TravelTube.com — Episode Transcript 

Host: Mark Murphy

Intro

Hey folks, Mark Murphy back with TravelTube.com, the travel expert channel — calling all you travel advisors. You're supposed to be the travel experts. If you've got something you want to share about a trip you've recently been on, I'm the guy to email: Mark at TravelTube.com. We'll get online and you can tell me all about it. How's that sound? Sounds good to me — I want to put you front and center.

With that said, all I ask is that you follow us on social media and on your favorite podcast app, and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Today I'm keeping it short and covering three things:

1. Airline pricing — oil is over $100 a barrel, prices are going up and will keep going up through the fall, especially for flying. Book now or get hammered.
2. A way to save money on travel booking using foreign currency and Forex exchanges.
3. Travel influencers — the pros and cons of the space, and why some of them may not have your best interests at heart.

Again, there's no cost to travel advisors — our main audience here. Just support us by signing up for the newsletter and following us on social media and your favorite podcast app. The name is TravelTube.com — you'll see our funky retro logo on screen. Thank you to Nick Chu for coming up with that logo years ago. Shout-out to Nick — my buddy, all-around great guy.

Airline Pricing and the Fall/Holiday Outlook

Given what's going on in the Middle East, we're seeing another spike in oil prices. A few weeks ago I told you airline prices were set to rise 20–25%. Now I think it could go even higher, especially with tensions around Iran potentially shifting, and with midterm elections less than two months away. However that situation resolves, I think we're stuck with much higher fares heading into fall — and holiday travel in particular is going to be expensive.

That's largely due to dynamic pricing and revenue management. When airlines and hotels have a lot of inventory available on a given flight, they drop the price. As seats fill up, the system bumps the price to the next tier, then the next. Business travelers — who tend to book last-minute — end up paying the highest prices.

I've flown plenty of last-minute economy trips, knees up to my chin (I'm 6'2", so economy is rough), because I wasn't about to spend $3,000–$4,000 of my own money on a first-class seat. I'd buy the cheap fare and end up sitting next to someone who booked the same flight, same seat, months in advance — for $380, while I paid $1,600. Same airline, same flight, same seat — I paid five times more. That's the reality of last-minute travel.

So plan ahead, know where you want to go, and shop for the best fares in advance.

Winter travel adds another wrinkle: weather. I always recommend avoiding connections when possible, even if it costs a little more — especially if you're catching a cruise. Book yourself a day or two of buffer before a fixed departure. I've been stuck missing connections because a plane needed de-icing, which delayed departure and blew the connection. Depending on how busy that travel period is, you can get rebooked two days later because every other flight is sold out — which doesn't help if your meeting is the next morning.

My advice for the holidays: if you have flexibility, travel between now and Thanksgiving, or over the Sunday/Monday right after Thanksgiving, or in the three-to-four-week window before Christmas. If none of that works, consider the first couple of weeks of January, after the back-to-school travel rush dies down. Hotels and flights get expensive around all the school-break windows because that's when families travel. Avoid it if you can — but if you're going to travel during peak times regardless, get your bookings done now, because prices only go up from here.

Saving Money: Currency Arbitrage and Booking Tricks

Codeshares: When my mother-in-law wanted to fly to England out of Philadelphia on American, the fare was $1,300–$1,400 in economy. That flight was a codeshare with a foreign carrier (using a hypothetical example — say, TAP Air Portugal). Booking the identical flight, same plane, through the codeshare partner's site was about $600 cheaper than booking direct with American. That's not universal, but it's worth checking.

Currency timing: Look at exchange rates before you book. Japan right now offers a lot of value for U.S. dollars — the yen isn't at an all-time high, but it's favorable. If you're planning a trip to Canada next summer, the Canadian dollar has weakened enough that it takes about $1.40 CAD to equal $1 USD (this fluctuates daily, but it's near a 15-year high). If you convert your U.S. dollars to Canadian dollars now, you lock in that rate for a trip planned 6–12 months out — even though currency could shift by then.

Geo-based pricing: You can also browse incognito and check regional versions of booking sites. If you set your location/flag to a country that's less prosperous than the U.S., some sites price more competitively to win that local business — you might find fares or hotel rates 15–30% cheaper than what you'd see booking as a U.S. visitor on a site like Expedia. For example, comparing a hotel booking in Cancún as a U.S. visitor versus appearing as a Mexican national could turn up a meaningfully better rate. It's not guaranteed, but it's worth testing, especially against currencies like the Mexican peso.

Why you should still use a travel advisor: Many hotels and resorts have rate parity agreements — they don't want to undercut their own website pricing by letting you find it cheaper elsewhere. But travel advisors work around this by partnering with wholesalers (Apple Vacations, Funjet, Classic Vacations, etc.) that package air, transfers, and hotel into one bundled price. Because you can't see the individual hotel cost, and because these wholesalers may be booking hundreds of rooms a night at a property, they have negotiating leverage you'll never get booking direct — and it shows up as a better bundled rate.

Net rates: Advisors also have access to "bed bank" booking engines with net rates — wholesale rates lower than published retail prices, since there needs to be margin for the advisor to earn a commission. Example: a $3,000, five-night all-inclusive stay might have a net cost of $2,000 to the advisor. They might mark it up to $2,600, pocketing a $600 profit while still saving you $400 versus the published rate — a win for both sides. That access to net rates, plus the willingness to shop it properly, is why a good advisor can out-earn a flat commission and still deliver real savings to the client.

Recap on saving money

• Check the Forex rate before a trip and buy foreign currency in advance if the exchange is favorable (Japan, Canada, Mexico, etc. right now).
• Don't carry more than roughly $20,000 USD equivalent in cash across a border — it raises flags with customs. Traveler's checks are one old-school alternative.
• Use a credit card with no foreign transaction fees, especially if booking through a "different country" site.
• Use a travel advisor — and feel free to use AI tools to fact-check their pricing. (I recently saved an extra $1,500 on a car by comparing a dealer's offer against Costco's auto-buying program — same idea applies to travel.)
• Keep in mind AI tools can help you sanity-check a deal, but they don't physically inspect hotels or verify reviews — more on that in an upcoming dedicated episode on AI and travel.

Can You Trust Travel Influencers?

It depends. On TravelTube.com we feature a lot of influencer content, and we vet it before posting. Some influencers do excellent destination overviews — genuinely better than what the Travel Channel used to produce.

But others are chasing free trips — pitching hotel PR teams for comped air, hotel, and transfers in exchange for content. Sometimes that arrangement comes with strings attached. Case in point: on a shoot in Thailand, a government tourism employee shadowed us everywhere, telling us what we could and couldn't film — like being on a chaperoned school trip. My colleague Nick and I eventually ditched our minder in Chiang Mai to shoot a night market on our own terms, and she was furious when she found us.

The bigger red flag: influencers (and even some legacy travel-show hosts) who are relentlessly, uniformly positive — "everything was amazing, incredible, perfect" — with zero criticism. That's usually a sign they're being compensated by the property and steering you accordingly. Mass-market cruise lines get this treatment a lot: an influencer will rave about the specialty steakhouse (which is genuinely hard to get a reservation for) without mentioning that on a true luxury line, that level of dining is available around the clock, included.

Better sources: actual travel advisors. Advisors who tour properties professionally — sometimes 8–10 hotels in a three or four day trip — do walk-throughs, inspect rooms, talk to staff, and eat at each property. And crucially, they get honest, unfiltered feedback from actual clients who've stayed there, since clients have no incentive to sugarcoat a bad experience. That gives advisors a much more reliable picture than any influencer post.

On hotel reviews generally: Take them with a grain of salt.

• Context matters. A five-star Hampton Inn review from someone in a small town is a very different frame of reference than someone who's stayed at luxury properties across 80 countries. Both might rate it "5 stars," but they're not describing the same experience.
• Fake reviews happen. Hotels have been caught paying third parties to write positive reviews about themselves — and sometimes negative reviews about competitors. Some properties even offer guests a coupon (like a free specialty dinner) in exchange for a positive TripAdvisor review, which obviously undermines the review's credibility.
• One-star reviews are often about something unrelated to the actual product — a bad wait-list experience, a rude phone call — rather than the room, food, or service itself. Read past the star rating to see what actually happened.

This all matters more now because AI tools scrape review sites to summarize destinations and properties for you. If the underlying review data is unreliable — padded with fake positive reviews, unfair one-star reviews, or paid content — AI will simply reflect and amplify that same bad data, since it isn't inspecting properties or independently verifying anything itself.

Outro

That's it for today — I've got a beach with my name on it. Sign up for the newsletter, follow us on social media, follow us on your favorite podcast app, and support the people who support you.

Until next time, I'm Mark Murphy, and this is TravelTube.com, the Travel Expert channel.