Andrew Ferrier’s Blog

Always add a note to your hotel reservation requesting a high floor if possible. Some hotel chains will let you do this on your frequent traveller profile, for others you may have to request each time. It’s worth it, for two reasons:

• You typically get a better view and a quieter room.
• You sometimes get upgraded to a better class of room, without having to explicitly ask for it - they are often high up.

It has a disadvantage, however.

Today:

• Got an SMS this afternoon saying flight to Terminal 5 had been cancelled. A request to call BA at my own expense.
• Rapid call to BA asking for a rebooking on an earlier Malév flight to Gatwick, followed by a semi-run to the hotel.
• Panic rush to airport; in the end, got there too early!
• Checked in; panic over for the moment.

I’ll have ‘fun’ when I get back checking whether I can claim compensation - I think I can. Normally I like flying with BA, but this will make me think twice in future. I’ll certainly be avoiding T5 for a while, if at all possible.

Normally I find Germany to live up to its reputation for competence and organisation. Today’s trip through the bureaucracy of Frankfurt airport, however, has been marred by duplicate security checks, far too many passport and boarding pass checks, annoying queues, and unclear instructions at the gate - and I haven’t even got on the plane yet! I’m not impressed.

Perhaps Frankfurt is suffering from the Heathrow disease of being just too big for its boots.

As I’ve starting travelling a lot recently, I’ve been making reasonably heavy use of both Dopplr and the less well-known TripIt. The idea behind Dopplr is simple: tell it which cities you’re travelling to and it will share that information with your other Dopplr contacts, notifying you when you’re in the same place. You can also syndicate your travel plans - I have mine published on Facebook and available as a feed via Google Calendar.

TripIt, although it has similar facilities for maintaining a list of travelling contacts, originates from a slightly different and more ambitious idea. Essentially, you email TripIt confirmation emails for hotels, airlines, car rental, etc. - and it parses them and automatically organises them into trips with information-rich itineraries, including weather, maps, city guides, etc. You can print those out, but (more usefully) you can again syndicate them into tools such as Google Calendar via iCal. This way, I end up with details about all my flights, hotels, and so on in my calendar automatically.

TripIt’s not perfect - I’ve found a few bugs - and TripIt doesn’t support every single travel agent (for example, it doesn’t support the one we use within IBM - at least not directly). But the TripIt team are very responsive to feedback - I notified them about a Hertz reservation email this afternoon that wasn’t recognised. They’ve already fixed the bug and the information has appeared in my TripIt account. I’m not sure how they plan to monetise their service (although that’s still not clear with Dopplr either), but I am likely to stay a regular user for the foreseeable future.

(Honourable mention for another useful travel website goes to Kayak, which has the most flexible and useful flight search interface I’ve found).

Hmm. Got this letter through the door the other day:

Dear Ms Ferrier [sic],

Born before 1958! Your age could save you money on your home insurance.

Let’s face it, you are bombarded with messages promising you cheaper insurance… [etc. etc.]

Quite entertaining that they managed to get both my sex and my age (quite significantly) wrong. I don’t think they’ll be getting my business.

I stayed in London last night, so decided to try something a little different and fly out of London City rather than Heathrow for my upcoming journey to Madrid. I think I’ve decided that this was a mistake. I was staying at R’s in Hammersmith, and the journey to City is much longer than it was in my head. In retrospect, Heathrow would have been much simpler; just a quick trip down the Piccadilly line. The DLR (something Richard has written about before) didn’t help. Only a few years after opening a potentially useful extension to London City, they are already deciding to play the UK rail game and shut it at the weekends for engineering work; a bus was needed. Pathetic.

The journey was tinged by a strange sadness, too. A middle-aged woman who had been sitting opposite me on the Piccadilly line for a few minutes, to all outward appearances entirely normal, suddenly surreptitiously slipped a can of Strongbow out of her (smart leather) handbag and swigged a gulp, then slipped it back in - all as discreetly as possible. Fortunately for me, I’ve never been close to anyone who’s been affected by alcoholism, but it began to dawn on me how strange an addiction it must be to need a drink in such a place - and from such a person. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for her.

NatWest have recently introduced a one-time pad device on their on-line banking system, which I’ve just got my hands on. As someone who travels a lot, it’s going to be an inconvenience to carry around, so I phoned up NatWest to see if I could have it disabled. The chap I spoke to implied it was being introduced by all UK banks in one form or another and wasn’t going to be optional. Does anyone know if this is true? I wonder if they have really thought through the implications for their customers. Online banking is often of the most use when you are away from home, and carrying a physical device seems like a very stone-age method of providing security. Why can’t I choose not to have it?

… find good food in Madrid? I’m obviously doing something wrong.

I’ve been in Madrid for just over a week now. My first mistake was to assume that restaurants would be open when I wanted them. Unfortunately, it appears that the local convention dictates that you don’t eat till about 9pm, so most don’t even open till 8.30pm. It took me a few days to give in and toe the line. The places I was forced into when I ignored this convention were not pretty (a cheap and nasty buffet being one of them). Although I’m now resigned to it, the habit of eating so late really disrupts my sleep (please, no comments about siestas. It’s close to freezing here some nights, and most people work 8am-6pm - with lunch at 3pm).

Even once I’d got the time right, both the quality and variety seem to be surprisingly low for such a major city. Yesterday’s meal, in an unassuming but smart Italian restaurant, was looking promising when I ordered the lasagna. It turned out to be less so when I realised it was microwave-heated: and not all the way through. My Spanish being not up to par, I couldn’t be bothered to complain, but skipped dessert without a second thought.

Tonight’s experience was almost worse. Getting fed up with Italian-based food (it’s easy to find when you’re travelling, but you get bored of pizza and pasta), I wandered into a place with a bit more variety. I fancied rice, but not the risottos available, so went for a chicken curry. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got even less - this time it was stone cold. I had a chat with the waitress and then the chef, and in between their broken English and my attempts at half-sentences containing the word ‘caliente’, I got it heated. I think the implication was that it was meant to be that way. Once hot, it was acceptable, but not much more than coronation chicken.

The best meal I’ve had here so far has been in a cheap down-and-out tapas bar with two Spanish colleagues at lunchtime. The second best was a pizza, but was marred by an embarrassing wine-glass-smashing incident. I think I’ve resolved that I must put aside my fear of speaking Spanish, bring with me a phrase book, and try tapas again for dinner. I’m fed up with everything else.

Amazon have obviously got just as sick of Royal Mail as I have. They now seem to be using the Home Delivery Network instead for large parcels. I’ve just had some network kit delivered - on a Sunday! What’s even more impressive, I picked the cheapest delivery option available.  There’s also online tracking available.

Roll on postal competition.

Sometimes travel produces the strangest combinations of experience. I was upgraded to Club Europe by BA on my flight to Oslo (probably something to do with the AA Gold Card that I was mysteriously sent after returning from San Jose earlier in the year). So as I write this inflight, I’ve just finished an impressively delicious chicken curry, polished off a bottle of red wine (no, not THAT size), and a decent bit of Stilton (which, I might add, goes particularly well with left-over curry sauce - yes, really). I’m listening to Kellie Pickler on my phone-cum-MP3-player with an operating system that barely manages to go a day without rebooting (but it’s OK, I’m gonna upgrade to an E61 soon, which Dave assures me is the bee’s knees). Kellie Pickler, incidentally, is pretty much the equivalent of Gareth Gates - as an American Idol almost-made-it - but the novelty of country music means that the unadventurous style is lost on me, and it evokes pleasant feelings of my trip to California anyway (yes, even California has country music).

All this is an unusual combination, to say the least. I’m checking into the Radisson SAS Plaza downtown later tonight, which Chris assures me (from a trip to Oslo earlier this year) is pretty decent, although sadly the team has to move after tonight as it seems that the whole world has checked into Oslo for this week and all the hotels are full. We have to move 50km away, so maybe I’ll be brave and hire a left-hand-drive MANUAL car. God help me.

Now all I have to do is make the week worth it by helping to impress the IBM customer I’ve come to see with our products. I’m nervous, but excited.

Later update: Hotel is OK, team is very friendly and seems very capable. I’m feeling quite positive about this week. I have discovered that we’re only at the customer till Thursday (rather than the Friday I thought), so I’ll have to find something to do on Friday. Maybe locate the local IBM office, or maybe take the day off. We’ll see.

Oh, and it’s 11:30pm and it’s still almost light outside.