ride-sharing solutions actually add up to too much money. If you've got five Uber rides in a day, you're much better off renting a car for thirty-five dollars a day. It's Gen Z that is now driving a resurgence in car rentals.

I went for a couple of years where I stopped renting cars and lost my frequent renter status because I was Ubering around. Then one day it occurred to me I'm spending a heck of a lot of money. You want to do that calculus in your head before you decide to just Uber it.

I also recommend that you focus on one car rental company family. If it's Hertz, it's Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty. If it's Avis, it's Avis and Budget. Enterprise and National are another. You pick one of those families, join their frequent renter program, and that gives you special benefits.

Now I just rent a mid-sized car, and my status allows me to walk on the lot and pick any car I want, up to a Range Rover or Mercedes SUV, because I have President's Circle status with Hertz. It's a great way to save money and it certainly makes it more convenient.

Mike Putman: Several of them have a product where they'll actually meet you at the baggage claim. They'll hold up a sign with your name, take your bags, and have the car waiting for you at the terminal, which is really convenient.

One thing I will say if you are comparing Uber with car rental is that Uber is just more efficient in a metropolitan city. If you're in a non-metro location, that might not be the case. The other thing is parking. I rented a car in Los Angeles and the rental was a reasonable price, but I paid two hundred dollars in parking in three days on top of the rental.

With Uber, you get dropped off at the front door and you don't have to deal with the parking. Also, if you go out and have a couple of glasses of wine, you don't want to be driving around for sure.

James Ferrara: You park at your hotel and it's not unusual to see a sixty or seventy-dollar overnight parking rate. I always say to the guy, "I don't want to buy the spot, I just want to park there." Mike, you had something about insurance?

Navigating Insurance and Avoiding Rental Scams

Mike Putman: Yes, the loss damage waiver. Take this to heart: do a little research before you rent your car. See what kind of coverage your credit card company provides, because most provide it if you rent utilizing that card. It will eliminate, in a lot of cases, the need for car rental insurance.

Be careful, because there's primary coverage and secondary coverage. The car rental companies make a lot of money on it. If you don't have the privilege to bypass the counter, those guys are like vultures. They'll try to scare you into buying the coverage. You immediately realize the guy at the counter is on commission because it's taking him thirty minutes to complete a rental he's trying to pitch. Just make sure you're not already covered.

James Ferrara: That incentive program for rental car counter employees extends to something else a little more sinister: damage claim scams. You bring your car back and they tell you there's a bubble in the tire or a ding in the rim, and they say you're responsible for seven hundred dollars.

I have seen evidence that they are on incentive programs for that as well. A really good strategy is when you pick up your rental car, use your cell phone and take a quick video. Walk around the full circumference of the car and the roof. When you return the car, if they make a claim, you can go back to the video and show them that dent was there when you rented the car.

Mike Putman: Absolutely. I've been a victim of that. I was in Glasgow years years ago and brought the car back. The counter was busy and I told them I had a flight to catch. They told me to just leave the keys above the visor. I get a bill a week later saying there was damage to the car.

It took quite a bit of going back and forth with the car rental company in order for them to not charge my credit card. Had I done what James just said on the return, it would have been easier. When you drop your car off, do the exact same thing: the walk-around with the video.

James Ferrara: Another one—and this is a juicy one. I always decline the pre-purchased fuel because it's six or seven dollars a gallon. I'll bring it back full. But if I'm racing back to the airport and I'm short on time and return the car with a quarter of a tank down, they're going to charge an outrageous amount of money.

I've noticed that many times the car rental companies will have an offer on the receipt to take a customer satisfaction survey for a twenty-five-dollar credit. I've seen it with Hertz and Avis. It takes two minutes on the phone, you answer a bunch of questions, and they apply a credit to your bill. That can really take the sting out of a fuel surcharge.

Wellness Travel Trends and Deals

Mike Putman: Very good idea. Those were some great tips, James. I encourage our listeners to log on to NoTouristsAllowed.com, go to the contact section, and submit any tips you may have. Next up, I want to bring on our deal guru, Jessica Deverson. Jessica, thanks for coming back with us this week. What exciting deals do you have?

Jessica Deverson: Thanks for having me again. I wanted to talk about wellness. August is Wellness Month. Wellness means practicing healthy habits every day to attain better physical and mental health. Maybe for your mental health you don't run on the treadmill, and that’s still practicing wellness.

The point is to practice habits that help you thrive rather than survive. Wellness travel allows a person to either kick off a healthy lifestyle, maintain one while traveling, or enhance a lifestyle they are already living. The main pillars are healthy food, fitness activities, immersion in nature, meditation, and rest.

James Ferrara: You know, I don't want to leave you with the wrong impression. A couple of years ago I went to Canyon Ranch outside of Tucson, which is a very famous wellness resort. One morning I got up at the crack of dawn to go to a Tai Chi class. I loved it. I was a little surprised, though—I thought it was going to be an Asian breakfast buffet.

Jessica Deverson: Well, Oceania Cruises is one of those brands that takes a holistic approach to wellbeing. They showcase this at their Aquamar Spa and Vitality Center. It offers typical spa services and massages, but it's more than that. There are onboard presentations, complimentary fitness classes, one-on-one personal training, and plant-based menus.

Oceania Cruises really took it to the next level with their gourmet plant-based menu. They also have cold-pressed juices and a smoothie bar. Their wellness discovery tours ashore let you learn about timeless traditions in Europe and Asia.

Oceania Cruises has some great offers right now. They have past guest savings of 10% and low single supplements for solo travelers. They have their simply MORE offer, which includes two-for-one cruise fares, free round-trip airfare, transfers, shore excursions, champagne, wine, specialty dining, and Wi-Fi. On top of that, they’re doing a summer sale with savings of up to 40%.

Mike Putman: I'm ready to go. That's very cool.

Jessica Deverson: Sticking with cruises, for Celebrity Cruises, wellness is a fundamental element of their philosophy. They have Peloton cycling and F45 Training. What's really special about Celebrity’s spa is the SEA Thermal Suite, which has distinct spaces inspired by nature.

Celebrity actually has an entire class of rooms called the AquaClass dedicated to wellness. It has amazing mattresses and pillows, a wellness concierge, and Blu, which is their dedicated clean cuisine restaurant.

Right now, you can get up to 75% off the second guest when you book non-refundable rates. You’ll also get a $200 bonus on basically all sailings from now until 2025 if you book soon.

James Ferrara: I went on a Celebrity cruise and the spa-focused restaurant became my go-to for breakfast and dinner. It was really beautiful, delicious food.

Jessica Deverson: Lastly, for a land company, let's talk about G Adventures. They have a wellness lineup created to recharge your body and nourish your mind. There are intention-setting ceremonies when you arrive, plus yoga and meditation led by experts.

G Adventures is big on local flavors and healthy food options. They have these wellness trips throughout India, Bali, Iceland, Peru, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Right now, G Adventures has tons of last-minute travel offers for 2023.

Conclusion and Travel Philosophy

Mike Putman: Those are some great trips, all focused around wellness. As you said, August is Wellness Month, so now's the time to take advantage of those offers.

James Ferrara: Thank you, Jessica. They all sound soul-filling. That's what we really want from travel. We don't want to come back from a trip and tell people we saw the tourist sites but didn't know where to eat. We want to ask local people, eat in the restaurant where we can't quite decipher the menu, and add surprise and adventure. Sometimes you discover the kind of place you'll tell your grandkids about. That's travel.

Mike Putman: Well, I think that wraps up another session of No Tourists Allowed. I want to thank Jessica Deverson for her input and James for his sage advice. We look forward to coming back next week with more information on how to travel better.

James Ferrara: Absolutely. Thank you, Mike. And remember everybody, No Tourists Allowed.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to another episode of No Tourists Allowed. We'll see you next week. No Tourists Allowed is produced by Podcast Studio X.