TRAVELTUBE.COM PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Host: Mark Murphy
Hello folks, Mark Murphy with Traveltube.com, the destination for travel experts. We've been aggregating great content from travel advisors and travel influencers. Anytime we see good content, we want to bring it to bear on Traveltube.com. I also want to interview folks who have just experienced a product, gone on an experience, or been to a new destination to give us the latest updates.
The reason we do that is because these travel advisors and travel influencers are all over the world gathering content and gaining experiences. Even if they're in a place where they're not shooting content, they can share their insights on what they experienced.
This week, I'm going to get into what's happening with breaking news regarding the weather. The weather's going to have a major impact on travel this week, so I'm going to get into that and some of the things you should be doing.
The other thing is what's going on with Minnesota and that unrest, what that means for folks outside the United States who are thinking about coming here, and how that has such a dramatic impact on how the U.S. is viewed. This leads me to media bias and how the media is literally screwing the inbound travel industry, and how the travel industry is almost mute in terms of its response to all this negativity.
In a country of 330 million people, when you have something going on in Minneapolis or areas where you have this ICE activity—folks, it's a big country. I'll get into some parallels we've seen in places like Mexico and other areas of the world, including the entire continent of Africa and what's taken place there going back to Ebola.
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WEATHER DISRUPTIONS AND TRAVEL IMPACT
Let me get into what's going on right now with the weather. I am not a weatherman or meteorologist, but I think people need to be prepared for what's about to hit across the country.
You have a good view of the swath of the storm that's going to come across and impact not only people traveling in this part of the country, but it's going to really wreak havoc if what they're saying is going to happen actually happens. You have to be aware of the other effects that impact travel, even if you're not in the zone that's going to get hit pretty hard.
If you've got a flight planned and you're ready to go somewhere, you'll notice that airlines are proactively canceling flights even if you're in an area that's not directly impacted. So what are your rights as a traveler, and why are they proactively canceling things when we don't even know if it's going to materialize?
How many times have you seen the media hype something like a winter storm and talk about all the cancellations? Your travelers usually call right before the storm hits, which gives you very few options. I may hear from them in the next couple of days as this becomes more prominent. By that time, it's probably going to be a little too late, but we're going to get ahead of it and give you the insights.
DOT REGULATIONS AND AIRLINE POLICIES
One of the reasons you're seeing proactive cancellation of flights is because of Department of Transportation rules. This goes back to the JetBlue incident in February 2011 or 2012, where people got stranded for about eight hours on the tarmac at JFK airport during a snowstorm. They couldn't get back to the gate, and people got stranded on the plane. It was an absolute disaster.
The DOT decided that if you do that as an airline, they're going to fine you $27,500 per passenger. Do the math on that. The average ticket price might be $300 for a domestic fare, but the airline, if they strand you over three hours, can get hit with a $27,500 fine per passenger. That means they're at risk—we're talking millions of people fly every day in the U.S., over 2 million. They're looking at $5 million on average per plane as their liability potentially.
So they'll proactively cancel and rebook people. They'll lose some revenues because they'll lose some flying days, but that's a lot cheaper than getting whacked $5 million per plane should they get stuck in a situation like JetBlue.
They've gotten a little more flexible so they're not just slamming airlines for things completely out of their control. But if the airlines screw up, they've got a massive hit potentially that they're facing.
WHY YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED OUTSIDE THE STORM ZONE
Why do you need to be concerned if you're outside the zone that's going to get hit? They're saying up to 180 million people could be impacted by the storm. I'm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and we're not talking about massive amounts of snow. I'll take the hot summers and the potential for a hurricane in exchange for beautiful weather.
But you have to know what happens when something interrupts travel. Let's say in the Northeast, and you're in San Diego on a beautiful sunny day—you might get some clouds or a little thunderstorm. The problem is, if your flight is coming from Chicago and you're in San Diego but only flying to Phoenix, could you be impacted? Yeah, because if your plane's coming from Chicago and the flight from Chicago can't get off the ground, even though you're only flying from San Diego to Phoenix, you just got screwed.
That's why you want to look at your airline app or any number of other apps out there that will let you see where your flight is, whether it's delayed, and where the plane you're going to be getting on is coming from. Look for "where's my plane" features. It'll show if it's still on the ground in Chicago, and even though your flight is scheduled, if that flight never gets off the ground, you may never arrive in San Diego that day for your trip.
Look at the airline apps, figure out whether you're going to get where you need to go, and understand that if you had a travel advisor, they could proactively look at that and rebook you or make sure you get your refund. Because if they cancel the flight, you're entitled to a refund.
CRUISE TRAVEL CONSIDERATIONS
If you have to get somewhere—let's say you're taking a cruise out of Florida and you're in the Northeast—based on the projections in the Northeast right now, you may find that your flight, even though the weather looks good the day you're supposed to fly, might get canceled because they have to position these planes and they're doing things proactively.
If you're supposed to leave on Saturday on a cruise and it looks like the storm's not going to really get going until later Saturday, are you going to get out? And if you get canceled, what's your backup plan? Could you drive to an airport further north, outside of the zone? Possibly. Will the airline let you do that? Probably. Will the travel advisor be better at finding those solutions than you as a consumer? Absolutely.
TRAVEL ADVISOR QUALITY
Not every travel advisor is the same. Not every travel advisor is great. There are really great ones, really solid ones, and really bad ones. The bad ones tend to be the ones that come from those MLM multi-level marketing groups that sell the dream of "you're going to travel for free, it's going to be wonderful, you're going to have a Mercedes in the driveway."
These people come in, sell their family and friends some trips, never get off the ground literally and metaphorically, and they're out the door. We see that all the time. Those people give the entire industry a black eye because that's what people see—people that are incompetent, that don't know what they're doing, that have had no training.
It's unfortunate, but it's a great moneymaker because they'll sell three, four, or $5,000 worth of travel. They're paying $50-$100 per month or more to be part of these organizations, and they're doing that because they're going to make money on their own personal travels. Then they try to go beyond that to friends, relatives, and community members. They realize it's a lot harder to convince someone to buy something from you when you don't know what you're doing, and then they drop out.
Find somebody that's established, find somebody that's going to do the work for you. If they are new and have a good background—let's say somebody who worked as a teacher or nurse, somebody who knows how to find information and does the work—even if they're not super experienced, if they're connected with a group where they can leverage that knowledge, they're going to be able to deliver for you. Most importantly, should you run into a problem, they're there to back you up.
ALTERNATIVE TRAVEL PLANS
Even if your cruise isn't leaving for two or three days, maybe do a two or three-day drive. If you're in New Jersey, it's about 16-17 hours of driving time to get down here to Fort Lauderdale. If you're going out of Port Everglades, you'll be fine. You could do a couple of cool stops.
If I was doing that trip, I'd probably come down and stop somewhere in the Virginia area. I'd stop again, probably in Georgia—maybe go to Savannah, a beautiful city. Maybe I'd stop in South Carolina at Charleston. Maybe I'd stop again in St. Augustine, and then I'd make the four-hour shot straight down to Port Everglades. But to each their own. If you want to make sure you don't miss your cruise, you've got to be thinking proactively.
IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND TOURISM PERCEPTION
Let's shift gears a little bit. What's going on in Minnesota? You've got these ICE agents flooding in. They're dragging people out of cars and homes. Sometimes they're detaining citizens. It doesn't look good as you watch this in the U.S. or from afar.
What's really going on? Are they just indiscriminately ripping people out of their homes? You can't have an open border and a welfare state. You can't say if people come here, you're going to give them housing, food, and medical treatment for free. If you do that, you're going to have an unbelievable influx. Well, guess what happened? We had an unbelievable influx.
Because of that influx, we now have—depending on who you talk to—at minimum 10-12 million illegal aliens that came in under the last administration, plus the ones already here who have been here for decades in some cases. Some think maybe it's more like 20+ million that came in in just four years.
The mess was created, and ICE is in Minnesota right now trying to clean that up. Why is that happening in places like Minnesota but not in Florida? There's none of this surge of ICE agents in Florida, but it's happening big time in Minnesota. Does the federal government just hate Minnesota? No.
What's happening is that in Florida, local law enforcement coordinates with the federal government. The federal government has supremacy—it's called the Supremacy Clause—over the states. When it comes to immigration, the feds rule the roost. They control the laws and enforcement of immigration.
If it's not happening in Florida and it's happening in Minnesota, why is that? It's happening because in Minnesota and other sanctuary states and jurisdictions, they will not work with federal law enforcement. They will arrest somebody for a horrific crime, charge them, try them, convict them, and send them to prison. In that sanctuary state or city, when that person's sentence is up, they get released back into the community despite the fact that there's a detainer on them to deport them from the federal government.
In Florida, the feds will get a call because there's a detainer on that person, and they will come pick them up.
MEDIA BIAS AND DUE PROCESS
Politicians will go on camera and talk on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, whatever—pick any of them, ABC, NBC, CBS—they all have issues. What they will do is go on and talk about due process.
Here's the process: If you came in seeking asylum and your asylum claim got denied—here's how it works. If you present yourself at a port of entry and claim asylum, we're going to run the process. We're going to see that you're an economic refugee, not one being politically or religiously persecuted. You came from one of 165 countries and came through 12 countries to get here. That's not an asylum claim. That's why over 90% of so-called asylum claims get rejected.
I don't blame people for wanting to come to the United States. I've been to somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 countries. This, in my opinion, having traveled the world, there's no better place to live, no better place to raise a family. But at the same time, you have politicians who will go on television and talk about due process.
That same politician—take any of the current Democrats that have been in Congress for 10, 20, 30 years, these dinosaurs (and they're on both sides, look at Mitch McConnell)—they will say the exact opposite of what they said 20 years ago, 15 years ago. And nobody in the media calls them out.
If you are going to interview somebody that has the opposite stance because they don't like the guy currently in charge versus what they stood for as little as 15 or 12 years ago, call them out. Run the video of them talking about how we can't just have an influx of illegal immigrants and we've got to enforce our borders.
RECENT NEWS STORIES AND MISINFORMATION
There have been two stories in the last 24-48 hours getting everybody worked up. They saw a man, around 60 years old, a Hmong man, being dragged out of his house in his underwear with a blanket on. People said they went in and ripped him out, and he's an actual American citizen.
What's the real story? They were there because there were two known sexual predators who were illegal aliens that they needed to arrest. If Minnesota had done their job and handed these people over to ICE, they never would have had to go to this house. But the guy in that house had two sexual predators living in the same house. So yeah, they removed them from the house. They are still looking for those sexual predators. Those people were in that house staying there, living there.
Another story: parents got out of the car and left their kids in the car. The car did have tear gas, but they weren't just driving back from a basketball game. They were there to protest and disrupt law enforcement. What idiot takes their children to a mass protest where there's tear gas and people blocking traffic?
Then what do they do? They go out and get a GoFundMe going, raise a bunch of money on a false story, and then we find out the story's all fabricated. It's literally another grift, another scam, just like we've seen with the whole Somali daycare thing, with these transportation companies, with hospice services.
Some people are saying on the financial side that if we could just get rid of all this fraud, we wouldn't be running any deficits. I'm beginning to think as more of this gets uncovered, they are probably right. Your politicians on the right and left are complicit in it, not just at the local level but at the national level.
TRAVEL NEWS VS. TRAVEL INFORMATION
This brings me to: what is travel news? Travel news is one of two things. It's either really bad news—plane crashes, cruise ship sinks, norovirus outbreak, somebody died on a trip—or it's just fluff, informational stuff.
There's nothing wrong with the informational stuff because it's things like a property got renovated, a new hotel is opening, a cruise ship is going into dry dock to be refurbished. They're going to cut the ship in half and expand it, dropping in a middle piece to bring in more cabins. They actually do this—they can cut a cruise ship down the middle, open it up, and drop in another piece they've prefabbed and connect it all up, which is absolutely incredible.
What's interesting about travel news is you don't really get a lot of good information. Let me look at USA Today's travel section. They claim to be really great at covering travel stuff.
Travel news from January 21st—yesterday, they have no fresh news. They've got "Jamaica Travel Advisory Reduced to Level Two: What Visitors Should Know." That's news, not really earth-shattering because there's always a travel warning with Jamaica because parts of Jamaica are dangerous, just like there's always a travel warning for Mexico.
If you worked with a travel advisor, what you would know is: if you go to Jamaica, you're staying in an all-inclusive 99% of the time. They have security, you're getting picked up at the airport and delivered directly to your property. You don't leave your property for the most part unless you're doing an excursion to Duns River Falls or whatever. You're going to have a great vacation and support a destination that got hit really hard with a hurricane several months ago.
Most of the stories are like "Pack Light for Stress-Free Flights"—is that news? "Are Overhead Bins Okay for Backpackers: What Light Packers Should Know"—it's a how-to thing, not news. "Does It Matter What Day of the Week You Fly?"—that's the kind of story you see all the time.
Then you get an actual news story: United Airlines flight makes hard landing in Orlando. That's what's going to get the clicks because people see "hard landing." Universal Orlando is getting a new Fast and Furious coaster—this is like a press release. They're getting a new coaster, and people will be interested in that.
Then there's "See Why Greenland Is Amazing in These 14 Spectacular Scenes." Why are they doing a story about Greenland? It's January. Who's going to Greenland in January? Nobody. So why did they do the story? They did the story because Greenland is trending. This is what journalists do. They go on Twitter, see "Oh, Greenland," and come up with "Here are the 14 best things to see in Greenland."
Many times they'll create a slideshow because as you click through to see the next beautiful photo, they're serving ads. In this case, they did a scrollable story serving ads repeatedly. That's how they make money. It's about advertising. This isn't news, it's just information.
HISTORICAL EXAMPLES: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC AND EGYPT
Let me give you examples of how media coverage impacts tourism. I went to Egypt about seven or eight months after Tahrir Square, when the whole country looked like it was on fire. People basically canceled their trips, which were really amazing experiences because of the history there. They destroyed the country's tourism industry because they rely on tourism.
Can you say the Dominican Republic? They rely heavily on tourism. What happened? Fake news stories about people dying from drinking alcohol. I won't get into all the details, but it was complete fabrication. However, once one outlet runs that story—CNN or Fox or whoever—they run it, all the keyboard journalists see it's trending, they jump in and do follow-up stories, and they start piling on that people are dying in the Dominican Republic because of tainted alcohol.
Never happened. Complete fabrication. It destroyed that industry for over 12 months in the Dominican Republic. For all the bleeding hearts out there who say we have to help these people—think about the Dominican Republic's story.
Any journalist worth their salt would ask: how does somebody go into property A owned by a Mexican hotel chain three hours away from property B owned by a Spanish hotel chain two hours away from a Dominican-owned hotel, and have these disparate incidents happen? People do die on vacation. People have medical emergencies. But how could they connect all of them up in some grand conspiracy that only targets Americans?
It was like this stealth killer that could infiltrate a minibar in three different places, hours apart with different employees and different suppliers, bringing in "dangerous tainted alcohol" that's actually sealed and produced—bourbon in Kentucky, sealed, put in a case, sent down to a resort in the Dominican Republic. And somehow that killed someone. But at the same time, other properties owned by other people, staffed by other employees, hours apart, tactically did the same thing? You can't make it up.
It's unfortunate, but they ran with that, destroying the entire industry.
CLOSING ADVICE
To wrap up: if you've got a plan to be on a cruise, call your travel advisor. If you booked it yourself, do it yourself—and I don't envy you. Figure out what's going on, figure out what your backup options are, get out of Dodge fast if you can. Take a couple extra days off work, drive down if it makes more sense.
If you're going to drive down, look at one-way rentals and how they look in terms of price and drop-off, then figure out whether that makes sense or if you're going to just use your own car and do the round-trip drive. Make sure you don't miss your cruise because if you booked your own airfare and your own cruise, it's on you if the ship leaves without you.
If you use a travel advisor who booked your flight with the flight team at the cruise line, then that cruise line will get you on your way to the next port where the ship's going to be, and you can catch up. But again, your travel is going to be disrupted.
That's why it's important to have travel insurance. That's why it's important to make sure there's trip interruption coverage. If it turns out you have to cancel that trip, make sure you have what's called cancel-for-any-reason insurance. Travel advisors deal with this on a daily basis. They work directly with insurance companies. They know the ins and outs of the policy. Make sure you are covered every way possible. Hopefully you'll never need it, but if you do, you're going to want to have that coverage that protects you.
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