TravelCommons

Thanksgiving travel volume shows how far things have fallen; we dig into digital vaccine passports; tracing my travel genealogy, is road warrior-ism hereditary?

Top 10 gift ideas for pandemic travelers; year-end status offers from airlines, hotels, and travel credit cards; work-from-hotel offerings; latest hotel reservation system data breach.

Eating local in South Philly and the UP; FBI cybersecurity warning on working from hotels; ‘flight shaming’ gives way to ‘flights to nowhere’; signaling concern about COVID does nothing but hassles travelers

Spent a week in Michigan's Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of TripIt data. We wrap up talking to Matt Schulz of LendingTree, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use?

Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What's worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with Emily Thomas about her new book "The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad".

My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn't bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz's new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return

I broke Chicago's containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz's bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage

Though I'm still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. We talk about what people will need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel - spacing in aircraft, and putting a higher priority on travel insurance and finding medical attention.

Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don’t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now.

Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled.