Oceania

Travel through Oceania by country:

Australia, Indonesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu

Travel through Oceania by popular city:

Auckland, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Wellington

Travel through Oceania by popular things to do:

Cook Islands, Sydney Opera House

Travel through Oceania with our writers:

In the Corner of the World, Work and Play in Queensland

Gadling’s favorite airlines for 2011

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Even with airlines falling over themselves in an effort to generate profits out of new fees and charges, flying retains some glamour and excitement. No? Not working for you? Well there are mileage programs to exploit and perks to chase. And even in the direst landscape for customers, there are always new routes to sample, smiling flight attendants to befriend, and reliable pilots to thank for safe landings.

Going into 2011, it appears that Virgin America is Gadling’s favorite airline. Virgin America sails above the competition with their standard of service, their appealing overall product, and their general freshness.

Other airlines we especially like or tolerate for one or another reason include easyJet, Qantas, VAustralia, Air France, Philippine Airlines, Turkish Airlines, Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific, Jet Airways, Continental, Alaska Airlines, and Porter.

We begin with the observations of Kent Wien, Gadling’s resident pilot-contributor and the motor behind two Gadling features, namely, Cockpit Chronicles and Plane Answers.

Kent Wien. Air New Zealand. I don’t know if I was more impressed with their new line of coach sleeper seats or the friendliness of their flight attendants. Either way, Air New Zealand has managed to capture much of the recent jump in tourism traffic to New Zealand by offering an innovative cabin design and enhanced service which includes an in-flight concierge for the entire airplane. They’ve changed the look and feel of their galleys by hiding them away during boarding, since the first thing passengers see when stepping on to an airplane is the in-flight kitchen. And most of these changes were accomplished even after they were named by Air Transport World as the airline of the year for 2010.

Mike Barish. I continue to love Virgin America. They’re willing to show personality. They have a sense of humor and their use of social media is phenomenal. They have really embraced customer service and care about humanizing their brand.

Annie Scott. Air France has the best coach class of any airline I’ve flown this year, but Philippine Airlines gets ten points for calling their economy class “Fiesta Class.”

McLean Robbins. Virgin America. Am I one of many?

Meg Nesterov. Turkish Airlines has become my default carrier of choice, which is fine given their excellent service. How many other airlines will let you cancel and rebook a flight last minute and only charges a small change fee? Their in-flight meals even in coach are reliably good and always free.

Melanie Nayer. Props to Cathay Pacific. Great in-flight crew, and any airline that makes me a grilled cheese sandwich in flight is tops in my book!

Alex Robertson Textor. Porter, hands down. I like the airline so much I found a way to write a piece for their in-flight magazine. I want two dozen regional Porters around the globe, each with limited route maps, quiet, fuel-efficient planes, friendly fight attendants, and a single class of service.Catherine Bodry. Alaska Air.

Grant Martin. Virgin America & VAustralia. All of that positive press is happening for a reason. These two airlines have the best service out there, and their hard products are equally gorgeous. Get to Australia next year while competition is still high and ticket prices are rock bottom.

Karen Walrond. I fly mostly on Continental because I live in its hub city and that’s where my airmiles are. Here in Houston, we’re nervous about the merger between Continental and United. We hope nothing will be ruined in the process!

David Farley. Jet Airways.

Sean McLachlan. easyJet. Everyone complains about them, myself included, but damn they’re cheap and convenient. And hey, at least they aren’t Ryanair!

Laurel Miller. Qantas for their consistently excellent service, staff, and on-time departures.

[Image: Flickr | LWY]

Gadling’s favorite hotels for 2011

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Where do your loyal well-traveled Gadling contributors especially love to spend the night? We polled Gadling writers on their favorite hotels in 2010. Think of Gadling’s favorite hotels for 2011 as our version of a hotel tip sheet.

Laurel Miller. The Kirketon in Sydney for its quirkiness, cool bar, small size, helpful staff and retro-mod style, blissfully free of big-city attitude. Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, South Australia as a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence in a staggeringly beautiful, intimate setting hovering over a private beach covered with wallaby tracks. For high-end luxury, Ecuador’s Hacienda Zuleta. It’s historic, in the foothills of Andes in northern Ecuador, a working dairy/horse farm/creamery/condor preserve. It offers an intensely Ecuadorean experience, from the local indigenous culture to hospitality, geography, and food that is worth the trek. And lastly theWit in Chicago with its ideal location on the Loop, across the street from the river.

Mike Barish. The Wort Hotel in Jackson, Wyoming. Located right in the heart of Jackson, a historic hotel steeped in cowboy tradition. Grab a drink at the hotel’s Silver Dollar Bar after a day exploring Grand Teton National Park.

Grant Martin. Favorite hotel of the year was the Elysian, right in downtown Chicago. Beautiful, huge rooms, clean, elegant and sharp appointments, razor-sharp staff and a perfect location make this the best spot to spend a long weekend in the Loop.

Annie Scott. The Capella Hotel in Singapore remains a favorite, as does the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. I’m a sucker for luxury. I also loved staying at Sanctuary Sussi & Chuma, a treehouse hotel in Zambia, despite a harrowing adventure with a giant bug which I eventually captured with a teacup and saucer.

McLean Robbins. CastaDiva Resort, Lake Como. Opened in June, this is the first five-star resort to open on the lake in about 100 years. It’s stunning and unique. Used to be a private home to the muse of Bellini, sat empty for decades before being gutted and re-done. Top-notch service, food and spa.

Don George. This year’s hotel highlights were the following trio in Peru. All combined great style and comfort with a deep sense of immersion in the local place, through their architecture, cuisine, artful decorations, and programs that featured local people to promote local sights and attractions. In Urubamba: Sol & Luna. In Aguas Calientes: Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel. In Cusco: Inkaterra La Casona.Tom Johansmeyer: My favorite hotel will always be On the Ave, on W 77th Street, between Amsterdam Ave and Broadway in Manhattan. I once lived there for a few months, and while doing so, I fell in love with the Upper West Side, ultimately moving into the neighborhood. Since my stay in 2004 the rooms have been renovated, but the sixteenth-floor terrace remains. On your next trip to the city, skip the big names, and head up to my neighborhood: it’s worth it to stay a bit out of the way.

Melanie Nayer. Sticking with the Shanghai theme (see yesterday’s favorite destinations post) my favorite hotel this year is the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong.

Karen Walrond. I’m a big fan of the boutique hotel. Recently I stayed at Hotel Lucia in Portland and was blown away by the customer service, and it’s not too expensive. In my homeland of Trinidad, I love the Coblenz Inn, an upscale little boutique place. I also love Acajou, an upscale-yet-very-rustic eco lodge in Grand Riviere, Trinidad. Lovely.

David Farley. The Royal Park Hotel in Tokyo. If you can, get upgraded. Upgrades mean an early-evening cocktail hour with complimentary drinks and snacks every evening.

Kraig Becker. The Chico Hot Spring Resort located in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park in the beautiful Absaroka Mountains. Rooms start as low as $49/night and range up to $300/night for luxurious cabins with some of the most spectacular views around. After a gourmet meal in the Chico dining room, guests can soak in the pool, which is drained and refilled each night with water from the local hot springs.

Catherine Bodry. Songtsam hotels in China

Alex Robertson Textor. Buenos Aires cE Hotel de Diseño. I loved the hotel’s location and thorough minimalism (concrete walls and floors) as well as the ample room size and delicious breakfast. The rate, which I found through Tablet Hotels, was also very reasonable, at $109 including taxes.

[Image: Flickr | doug_wertman]

Flight attendant trainee suing Qantas for failure to provide shrink

by Tom Johansmeyer on

So, you’re new on the job. In fact, your title still has “trainee” in it. And then something goes wrong. That’s enough to make you go home, pop the cork on a bottle of wine and lament the fact that you work for a third world company. Now, imagine the whole thing happening 30,000 feet from the ground. Yeah, it sucks. You need more than a bottle of wine to take the edge off at that point. In fact, there’s probably a good chance you’d want some counseling.

Well, that’s exactly what Jessie Holgersson wanted, and she doesn’t feel she got it fast enough.

According to AM, an ABC morning show in Australia, Holgersson, a flight attendant on the Qantas 747 that had an engine fire, didn’t get counseling until a day after the incident. Her attorney “says that was too late and claims that Miss Holgersson was discriminated against for raising safety concerns about the airline’s lack of care.” Yeah … lawyer. Discrimination. Do the math: Holgerrson is suing.

Says Holgersson:

I was on my second training flight, we’d just flown from Sydney to Singapore, and everything went great on that flight and we had a nice day in Singapore and then we were heading back home and everything seemed normal and fine and about sort of six minutes after take-off we had an incident with our engine nut blew out.

She adds that “afterwards we were told that it was a fairly normal occurrence and these things can happen and, you know, not to worry about it too much.”

To make matters worse, according to AM, “The trainee was not given a permanent job.”

Qantas says through a spokeswoman that “Miss Holgersson was being assessed for possible employment by a UK cabin crew subsidiary at the time of the flight, with any position to be based out of London.” The company cites her behavior in training as the reason it didn’t offer her a position – and that she didn’t want to work out of the UK.

As to the claim that the flight attendants weren’t provided with counseling, Qantas says that it provided immediate and appropriate support.

[photo by Skazama via Flickr]

The Gadling budget travel manifesto

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Over the past two weeks we’ve upped our budget travel coverage here at Gadling. We’ve published stories on budget-friendly Caribbean destinations, budget-friendly European destinations, Thanksgiving hotel deals, hardcore budget travel suggestions, New York City budget travel tips, local budget travel secrets, cheap local fast food worldwide, great sites for planning budget-friendly European travel, and how to find affordable ski deals.

Our recent hyperactivity around budget travel is no accident. We want to improve Gadling’s standing as budget travel resource, as a go-to site for budget travel tips, information, and inspiration.

In order to give this new resolve some oomph, a Gadling budget travel manifesto is in order. The goal here is to intervene in a travel media landscape that sees luxury travel as the universal objective of all travelers by glorifying budget travel and budget travelers. Budget travel is exciting and sophisticated and it needs to be recognized as such.

The lure of aspirational travel

People love to read about expensive resorts and impossibly dear travel accessories because they’re exciting to contemplate. In this respect, they fulfill a function not a million miles from pornography. And like porn, they’re also a lot of fun. The problem is that just as pornography does not provide a good map for most human relations, aspirational travel does not offer a useable guide for most forms of travel. Worse yet, aspirational travel often comes to cloud impressions of travel and actually convince many, many people that travel is an endeavor that can only be engaged at unmanageably high price points.

The focus on aspirational travel in the travel media creates all sorts of strange situations. Reading through a typical American travel magazine or even the weekend travel section of big newspaper, one might believe that $500 per night is a reasonable mid-range rate for a night’s hotel accommodation. Honestly, this is outrageous. When push comes to shove, how many people can actually afford such rates?

Budget travel can mean many things. It can mean finding a deal on a hotel, cruise, or air journey. It can mean traveling with very little money and simply making do. It can mean organizing travel around friendship networks, or joining home exchange or couchsurfing membership programs. But however it might be defined, it doesn’t include hotel rooms that run $500 per night.

Budget travel is sophisticated travel

Here are three assertions about budget travel in general and in relation to luxury travel that might at first seem counterintuitive.

1. Budget travel enables better interaction with local culture than does luxury travel.

2. Budget travel is more sophisticated than luxury travel.

3. Budget travelers are more creative than luxury travelers.

I’ll anticipate a few knee-jerk criticisms and try to answer them here in advance. Obviously not all budget travelers are savvy. Many are in fact the opposite. But it is just as certain that many, many (most?) luxury travelers are not at all sophisticated–not truly and fully in the spirit of cultural engagement and courageous exploration.The first assertion here is probably the most self-evident. Budget travelers very often stay in modest accommodations run by locals or long-term expats in settings surrounded by locals. Unlike luxury travelers, who are typically cocooned in hermetically-sealed compounds radically separated from the surrounding locales and their residents, budget travelers have an easy time experiencing the richly local dimensions of their destinations.

Points two and three: Budget travelers work creatively to find interesting places to visit and build itineraries. Unlike many luxury travelers, they don’t particularly care about international brands, and don’t stop thinking about how to spend their time after they’ve booked a stay at a particular five-star chain hotel and exhausted the menu of in-house spa treatments. Budget travelers approach their travel with open minds about where they might stay and about which sorts of inexpensive accommodations might be on offer in particular locations.

Budget travel glamour

Budget travel is real travel. It’s often challenging and not always predictable, yet it’s also often far more glamorous than its reputation.

There is glamour in amassing tons of passport stamps on a dime, in accumulating personal top ten lists of the best dive bars in a particular city, and in getting your high culture quota in the standing-room only zone. There are joys in cheap apartment sublets, in couchsurfing, in volunteer tourism, in hitchhiking, in slow buses. There are pleasures in delicious and fresh local fast food.

But evidence of the glamour of budget travel is too often absent even within the tiny budget travel media, which often prioritizes an upwardly-mobile demographic and ignores countless very good budget accommodations in favor of stylish hotels with stratospheric nightly rates. This approach may be good for advertising revenue but it renders the very concept of budget travel unrecognizable. And in the process, the real glamour of budget travel is lost.

Gadling’s budget travel content

Moving forward here at Gadling, we are committed to providing better targeted budget travel advice in the form of hotel and restaurant tips, strategic booking suggestions, local secrets, and solid general information for getting the most for your money.

We want to hear from you. We want to know which budget travel questions you want answered and which types of budget-friendly advice you most need. How can Gadling best deliver the budget travel goods?

[Image: Flickr / cyclonebill]

Follow Andrew Evans and Intelligent Travel on an adventure around the world

by Grant Martin on

Our good friend and writer-at-large Andrew Evans is on the road with National Geographic for the next few months, writing, video blogging and tweeting his adventure around the planet.

As part of his engagement with readers he’s leaving clues and tidbitds about his journey scattered across the interwebs, like tiny bread crumbs of travel fodder for his faithful fans to gobble up. Our favorite so far? From @wheresandrew:

My take on #Vegemite: If “oil spill” was an artisanal cheese.

Check out one of the opening videos from his journey below. You can follow the rest over at Intelligent Travel or on the Twitters.