Why bulkhead and exit row seats are not always the best pick

by Scott Carmichael on

Ask anyone what they think the best seat is on the plane, and most will respond with “the exit row”. And in many cases, the exit row or bulkhead seats are indeed the most cherished row of seats on the plane.

But don’t be tricked into picking the exit row or bulkhead seat without doing a little homework – not all good seats are going to provide any extra comfort, and in some cases, the most desirable seats may actually be the worst on the plane.

Finding the right seat

It isn’t hard to pick the right seat – you just need to have the right tools. My personal favorite is Seatguru.com, the granddaddy of seat map sites. On Seatguru, you can pick your seatmap by plane type, or by flight number. When you see a seatmap presented on the airline site, all seats look the same – and the airlines obviously won’t tell you in advance that a specific seat will be really uncomfortable. If you need instant (mobile) access to Seat maps, you can use the SeatGuru mobile site.

Why some airline seat choices are bad choices

All exit row and bulkhead seats are good right? Wrong. On the SeatGuru seat map, you can see exactly which seats are the most desirable – and in some cases, the exit row seats may indeed be quite a lot better than the others. However, there is more to a good seat than a lot of legroom. Legroom is useless when you are stuck in a seat that doesn’t recline, doesn’t have any room under the seat for bags and has over an inch less width.

The non-reclining seat

Non-reclining seats are usually the seats right in front of the exit row seats. These seats are locked in place to prevent them from being reclined into the exit row. Not everyone likes to recline their seat, but on a long flight, being forced to sit upright can be a real pain.

The tray-table width dillema

Because exit row seats have a lot of leg room in front of them, the tray table had to be moved into the armrest. This shaves an inch or more off the width of your seat, making it quite uncomfortable. Sure, you may have legroom, but that may not make up for the tight squeeze of your seat.

No space for bags

In a “normal” seat, you’ll have room for your bags under the seat in front of you. Having quick access to your bag means you can reach for your MP3 player, bottle of water or laptop. Without this space, you’ll need to store your bag in an overhead bin – which may not always be right above you. If you boarded late, your bag may be 20 rows behind you.

No seat pocket storage

Not only do you lose space under the seat in front of you, you also lose the seatback pocket. For most people, this is where you stash your headphones, magazines and books and a bottle of water. Without this, you’ll once again have to rely on keeping stuff in your bag(s).

Leg room with a price

Even though the row in front of you is pretty far away, there are other objects that may impact your legroom – the window seat may be obstructed by the large slide cover on the emergency door – which is of course something else not mentioned in the airline seat map. In some cases, this large obstruction may even decrease the amount of leg room offered when compared to a normal seat.

Climate control (or lack of)

Being so close to the exit door can often mean you are going to be freezing during your flight. Climate control on planes is bad enough, but on an international flight, the exit row can become especially cold. And since you can’t ask the crew to turn the heat up just for you, you may need to embark on a mission to find a couple of blankets just to stay warm.

How to break into a hotel room with a rubber band

by Jeremy Kressmann on

This past February, we showed you a video of how easily a thief could break into a hotel room, using nothing more than a simple piece of wire. Apparently that’s not the only way. According to a recent video posted at Blackbag, the blog of professional lock picker Barry Weis, a hotel room chain lock can be opened with nothing more than a simple rubber band. Watch in disbelief as a hand slips through the crack in the door, latches on a rubber band, and pulls the chain out of the bolt. It’s an amazingly cunning trick, thought it does raise a few questions. For instance, how would a thief using this trick get the door open if it was locked from the outside?

Before breaking into a state of safety hysteria, remember that not every hotel room is a burglary waiting to happen. Use common sense and don’t leave your valuables lying around when you leave the room. Use the in-room or hotel safe. And if possible, try to stay in rooms with bar-style locks rather than chain ones.

[Via View from the Wing]

Around Antwerp – strange and wonderful sights

by Annie Scott on


Walking through Antwerp is like walking through a gothic storybook. The colors are bright, but rained-upon, the cobbled streets are haphazard with marble-tiled crosswalks and lined with buildings which seem to lean left and right. The river has a graffiti-emblazoned concrete walkway leading to a castle-esque fortress, and of course, De Kathedraal (below/next page) is an astonishing sight to behold. From museums (with secret gardens) to high fashion and art to super-concept shops and diamonds, there’s a lot to see and do in Antwerp, Belgium.

Yes, I was surprised.
%Gallery-90174%I must admit that, as a traveler, Antwerp was not really on my radar. Because of this, I was pleasantly taken off guard as I rode in on the train and saw the stunning architecture to my left and right — both the decorative columns on the railway itself and the city beyond, dotted with cupolas and giant clocks.

There’s fine dining at restaurants like Dome — Dome is actually a trio of one fine dining restaurant, a more relaxed but similarly elegant cafe with fish in the wall (below), and a bakery — and Le John, where if you’re nice to your host, he might give you a taste of some fine aged Guatemalan rum. Zuiderterras offers a solid menu with killed views of the river, and cheaper options include the market down by the student pavilion and any kind of Belgian frites or Belgian chocolates you can imagine.

Antwerp’s legendary diamond district features more than just great deals on ice: a Diamond Museum as well as Diamondland (my preference), where you can learn all about the diamond trade and how diamonds are made and cut. There’s also a zoo, a World Heritage Site printing museum, The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which features 20 Rubens and Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, the De Koninck brewery and countless art galleries and monuments. East of the city center, right in the heart of the Diamond District is Central Station (below), a stunning building built between 1895 and 1905 with bling money. Walk south from the city center near the river and you’ll come upon a number of swingin’, happy clubs — keep walking and you’ll hit something that looks like the Sydney Opera House; it’s the courthouse.

All in all, I would say that Antwerp is a wonderful place for those who fall in love with old European cities. There is a strange, common juxtaposition of perfectly manicured buildings and those which look condemned or out of a Tim Burton movie, as well as all the gothic architecture and rainy romanticism a Europhile craves. I didn’t know what to expect from the city of Antwerp, but I now regard it as one of the most charming cities to which I’ve ever been.

My visit to Antwerp was sponsored by Tourism Antwerp and Cool Capitals, but the opinions expressed in the article are 100% my own.

Knott’s Berry Farm adds chocolate and bacon to the funnel-cake menu

by Leigh Caldwell on

Chocolate. Bacon. Funnel cake. Three of my favorite things in the world. But is putting them all together too much of a good thing?

Apparently not at Knott’s Berry Farm, where chocolate bacon funnel cake is being added to the menu.

This over-the-top culinary concoction started where all good theme-park food trends do these days, on Twitter.

Meghan Gardner, a spokeswoman for Knott’s Berry Farm, said that the park sent out a tweet asking followers what funnel cake toppings they would like to see added to the menu.

Chocolate and bacon was the winner. So, the Buena Park, Calif., theme park created a funnel cake drizzled with chocolate syrup and topped with chopped bacon.

It was supposed to be a temporary item, Gardner said. But it proved so popular that the new snack has been added to the permanent menu at the park’s Funnel Cake Kitchen.

Chocolate bacon funnel cakes sell for $8.

Trade Mocked

by Andrew Evans on

You were a cheerleader, you dated a cheerleader, or you hated the cheerleaders. As I recall, that’s how high school worked.

Thanks to travel PR, that same primeval paradigm lives on long after graduation. That miniskirts-shouting-slogans thing still works, whether you’re a used car salesman, Miley Cyrus on VH1 or the tourist board of a small Balkan nation. When it comes to selling your destination in today’s busy world of busy people, a country’s name just isn’t enough–just like school spirit, you need colors, a pep band, a mascot, a brand and most important–a cheer.

It’s tragic but true: tourist boards don’t trust their country’s name to inspire appropriate thoughts in your brain. Toponyms are too open-ended and too untrustworthy–also, way too obvious. For example, what’s the first thing that pops into your head when I say . . . Monte Carlo? How about Australia? The Bahamas? Kuwait? The Gambia?

Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not enough. Tourist boards want you to choose their destination over all others, then allocate all of your vacation days to them and then come spend your money on very specific things–like miniature golf by the sea or hot air balloon rides across the prairie. In short, they want your school spirit so much they’re churning out cheers to fill up all the Swiss cheese holes in your mental map of the world.

Like a good cheer, a good destination slogan is simple and so memorable it sticks in your head like two-sided tape. Sex sells, but then so does love: “Virginia is for Lovers”, Hungary offers visitors “A Love for Life”, Albania promises “A New Mediterranean Love”, while the highlighted “I feel Slovenia” spells out sweetly “I Feel Love”. Meanwhile, Bosnia & Herzegovina call themselves “the Heart Shaped Land” and Denmark’s logo is a red heart with a white cross. Colombia and Dubai have red hearts in their logo. Everybody else uses sunshine.
There is a direct correlation between sunshine deprivation and travelers with disposable income–sunny places sell, which is why Maldives is “the Sunny Side of Life”, Sicily says “Everything else is in the shade”, Ethiopia quizzically boasts “13 Months of Sunshine”, Portugal is “Europe’s West Coast”, and Spain used to be “Everything Under the Sun”. Spain was also the first country ever to have a logo-the splashy red sun painted by Joan Miró in 1983. Some destination logos work–like the black and red “I LOVE NY” design of Milton Glaser that’s been around ever since the 70s. Others fail to grasp the spirit of a place (cough, Italia). Reducing one’s country to a crazy font and some cheesy clip art often detracts from that country’s best assets. Like nature.

When chasing the crunchy yuppie granola suburbanite dollar on vacation, you’ve gotta roll out Nature and promise them the kind of purity that lacks from their daily life. British Virgin Islands claims “Nature’s Little Secrets” while Belize counterclaims with “Mother Nature’s Best Kept Secret”. Switzerland urges us to “Get Natural”, Poland is “The Natural Choice”, Iceland is “Pure, Natural, Unspoiled”, Ecuador is Life in a Pure State, “Pure Michigan” is just as pure, Costa Rica is “No Artificial Ingredients”, and like a clothing tag that makes you feel good, New Zealand is simply “100% Pure”. New Zealand also wants us to believe that they’re the “youngest country on earth” but that’s pushing it. The youngest country on earth is actually Kosovo (Born February 2008)–so young they’re still working on their slogan.

And there’s a tough one–how do you sell a country that’s just poking its head out from under the covers of war and bloodshed? Kosovo’s big bad next-door neighbor Serbia asks us frankly to “Take a New Look at Your Old Neighbor”; “It’s Beautiful–It’s Pakistan” steers clear of the conflict, Colombia owns up to its knack for kidnapping by insisting, “The Only Risk is Wanting to Stay”, and Vietnam nudges our memories away from the past and towards “The Hidden Charm” of today.

Our nostalgia for simpler, better, pre-tourist times invokes our most romantic notions about travel: Croatia is “The Mediterranean as it Once Was”, Tahiti consists of “Islands the Way they Used to Be”, and Bangladesh employs a kind of reverse psychology to insist we “Come to Bangladesh, Before the Tourists.” Such slogans of unaffectedness mirror the push for national validation by tourism, where actual authenticity is second to perceived authenticity, hence Malaysia is “Truly Asia”, Zambia is “The Real Africa”, and the Rocky Mountain States make up “The Real America”. Greece is “The True Experience” and Morocco is “Travel For Real”. Everybody wants to be legit.

Countries without the certified organic label try merely to stupefy us: Israel “Wonders”, Germany is “Simply Inspiring”, Chile is “Always Surprising”, Estonia is “Positively Surprising”, “Amazing Thailand” amazes, and Dominica claims to “Defy the Everyday”. To that same surprising end, Latin America loves trademarking their exclamation points (see ¡Viva Cuba!, Brazil’s one-word essay “Sensational!” and El Salvador’s “Impressive!”)

Where punctuated enthusiasm falls short, countries might confront the traveler with a challenge or a dare. Jamaica projects the burden of proof on its tourists by claiming “Once You Go You Know”, Peru asks that we “Live the Legend”, Canada insists we “Keep Exploring”, South Africa answers your every question with a smiley “It’s Possible”. Meanwhile, Greenland sets an impossibly high bar with “The Greatest Experience”.

Working the totality of a country’s experience into a good slogan is a challenge that often leads to open-ended grandstanding: “It’s Got to be Austria” might be the answer to any question (and sounds better when spoken with an Austrian accent). Next-door Slovakia is the “Little Big Country”, insisting that size is second to experience. Philippines offers “More than the Usual” and small, self-deprecating Andorra confesses, “There’s Just So Much More” (I think what they meant to say is, “come back please”). Really big numbers carries the thought even further: Papua New Guinea is made up of “A Million Different Journeys”; Ireland brightens with “100,000 Welcomes”.

When all else fails, aim for easy alliteration, as in “Enjoy England“, “Incredible India“, “Mystical Myanmar”, and the “Breathtaking Beauty” of Montenegro. (For more on the correlation between simplistic phrases and high mental retention, See Black Eyed Peas-Lyrics).

The point of all this is that today, the internet is our atlas and Google is our guidebook. It’s how we travel, how we think about travel and how we plan our travel. Punch in a country like Tunisia and you’re greeted with a dreamy curly-cue phrase like “Jewel of the Mediterranean”–Type in next-door neighbor Algeria and you get a glaring State Department warning saying “Keep Away.” In a scramble for those top ten search results, destinations compete with a sea of digital ideas that pre-define their tourist appeal. It’s why we’ll never find that page proclaiming Iran “The Land of Civilized and Friendly People” but why a simple “Dubai” turns up Dubai Tourism in first place, along with their moniker “Nowhere Like Dubai” (which should win some kind of truth in advertising prize.)

That aggressive, American-style marketing has taken over the billion-dollar travel industry is obvious. Nobody’s crying over the fact that we sell destinations like breakfast cereal–that countries need a bigger and brighter box with a promised prize inside in order to lull unassuming tourist shoppers into stopping, pulling it off the shelf, reading the back and eventually sticking it in their cart. I guess the sad part is how the whole gregarious exercise limits travel and the very meaning of travel. By boiling down a country into some bland reduction sauce of a slogan, we cancel out the diversity of experience and place, trade wanderlust for jingoism, and turn our hopeful worldview into a kind of commercial ADHD in which we suddenly crave the Jersey Shore like a kid craves a Happy Meal.

Nobody’s ever asked me to join their tourist board focus group, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own opinions and tastes. For instance, my daily reality is a stereo cityscape of car alarms and jackhammers. Any country that simply placed the word “Quiet” or “Peaceful” in lower-case Times New Roman, 24-point font white type in the upper right hand corner of a double-truncated landscape spread–well, I’d be there in a heartbeat. Better yet–how about a one-minute TV commercial of total silence. (“Oh, wow honey, look!–that’s where I wanna go.”)

This is probably why I’ve never been in a focus group. For all the focus on authenticity and reality, I find most tourism slogans lacking in both. For the most part, they are limiting and unoriginal, easily dropped into any of the above categories. Even worse, today’s slogans challenge actual truths gained through travel experience. One day spent in any place offers a lifetime of material for long-lasting personal travel slogans. My own favorites include Russia (“Still Cold”), Turkey (“Not Really Europe At All”), England (“Drizzles Often”), Orlando (“Cheesy as Hell”), and Ireland (“Freakin’ Expensive”).

As a writer, I must argue against the cheerleaders and in favor of words–the more words we attach to a destination the better the sell. I think it’s safe to assume that Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia has done more for Argentina tourism than any of their own slogans. Similarly, Jack London gives props to Alaska, Mark Twain mystifies us with the Mississippi, and Rudyard Kipling keeps sending people to India. All four authors wrote about love, nature, and sunshine. They wrote long books filled with enthusiasm and punctuated with exclamation marks. They made us fall in love and yearn for places we never saw or knew.

No matter how many millions get spent on tourist slogans, today’s trademarked PR phraseology has generally failed to hit the mark. Perhaps they’ll make us rethink a place–reconsider a country we’d somehow looked over, but can a two or three word slogan ever touch us in that tender way, make us save up all our money, pack our bags and run away?

I don’t think so.