We've been figuring out what to do with spring break week, the week for which I still hold four spots on Intrepid Travel's Egypt Adventure trip and four tickets on Delta's flight 84 to Cairo. Cancellation gymnastics to begin in earnest on that tomorrow; I'm waiting for Intrepid to cancel our departure. They've canceled all Egypt trips through the day before our departure and will decide on ours tomorrow, using the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade travel advisory status as a guide. As long as Egypt remains on the department's "Do Not Travel" list, Intrepid will cancel our departure (I hope). I'm waiting for Intrepid to cancel us because that will make it a little easier to recoup our money: Intrepid will give us a refund for the land portion, and I'll just have to battle the insurance company over the airline tickets.
Mike's decided to take the planned vacation week and stay home and work. Adam's going to head to our New Hampshire place for some snowboarding. Dana and I have invited ourselves to Orlando to my parents' rental condo in the Villas at Seven Dwarfs Lane. Talk about plans doing a 180: from revolution in the Middle East to sunning in a gated community named for Disney characters.
I've been bouncing around Kayak, Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz trying to find the best flights to and from Orlando, and it's been a piece of work. I don't want to pay top dollar, but I want nonstops and convenient departure and arrival times on both ends. Trying to get these pieces to fit has been difficult. Until now.
I just found Hipmunk, a website that lets you sort flights by various categories, including "agony." This is just what I've been looking for. Hipmunk measures the agony factor of flights by considering price, duration and number of stops. And it displays search results on a spreadsheet that gives you an easy, intuitive view of how flights compare.
When you find flights with the degree of agony that's right for you, you can click through to Orbitz to buy your tickets. Hipmunk is genius and is my new go-to flight search site. Even if you're not going anywhere, Hipmunk's fun to play with.
www.LoriHein.com
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
February 09, 2011
February 02, 2011
Out of Egypt, again
I apologize for not posting in the past week or so. I've been glued to CNN and Al Jazeera. We have tickets to Egypt, and our intended departure date is February 25. Obviously we're not going -- again. Those who follow this blog know I had to cancel our summer trip to Egypt because I broke my foot and also know I had a bear of a time collecting from Nationwide, the insurance company from which I bought trip cancellation insurance. Click on "Egypt" in the "Where Do You Want To Go?" sidebar on the right to read posts about our original non-trip to Egypt.
I'll soon get to work retrieving our money for this second non-trip to Egypt. I'm eating Wheaties to fortify myself for the task, which I expect will sap a ton of time and energy. But I will, eventually, get my money back, as I followed the advice I gave in my earlier Egypt posts: I bought travel insurance.
This time I opted for a policy from M.H. Ross, again purchased through the excellent online agency InsureMyTrip.com , and I paid a little extra for additional coverage for "cancellation for any reason." I must have felt something in my bones, because, had I not purchased this extra bit of protection, my trip cancellation coverage would not have covered us for this cancellation. Terrorism is covered; civil unrest is not. I'll invoke the "for any reason" clause when I submit my claim.
I'll also have to return the several hundred dollars' worth of Egyptian pounds that I bought from Travelex. I always get some paper currency before I land in a country so I'm self-sufficient upon landing, should banks, foreign exchanges and/or ATMs be closed or hard to find. Having a small stash of local cash gives me power and peace of mind.
I'll get to Egypt some day. It's just not in the cards right now. I'll watch the momentous, history-making developments from here in Boston, on my TV and computer screens, and I'll root for the Egyptian people.
My sister Lisa sent me an email last night:
Hi Lor,
I'll soon get to work retrieving our money for this second non-trip to Egypt. I'm eating Wheaties to fortify myself for the task, which I expect will sap a ton of time and energy. But I will, eventually, get my money back, as I followed the advice I gave in my earlier Egypt posts: I bought travel insurance.
This time I opted for a policy from M.H. Ross, again purchased through the excellent online agency InsureMyTrip.com , and I paid a little extra for additional coverage for "cancellation for any reason." I must have felt something in my bones, because, had I not purchased this extra bit of protection, my trip cancellation coverage would not have covered us for this cancellation. Terrorism is covered; civil unrest is not. I'll invoke the "for any reason" clause when I submit my claim.
I'll also have to return the several hundred dollars' worth of Egyptian pounds that I bought from Travelex. I always get some paper currency before I land in a country so I'm self-sufficient upon landing, should banks, foreign exchanges and/or ATMs be closed or hard to find. Having a small stash of local cash gives me power and peace of mind.
I'll get to Egypt some day. It's just not in the cards right now. I'll watch the momentous, history-making developments from here in Boston, on my TV and computer screens, and I'll root for the Egyptian people.
My sister Lisa sent me an email last night:
Hi Lor,
Although the prospects for your trip to Egypt aren't looking too promising right now, isn't it just absolutely thrilling that for the first time ever, the Egyptian people are speaking out, having a voice and mobilizing towards democracy in a peaceful manner. Just incredible. When you do get there, it may very well be a happier people you will see.
July 19, 2010
Dead Sea, Red Sea: My feet in pictures
"So, if you'd gone on your Egypt trip where would you be today?" asked Linda in my yoga class."Let's see..." I played the itinerary through in my head. "I think we'd be on the Sinai peninsula, camping on the beach at the Red Sea."
"Wow."
It did sound exotic, even more so when I said, "I've been to the Red Sea before."
"Did you float on top of it?"
"That's the Dead Sea. I've been there, too."
"Did you float on top of that?"
"No. I was on the Jordanian side, so I was all covered up in a long skirt and a tunic."
I did dip my toes in the Dead Sea at a public picnic area that sat off the road that rims the sea. I took a picture of my feet, and long skirt, in the salty froth.
My feet figured big in the pix from my trip to Jordan. Feet at the Dead Sea, feet at the Red Sea.
My Red Sea feet, sans long skirt and tunic, are propped on a chaise on the private beach of the Radisson resort in Aqaba. I'd paid good money to be able to dispense with the long skirt and tunic while a guest at the property, so I took full advantage and sat outside in my bathing suit.
It was rather extraordinary sitting there on that beach because I could see four countries at once.
I was sitting in Jordan; to my right and slightly behind me was Eilat, Israel; to my right and slightly ahead lay the Sinai desert in Egypt; to my left sat Saudi Arabia.
At night I stood on my balcony to look again at the four countries. In the blazing haze of day, they'd all looked about the same. In the dark, they looked very different, and you could tell exactly where the borders were by the amount of electricity in use, or not.
Eilat was ablaze with lights from cafes, restaurants, discos, beachfront apartment complexes and seaside homes that marched up the hills fronting the sea. Eilat was chic, highrise heaven so its lights had altitude. Aqaba, where I sat, was the next-best illuminated, with just enough lights to keep the modest beach resort from being completely dead after dark. Saudi Arabia was bathed in intermittent, muted pink and green lights that hung on sparse, low buildings. In Egypt, there was a concentrated splash of light at Taba, a dive town, but after that, away into the Sinai, nothing but black. Had my eyesight been better perhaps I would have seen the distant glow of a Bedouin campfire.
(And, I promised to keep you posted on my trip cancellation insurance claim. I'm happy to report that Nationwide/TruTravel came through. I got my check today. I now feel comfortable recommending InsureMyTrip.com as a source for travel insurance products. Nationwide took its time, but I got my money.)
www.LoriHein.com
June 14, 2010
Egypt: Anatomy of a cancellation
Well, the Egypt trip is off. While my ankle sprain and foot fractures might heal enough to allow slight weight-bearing by the time of our intended departure, the trip is long and rugged, and I doubt I could fully participate. Arduous walking, self-portering of packs, sleeping on trains, boats, lean-tos and mud huts just don't seem doable to me right now.
I made the decision to cancel when I visualized the climb of 7,000-foot Mount Sinai to see the sun set, then the descent in darkness. Even if the foot were up to it, I couldn't shake the image of me respraining the compromised ankle at about 5,000 feet above the Sinai desert. That would be mighty inconvenient, not only for me, but for Dana and the other 10 folks booked on this trip.
Egypt's been there for millenia; it'll be there when I'm fully healed.
Which puts me in the position of having to cancel the trip -- land and air portions for two travelers -- and recouping the thousands of dollars I've doled out.
I have three parties to deal with: Intrepid Travel, the company supplying the land tour; Egypt Air, via Orbitz, through which I purchased the air tickets; Nationwide, my travel insurance company. Here's how it's working out so far.
This will be a bit long: getting one's money back requires some time and planning, and to keep some of you from getting burned in the future, I'd like to share what I've learned and/or confirmed in the last few days about protecting yourself should you have to walk away (in my case, hobble away) from an expensive trip.
First, Intrepid Travel has been excellent to deal with. I've had multiple email communications with a few staffers at the Boulder, Colorado office in the past few months, and when it came to canceling, there was no hassle and no push-back. We had one day of electronic back-and-forth because of a miscommunication about whether I was canceling just my trip, or Dana's as well (yes to that), but the correct refund amount was processed swiftly thereafter.
The correct refund amount was 50% of what I'd paid Intrepid, as I canceled 31 days prior to departure. Had I canceled less than 30 days prior to departure, I would have received no refund from Intrepid. This is spelled out in the booking terms. When booking a tour, always read the fine print and make sure you understand the cancellation terms. The fact that anything can happen and that it can happen both more and less than 30 days before your dream vacation led me to buy a travel insurance policy that covers cancellation so I'd get back anything I didn't get back from Intrepid. More on that in a minute.
Next, the plane tickets. First, I always buy refundable tickets. They usually cost a bit more -- in this case the refundable roundtrip from New York to Cairo was about 30 bucks more per ticket than the non-refundable version -- but a non-refundable ticket seems to me like a sword of Damocles waiting to drop and slice through your bank account. Sure, many non-refundable tickets let you use the value of the ticket for another flight, usually within a year, but betting that both Dana and I (the tickets are almost always non-transferable) would be able to sync our schedules and go to Egypt within a defined 12-month period with the clock already ticking was a wager I wasn't willing to take.
Like tour company cancellation terms, always check the fare rules of your air tickets to see what's allowed and at what price should you need to change or cancel your ticket. For me, refundable is the only way to go, especially if the ticket is expensive and/or is for passage on an unusual carrier to an unusual destination and not easily reused should your plans change.
I bought the tickets through Orbitz, which allows online cancellation with a few clicks -- but not of refundable tickets. To cancel those you have to make a toll-free phone call. I chatted first with customer service rep Yvette. I had the fare rules screen for my tickets in front of me as we talked. She confirmed that my tickets were refundable, with just a $100.00 per ticket cancellation fee and said she'd send me an email confirming my refund.
The email quoted a refund amount that was short by $1600.00. The email was, of course, from a "do not reply" e-mailbox. Just the thought of dialing again and speaking to someone who would surely not be Yvette to re-explain myself and plow through the errors in Yvette's work exhausted me, so I turned to the "Live Chat" customer service option on the Orbitz website and found myself typing with Sophia.
It took a while -- I drank multiple cups of coffee, read the mail and folded the laundry while Sophia investigated my case -- but eventually Sophia typed me the happy news that I was right, Yvette was wrong, and the full price of the two tickets less the $100.00 cancellation fee per ticket would be refunded to my credit card. I asked for an email confirming the amount, which I received within five minutes. I'm happy with Orbitz. (But Yvette needs retraining, or a math skills refresher course.)
So, I have my 50% from Intrepid and everything except 200 bucks from Egypt Air.
To get the other 50% and the 200 bucks, I now have to turn to the trip cancellation coverage I bought from Nationwide, through the online agent, InsureMyTrip.com.
According to my policy details, as long as I provide medical documentation and a letter from my physician stating that it is medically "inadvisable" for me to take my trip, Nationwide should reimburse me the missing money, down to the penny.
I'm preparing my claim package, complete with x-rays and a "she can't go" letter on my orthodpedist's letterhead. I hope this goes smoothly, and I'll let you know, one way or the other.
Read cancellation terms; buy refundable tickets; get cancellation insurance.
Then, have a nice trip.
www.LoriHein.com
I made the decision to cancel when I visualized the climb of 7,000-foot Mount Sinai to see the sun set, then the descent in darkness. Even if the foot were up to it, I couldn't shake the image of me respraining the compromised ankle at about 5,000 feet above the Sinai desert. That would be mighty inconvenient, not only for me, but for Dana and the other 10 folks booked on this trip.
Egypt's been there for millenia; it'll be there when I'm fully healed.
Which puts me in the position of having to cancel the trip -- land and air portions for two travelers -- and recouping the thousands of dollars I've doled out.
I have three parties to deal with: Intrepid Travel, the company supplying the land tour; Egypt Air, via Orbitz, through which I purchased the air tickets; Nationwide, my travel insurance company. Here's how it's working out so far.
This will be a bit long: getting one's money back requires some time and planning, and to keep some of you from getting burned in the future, I'd like to share what I've learned and/or confirmed in the last few days about protecting yourself should you have to walk away (in my case, hobble away) from an expensive trip.
First, Intrepid Travel has been excellent to deal with. I've had multiple email communications with a few staffers at the Boulder, Colorado office in the past few months, and when it came to canceling, there was no hassle and no push-back. We had one day of electronic back-and-forth because of a miscommunication about whether I was canceling just my trip, or Dana's as well (yes to that), but the correct refund amount was processed swiftly thereafter.
The correct refund amount was 50% of what I'd paid Intrepid, as I canceled 31 days prior to departure. Had I canceled less than 30 days prior to departure, I would have received no refund from Intrepid. This is spelled out in the booking terms. When booking a tour, always read the fine print and make sure you understand the cancellation terms. The fact that anything can happen and that it can happen both more and less than 30 days before your dream vacation led me to buy a travel insurance policy that covers cancellation so I'd get back anything I didn't get back from Intrepid. More on that in a minute.
Next, the plane tickets. First, I always buy refundable tickets. They usually cost a bit more -- in this case the refundable roundtrip from New York to Cairo was about 30 bucks more per ticket than the non-refundable version -- but a non-refundable ticket seems to me like a sword of Damocles waiting to drop and slice through your bank account. Sure, many non-refundable tickets let you use the value of the ticket for another flight, usually within a year, but betting that both Dana and I (the tickets are almost always non-transferable) would be able to sync our schedules and go to Egypt within a defined 12-month period with the clock already ticking was a wager I wasn't willing to take.
Like tour company cancellation terms, always check the fare rules of your air tickets to see what's allowed and at what price should you need to change or cancel your ticket. For me, refundable is the only way to go, especially if the ticket is expensive and/or is for passage on an unusual carrier to an unusual destination and not easily reused should your plans change.
I bought the tickets through Orbitz, which allows online cancellation with a few clicks -- but not of refundable tickets. To cancel those you have to make a toll-free phone call. I chatted first with customer service rep Yvette. I had the fare rules screen for my tickets in front of me as we talked. She confirmed that my tickets were refundable, with just a $100.00 per ticket cancellation fee and said she'd send me an email confirming my refund.
The email quoted a refund amount that was short by $1600.00. The email was, of course, from a "do not reply" e-mailbox. Just the thought of dialing again and speaking to someone who would surely not be Yvette to re-explain myself and plow through the errors in Yvette's work exhausted me, so I turned to the "Live Chat" customer service option on the Orbitz website and found myself typing with Sophia.
It took a while -- I drank multiple cups of coffee, read the mail and folded the laundry while Sophia investigated my case -- but eventually Sophia typed me the happy news that I was right, Yvette was wrong, and the full price of the two tickets less the $100.00 cancellation fee per ticket would be refunded to my credit card. I asked for an email confirming the amount, which I received within five minutes. I'm happy with Orbitz. (But Yvette needs retraining, or a math skills refresher course.)
So, I have my 50% from Intrepid and everything except 200 bucks from Egypt Air.
To get the other 50% and the 200 bucks, I now have to turn to the trip cancellation coverage I bought from Nationwide, through the online agent, InsureMyTrip.com.
According to my policy details, as long as I provide medical documentation and a letter from my physician stating that it is medically "inadvisable" for me to take my trip, Nationwide should reimburse me the missing money, down to the penny.
I'm preparing my claim package, complete with x-rays and a "she can't go" letter on my orthodpedist's letterhead. I hope this goes smoothly, and I'll let you know, one way or the other.
Read cancellation terms; buy refundable tickets; get cancellation insurance.
Then, have a nice trip.
www.LoriHein.com
May 05, 2010
Pack like an Egyptian
I'm officially in pre-trip planning mode.
In July, Dana and I are taking a three-week, no-frills tour of Egypt with Intrepid Travel. It's a low-budget trip that will take us and 10 others a bit off the beaten path, and I've got to get the packing just right. While traveling light and carrying everything on our backs, we have to have gear and clothing for such things as 105-degree weather, blazing Sinai sun, 3-star hotels with no air conditioning, conservative female dress, a few funky overnight arrangements and an after-dark descent of a 7,500-foot mountain. We're not checking into any Marriotts.
First, I'm packing an insurance policy. I found a great website, InsureMyTrip.com, that offers an array of travel insurance products displayed to make comparison a cinch. I bought a policy that has your standard medical, cancellation and lost luggage components and also covers emergency evacuation and repatriation. In fact, Intrepid requires such coverage. Seems like a good idea to me.
Tomorrow I'll shop online for sleep sacks, also known as sleeping bag liners, because we'll be bunking down in some weird places, and I think we'll be glad to have clean cocoons to crawl into. I've been reading sleep sack reviews, and most of them suggest going for silk sacks rather than cotton, because they're stronger. I don't know... We're going to Egypt, land of cotton. Egyptians live in cotton, and my gut tells me to take my cue from them. When in Egypt, do as the Egyptians do, right? Right. I just convinced myself: cotton it is.
We'll spread our sacks, which fold into little pouches when not in use, in such places as Cairo's Hotel Pharaohs, which gets pretty low marks for cleanliness from TripAdvisor reviewers; overnight trains between Cairo, Aswan and Luxor; the deck of a toilet-less felucca (giant sailboat) on the Nile; the home of a Nubian family in Upper (southern) Egypt; and, on the Red Sea, a beach hut made of palm trees with a mattress on the floor and a mosquito net.
Our itinerary also includes a late afternoon climb up the Biblical Mount Sinai to watch the sun set, after which we descend Moses's mountain in the dark.
I don't expect to encounter any burning bushes on the way down, so we'll be packing our own torches. Sturdy, rubber-soled shoes and headlamps will help ensure that we don't have to pull out that emergency medical evacuation policy.
www.LoriHein.com
January 01, 2010
Arabic by osmosis
If I don't already speak the native language of a place to which I'm planning to travel -- I speak passable French, German and Spanish and can cover a lot of territory with those -- I try to learn some key words and phrases in the destination's language before I go.
Knowing a few words and making an attempt at communication in your hosts' native tongue is not only practical, it's polite. Greeting or thanking someone in his own language shows respect and breaks barriers.
A simple namaste in Kathmandu, merhaba in Istanbul or spasiba in St. Petersburg instantly advances the cause of international relations. That I don't understand the torrent of speech that often spills from whomever I've just greeted or thanked doesn't matter at all. I do understand the grins and smiley head-nodding. I've made a friend -- by uttering a single word in a language other than English.
I have seven months to learn some Arabic. Dana and I are going on a low-budget Intrepid Travel tour to Egypt in July. We'll be gone three weeks and will see a lot of the country. (I'd originally signed us up for a month-long overland tour of Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, but the State Department recently put Mali on its travel advisory list due to Al Qaeda sympaticos operating in the Timbuktu area. Intrepid changed its itinerary in response and eliminated Timbuktu, but Mali without Timbuktu is like Peru without Macchu Pichu, so switching trips seemed a good move.)
Learning Arabic means tackling the Arabic alphabet. I can learn words by studying phonetic transliterations, but it's nice to be able to decipher something of the print -- road signs, transport timetables, menus, billboards, newspapers, placards on restrooms that tell you what sex should enter which door -- that you encounter as soon as you land in a country.
Like I did pre-trip with the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, I'll tape the Arabic alphabet to my fridge, the mirror over the bathroom sink, the dashboard of my car and other oft-stared at places around my home so I can take advantage of seven months of osmosis.
Right now, those elegant curves, curls and lines all look the same to me. I have seven months to learn their unique identities.
www.LoriHein.com
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