Travel Channel show host Samantha Brown doled out some travel advice in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, and I thought this simple observation about language barriers was particularly astute: Americans’ tendency to ask “Do you speak English?” with little introduction when they’re overseas, puts distance between them and their hosts. 

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“Most of us are stuck in economy class, but not all of us stay there,” writes Christopher Elliott this week. “How do people snag upgrades? Well, one of the secrets of frequent travelers is to look the part....I’ve spoken with several airline folks who have admitted they’ll pick someone who looks like he belongs in the forward cabin.” In other words, this guy probably isn’t getting the nod.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Really Cool, Well-Traveled’ John Flinn on the Dorky Zip-Off Pant
* In Thailand, Pink is the New Black

Photo by crucially via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Herewith: World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

It starts today: Thanksgiving travel madness. An estimated 27 million people are expected to fly between now and Nov. 27—up 4 percent from last year. Military air space has been temporarily opened to ease congestion, but it’s going to get ugly out there. What to do?

1) Ship your luggage using a courier service and print your boarding pass at home. Then avoid the airport’s departure level. “When getting to the airport (especially for a morning flight), don’t go to the departure level. It will be a zoo. Besides, you have no baggage to check and you already have your boarding pass. Instead, skip the car and people traffic and head for the arrivals level. In the early morning, no one is there. Then take the escalator upstairs and go through security to your gate.” (Peter Greenberg, MSNBC)

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

Rick Steves suggests saving time and money by washing laundry in your hotel sink. Fair enough—but while DIY laundry certainly isn’t rocket science, there are a few more things you can do to help make your travel clothes laundromat-fresh.

1) Pack a laundry kit. “Pack the following items in a re-sealable plastic bag or small cosmetic bag: Small travel bottle (with a pull-top lid) filled with your favorite formula of liquid detergent or hand wash detergent (for delicate items). Sturdy plastic knife (since many airlines now restrict such items, alternatives may include a hotel card key, laminated video rental card or any other sturdy card). Portable clothesline (two trees or the shower walls or hotel balcony make the perfect place to hang a line). Portable drain cover or access to a small bucket/dishpan. (If you’re camping you have probably packed this already. The hotel ice bucket works as well.)”—Frank’s Laundromat

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

1) Always back up your files. “Do a regular backup so if something bad does happen, you don’t lose too much data. The easiest way to do this is to buy a laptop with a built in DVD burner. One DVD disc should be more than enough to store your work data. You could also use a CD burner, but you would probably need to carry multiple discs. If you only have a small amount of files you need to backup, a USB flash drive would also do the job.”—Laptop Lifestyle

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

For professional dancers, Mark Morris Dance Group member David Leventhal writes in the New York Times, “air travel is a bitter enemy.” Their jobs require movement, and being on a long flight means feeling “like caged tigers.”

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

1) Play the odds. “Travelers can minimize the risks by choosing islands like Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao or Trinidad and Tobago, all located so far south that they are rarely hit by major storms.”—The Washington Post

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

1) Take an early flight to minimize your risk of a delay. “[G]round delays are especially risky. That’s because pilots aren’t required to turn on the air supply until the plane is airborne. ‘As a result, everybody is basically recycling everybody else’s air,’ says Vance Fowler, M.D., assistant professor of infectious disease at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. A dramatic example of how rapidly illness can spread during a ground delay occurred in 1979, when a planeload of passengers in Homer, Alaska, was kept waiting for three hours. Almost 75 percent caught the flu, most likely from just one person.”—Self magazine

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

1) Eat seasonally. “Germans go crazy for white asparagus. Italians lap up porcini mushrooms. And Spaniards gobble their snails (caracoles)—but only when waiters announce that they’re fresh today. You’ll get more taste for less money throughout Europe by ordering what’s in season.”—Rick Steves.

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There’s more bad news for those of us who like to stretch our legs on transatlantic flights. New York Times Practical Traveler writer Michelle Higgins notes that Delta Airlines is among the latest carriers to start using narrow Boeing 757s for flights between the U.S. and Europe.

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Travel tips are easy to find on the Internet, but some are better than others. Each week, we’ll bring you World Hum-approved travel tips from around the Web.

1) Photograph where you park at the airport. Or even the address and location of your hotel or hostel, so if you can’t find your way home you can show a cabbie. “Instead of jotting your parking location on a scrap of paper, which can get misplaced, take a picture of the parking location sign with your camera phone or digital camera.”—Joanne Grisham, Executive Assistant, Dallas/Fort Worth, from American Airlines Employee Travel Tips.

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Wall Street Journal travel writer Stan Sesser, a man with 40-plus years experience on the road, says that’s the key to escaping what he calls the “tourist bubble.” “When conventional wisdom tells you to do A, consider doing B,” he writes. “In practice, this might be something as simple as eating food from a street vendor or as heart-stopping as going to a country when everyone else is fleeing it. Counterintuitive thinking inevitably gets me out of the bubble, and even though it might provoke some anxiety, it usually works out fine.”

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