Photo Of The Day: The World Trade Center, Rebuilt

by Jessica Marati on

The events of September 11, 2001, left an indelible mark on the country, and indeed the world. Today, New York will commemorate the 11th anniversary of 9/11 with a series of ceremonies and memorial services. It will also celebrate the progress underway on the new World Trade Center towers, which serve as a reminder of America’s ability to overcome adversity. The most prominent tower, called WTC1, was photographed yesterday in all of its red-white-and-blue glory by Flickr user Gus NYC. When completed, WTC1 will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

Do you have any great photos of the new Twin Towers? Upload your shots to the Gadling Flickr Pool and your image could be selected as our Photo of the Day.

New Study Reveals Cities With The Highest And Lowest Taxes For Travelers

by Dave Seminara on

On a recent road trip, I stopped for the night in suburban Indianapolis and was happy to find a nice hotel room for just $91 per night. But in the morning, when I saw the receipt that was slipped under the door and noticed a total bill of $106.47, I thought that there was some mistake.

In huge cities like New York and Chicago you expect punitive taxes on travel related expenses, but could the hotel tax rate really be 17% in the Hoosier State? A stroll down to the front desk confirmed that there was no mistake and according to a newly released report from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), Indy has one of the highest hotel tax rates in the country.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m planning a trip, I don’t think much about taxes, but I probably should because in some places they can really drive up the cost. I tend to look at the room rate or the rental car rate itself, and by the time I get to the confirm page where you see the taxes, I’ve more or less already made my decision and somehow I think I’m paying $91 for the room in Indy, rather than the $106.47 it will come to with taxes.Since the start of the Global Recession, politicians in cash strapped municipalities all over the country have been looking for ways to make up for budget shortfalls and hitting out-of-towners is a convenient way to escape the wrath of local voters. According to the GBTA’s fifth annual report, “discriminatory travel taxes and fees enacted on travel-related services impose an average increased cost on visitors of 57% over general sales tax.”

So what are the most and least taxing cities for travelers? It should come as no surprise to see New York and Chicago on the taxing list, but why are Portland, Oregon, and a few places in California in the least taxing column? Portland actually shows up in the top ten least taxing list because Oregon has no sales tax, but it also shows up in the top most discriminatory taxes list (which doesn’t count taxes that apply to everyone, just those that apply to travelers) because it has a very high rental car tax rate.

A number of municipalities in California lowered their sales tax rate in 2011 and made the least taxing list based on that. The biggest surprise for me is the fact that Honolulu made the least taxing list.

Highest Overall Tax Burden for Travelers

The following figures reveal how much a traveler would pay in taxes for one day of travel, including a $103.45 hotel room, a $55.99 rental car and $91.22 in meals at restaurants. Chicago hits the trifecta with crippling taxes on hotels and rental cars plus a high sales tax rate, giving it the overall tax crown.

Chicago- $40.33
New York- $37.98
Boston- $34.83
Kansas City- $34.58
Seattle- $34.43
Minneapolis- $34.32
Cleveland- $34.22
Indianapolis- $34.19
Nashville- $34.13
Houston- $33.51

Lowest Overall Tax Burden for Travelers

Ft. Lauderdale, FL- $22.21
Ft. Myers, FL- $22.21
West Palm Beach, FL- $22.21
Detroit, MI- $22.37
Portland, OR- $22.45
Orange County, CA- 22.79
Burbank, CA- $23.74
Ontario, CA- $24.08
Honolulu, HI- $24.38
Orlando, FL- $24.50

New York City has the highest hotel tax rate, followed by Nashville, Indianapolis and Houston. Chicago has the highest rental car tax rate, followed by Boston, Las Vegas, and Minneapolis.

One might ask what these cities are doing with the tax revenues they collect from travelers. Are they using the money to promote their destination or to enhance the tourism infrastructure? The answer varies from place to place, but looking at Chicago, for example, just 1% of the 16% hotel tax goes toward tourism promotion, according to the study.

In most European countries, prices for hotels, rental cars, meals and almost everything else already include the applicable taxes. As a consumer, I find this very straightforward in that you know exactly what you’ll pay, but it also masks where your money is going. You might think that 100€ you’re paying for a hotel room is pricey, but you may not be aware that the hotel is losing a large chunk of that revenue to the tax collector.

Do you pay attention to the tax rates when planning travel, or are they just an afterthought? If the city has a high hotel tax rate, will you choose a less expensive hotel or go to a different city altogether? Would you like to see hotels and rental car companies display or explain the tax rates in a more transparent way when you book through the Internet or over the phone?

[Photo by 401K 2012 on Flickr]

New York City’s (Mostly) Unfortunate $1 Pizza Slice Phenomenon

by David Farley on
There was a crash and a boom from the kitchen. I was just a teenager but from my bedroom, my friend Jay and I immediately knew what had happened. “Your dad dropped the pizza,” he said to me, seconds after the noise reverberated through the suburban Los Angeles house. Yep. That’s exactly what happened. My dad, likely liquored up after an afternoon of football watching (and inspired to imbibe more by the prospect another work week was looming around the temporal corner), was cooking his “special” pizzas. And while removing it from the oven, he dropped it. We’d have to get pizza delivered instead.

Which was a good thing. Because my dad’s pizza was the worst I’ve ever eaten in my life. About one Sunday every month, I’d stroll out into the kitchen and see stacked-up containers of flour and jars of tomato paste and I knew it was one of those dreaded Sunday pizza nights. The thin crust of dad’s pizza, set nonna style in a rectangular pan, would cook wildly uneven: the edges were brick hard and the center doughy; the sauce was so thin it was hard to see on the finished product that there were even tomatoes involved in this near-inedible orgy; and the toppings always consisted of ground beef and bell peppers.

In a way, it seems hard to screw up something so simple. Pizza is just flour and egg for the dough, tomatoes for the sauce and whatever else you want to top it with. Put it in a scalding oven for 10 or so minute and ecco la! Your pizza is done and delicious.

I’ve recently found my dad’s match for the worst pizza I’ve ever tasted. And it’s right where I live in New York City. In the last few years a recent phenomenon has emerged on the city’s dining landscape: $1 pizza slices.

The phrase, you pay for what you get, very much applies here. I talked to Adam Kuban, founding editor of the website Serious Eats and editor and founder of Slice, a blog dedicated to all things pizza. “I think the recession is the big force driving the rise of the dollar slice,” he said. “I don’t know about other folks, but for me, once a plain slice started creeping up near the $3 mark, it ceased to be an automatic transaction. Two bucks? Fine. Two-fifty? Um, OK, sure. Because even at $2.50, if you’re getting two slices, like a lot of people do, it’s still an even fiver. Once you break the $2.50 barrier, though (the average price in Manhattan seems to be holding around $2.75), you start to think about the price in terms of MORE THAN $5.”

A good point. South Brooklyn Pizza in the East Village, one of the best slices in the city, in my opinion, is a whopping $4 per slice. It’s worth it, though. But, as Kuban pointed out, with that kind of pricing it’s not automatic anymore.


The pizza slice didn’t enter the American food landscape until the middle of the 20th century. Before this pizza was largely an ethnic phenomenon with newly arrived Italian laborers eating it in places like New York, New Haven, Chicago and Boston. But when American soldiers returned from Italy after World War II, pizza was on its way to becoming “American.” After the gas pizza oven was created here, allowing pizza makers to create this once-Italian delicacy cheaply and quickly, pizza spread through the rest of the country.

And so now we come to the $1 slice. There’s an extensive write up on Kuban’s blog with an excellent analysis of the $1 pizza phenomenon, claiming it’s a different genre of pizza, as most of the places – especially the increasingly ubiquitous 2 Bros Pizza and 99¢ Fresh Pizza – use a slightly different technique.

“Most of the dollar slice places … stretch the dough on an oiled surface,” said Kuban. “This means they have to use a baking screen so the oiled dough doesn’t burn on the hearth of the oven. The cooking method gives you a less crisp crust – more spongy.”

Which brings us to Percy’s. Located on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, this pizzeria started out as an outlet of South Brooklyn Pizza. When the NYU students were balking at $4 for a slice, the owner took a different approach.

When I stopped in for a slice, longtime pizzaiolo Jack Bruli was shoveling cheese pizzas in and out of the gas-burning oven.

“Because we put love into our work here,” Bruli said when I asked why the $1 slice is so much better here. “And we’re trained. We know what we’re doing. At the other places, there are college students working there who don’t care about their product. We do. This is my job. I’ve been doing it since the ’70s.”

True or not, what also makes Percy’s so special is they still largely use the same technique as South Brooklyn and some of the better by-the-slice places in the Big Apple. Which is to say, they don’t adhere to the same pizza-making ways of the other $1-per-slice joints.

I sat down and bit into the slice. The crust was crispy all the way through, which already gives it a huge advantage to its competitors.

This was a pizza not worth dropping on the kitchen floor.

Cruise Line Taps Top Artist For Hull Design

by Chris Owen on

Norwegian Cruise Line today released the first image of the hull art planned for its next ship, 144,000 ton Norwegian Breakaway, designed by pop-artist icon Peter Max.

Covering 40,000 square feet of the ship’s exterior, the New York City-themed design features images of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline.

“The Big Apple is known for its love of art and its many galleries — and now, Norwegian Breakaway becomes a floating piece of that art that will cruise in and dock every Saturday on New York’s West Side,” said Kevin Sheehan, Norwegian president and CEO in a statement.

Artists and art at sea is nothing new, Peter Max was along for the ride on inaugural sailings of Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas and an on-board Britto store with works from Romero Britto, is featured on the ship.

Sister line Celebrity Cruises has a similar focus on the arts, offering hands-on instruction from experts in drawing, painting and beading, as well as the art of food with culinary-themed classes on their Solstice-class ships.
Currently under construction in Germany, Norwegian Breakaway will debut in April 2013. The ship is scheduled to sail year-round from New York to Bermuda and the Bahamas and will be the largest ship ever to be based year-round in the city. That adds one more drive-to-the-port option for cruise passengers in the often under-served New York market.

Embarking on seven- to twelve day cruises to the Bahamas and Florida from October 2013 to April 2014, ports include Nassau, Great Stirrup Cay, Orlando and Port Canaveral. Two 12-day Southern Caribbean voyages and two “Weekend Escape” cruises in January 2014 are also scheduled with the 12-day itinerary incorporating visits to San Juan, St Thomas, Philipsburg, Castries, Bridgetown and Basseterre.




Photo courtesy Norwegian Cruise Line

Space Program Spinoff: New York To Tokyo In 90 minutes By 2030

by Chris Owen on

Throughout the years, space program spinoffs have served us well. Everyday products include freeze-dried food, firefighting equipment, emergency “space blankets,” Dustbusters and more. First they were proven in space, then adapted to fulfill earthly needs. Today, forward-thinking scientists are talking about adapting technology not even in practice yet to address current real-life desires.

XCOR Aerospace is a California corporation formed by people who realized the only way for them to get to space is to make it affordable for private citizens. Their current focus is set on developing the Lynx commercial reusable launch vehicle (RLV). Lynx will take humans and payloads on a half-hour suborbital flight then return safely to the takeoff runway. But looking beyond what has not even been done yet, XCOR could have the ticket to a flight from New York to Tokyo in 90 minutes by 2030.

Airlines have all but given up on supersonic flight, burned by the two unsolved problems of the Concorde that retired in 2003: the high cost of fuel and the noisy sonic boom created by the aircraft. Those two factors, respectively, led to an inability to make Concorde’s operation profitable and limited its market as nations (including the United States) prohibited landing. Still, the idea of flying from New York to Tokyo in under three hours still has its charm and XCOR might have a way to make it happen.

Flying what is called point to point space travel, the Lynx will take off and land like a conventional plane, going from point A to point B, but cruise at Mach 3.5 (2,688 mph).”Rockets are the way to go,” said XCOR COO Andrew Nelson in an interesting Business Insider article about how the return of supersonic flight will revolutionize travel. Initially it will be “much more like a fighter pilot experience” than business class, says Nelson, but New York to Tokyo in 90 minutes? How great would that be?

Sound familiar?

In 2008 Gadling reported, “It should be two years before the Lynx is off the ground, and Xcor has still to find a commercial partner to market and operate the flights,” in “The Commercial Space Race Heats Up.” But that was for a joy ride in suborbital space for millionaires launching and landing in the same place.

Point to point space travel is an entirely different animal, as we see in this video:




[Flickr photo by Midland Intl. Airport]