Spendthrift Shoestring

Five European Low-Cost Air Predictions for 2008

Facts and route information about Europe's biggest low-cost carriers are easy to master; the business of Europe's budget airlines remains more opaque and difficult to predict—for me at least. So take the following with a grain of salt. If nothing else, these predictions will be interesting to return to in 12 months.

1. EasyJet will continue to thrive. The airline is moving from strength to strength, and is even employing the competitive, bravado-based strategy more commonly displayed by their arch rival Ryanair. EasyJet's purchase of GB Airlines earlier this year means that the airline will be operating just under a quarter of all routes in and out of Gatwick by the spring.

2. There will be one big consolidation. Will it involve Vueling, which suffered resignations and a lowered Goldman Sachs rating in the fall? Will it be SkyEurope that falls? The Slovak airline is selling planes but increasing revenue. Or will it be another airline altogether?

3. Eastern European routes will continue to boom. Ryanair's recent addition of Constanta is the latest sign. EasyJet flies routes to Bucharest, Sofia, and Istanbul, and SkyEurope flies to Timisoara, Bucharest, Sofia, Varna, and Bourgas. Romania and Bulgaria will see more budget air traffic, in particular to destinations in Italy and Spain. Moldova and Ukraine have barely been tapped—among budget airlines, only On Air flies to Ukraine, and only Meridiana schedules flights to Moldova. Both countries will see more budget air routes relatively soon, though possibly not within the next year.

4. There will be more destinations beyond Europe served by European LCCs. Ryanair will probably begin to fly to Tel Aviv.

5. Flyforbeans will finally launch, with the quirkiest route map around. (Ok, this last one is complete guesswork.)

Hotel Julamis, Mérida

I waited until the last minute to make a Mérida hotel reservation. When I finally got around to sending out emails, I received lots of disappointing no vacancy responses. After what seemed like an eternity, my onslaught of email queries yielded Hotel Julamis, a guesthouse in the city's historical center, with availability for six of the seven nights I was due to be in Mérida.

My hardcore budgeteer side was thrilled by the $25 nightly rate, single or double. This nightly rate was appealing, if seemingly incredible. I figured that in the case of a true disaster I could crash with a family member in town for the week.

It turns out that Julamis is a complete gem. The hotel is decorated simply, even sparsely, though carefully and well. It's got a lush courtyard full of plants and shade. Common spaces are decorated by paintings done by one of the proprietors. There are lounging areas, a hammock, and a single computer terminal that can be used for just 12 pesos ($1.10) per hour. A candle is lighted in a mid-stairwell basket at dusk. And a friendly dog and cat keep court.

All rooms are ensuite, cozy and very simple. There are no televisions and air conditioning is available in only one room (at a significant surcharge of $35/night.) The nightly rate comes with breakfast, which consists of toast with jam, corn flakes, a bowl of fruit, and coffee. 

But what makes Julamis so wonderful is not (just) the nightly rate, the friendly house dog, the slices of papaya at breakfast, or the hammock. It's the mood of the place. For this the proprietors of Julamis have to be credited. On Christmas night, they served a massive Cuban/American Christmas dinner for guests, friends, and neighbors. There were early evening tequila shots, too, and breakfast time daytrip suggestions throughout.

Julamis opened officially in November. As it offers few traditional amenities, it's not for everyone. But for travelers looking for a basic guesthouse that is also very friendly and aesthetically pleasing, it's an ideal choice. I'm expecting Julamis to attract a fanatical repeat following within a few months. I just hope they'll be able to squeeze me in on my next visit.

A Week in Yucatán

Mérida is a dreamily beautiful city. Its historical center, one of the biggest in the Americas, is full of gorgeous corners, both near and beyond the few blocks around the Zócalo.

My first day I scooted around as if time were at a premium, exploring the historical center, visiting the Anthropological Museum, and scarfing delicious tacos (8 pesos or $.75 a pop) and tortas at D'Al, a little restaurant at the corner of Calles 53 and 54. This hectic pace was all wrong. It took the slow arrival of various family members, over several days, to relax my pace.

It's good that I did slow down; as it turns out, Mérida is a city ideally experienced in a leisurely and unprogrammed manner. Its churches, squares, colonial architectural core, and two-laned one-way streets are all enchanting. The architectural scale consists of one and two-story buildings throughout most of the historical center. Best of all is the balance between renovated and crumbling buildings. This balance, along with a nice variety of residential, commercial, and retail spaces, makes for a mostly unmanicured historical center. The impression is so inviting that the sheer volume of expats comes as no surprise.

Mérida is also very cheap. Hotel Julamis, which will receive a lavishly praiseworthy post of its own shortly, cost me just $25 a night for a double room. For those (like me) who are done with hostels yet perennially in search of hotel bargains, a $25 double room in a guesthouse that manages to be not just spic-and-span but also aesthetically gorgeous and run with deep care is a revelation.

Local grub is also pleasing and affordable, though not quite so dramatically cheap as the beds on offer at Julamis. I'd recommend Los Almendros, across from the Parque de la Mejorada, which serves up gorgeous Yucatecán cuisine, including crunchy salbutes and soupy papadzules.

I'm a sucker for a city that draws visitors in on the basis of general atmosphere over discrete sights, and Mérida certainly satisfies on this count. My only exploration beyond the city limits was to Izamal, the "yellow city" about 70 km east of Mérida. Izamal, with its quiet streets, yellow buildings, and enormous monastery across from an almost twin-like pyramid, was almost otherworldly in its beauty. Roundtrip bus journey from downtown Mérida to Izamal was 45 pesos ($4.15).

Mérida

Yesterday afternoon I returned from a week in Mérida, Mexico. It was an enchanting week, and I'll return to form in the next few days with descriptions of why Merida is quite so enchanting, as well as a review of one of the best guesthouses I've had the good fortune of frequenting.

Schengen

I keep bringing up tomorrow's expansion of the Schengen Agreement with people and wondering why they're not as amazed as me about the whole thing. There's no way around the fact that tomorrow's move is a huge deal.

As of tomorrow, all land and sea entries between every country in the EU (plus Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, and minus the UK, Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus) will no longer operate border controls. This will mean, among other things, that you might fly to Helsinki from abroad, take the ferry to Estonia and proceed by bus or car or rail across the Latvian border, the Lithuanian border, the Polish border, and so on, down to Italy, where you might catch a ferry to Greece, all without once being asked to show your passport.

From April 2008, the agreement will apply to air travel as well. Several other countries are on track to joining Schengen as well: Switzerland, Cyprus, Romania, and Bulgaria will join within the next several years.

A big deal, indeed.

Click4Sky Improves

Back in late September I blogged for EuroCheapo about Click4Sky, the CSA Czech Airlines initiative to fill its empty seats. Click4Sky is a simple and appealing concept. Seats are sold on a roundtrip-only basis for a flat fare.

Back in September, the only option was to book roundtrip journeys originating and terminating in Prague. This was great for residents of Prague and surrounds, but completely useless for your average deal-seeker.

That was then. Click4Sky has improved its service by making it possible to purchase roundtrip tickets from any of the other 36 cities (all but Cairo in Europe) included on the route map to Prague. The Czech capital is still the hinge, but by allowing the purchase of Click4Sky fares to Prague, the value of the program increases dramatically. Roundtrip tickets run €138 (including taxes), which is not a bad fare for many of the routes in question. Don't forget that all flights are flown on CSA, and that free newspapers and drinks (thus a complete absence of cattle-call LCC atmospherics) are part of the deal.

Now if they would just permit the purchase of one-way tickets, they'd be offering a service that continent-wandering travelers could use more easily.

A Summer Morning in Belgrade

I took this photo in Belgrade last summer very early in the morning outside of Hotel Royal. It had been extremely hot, both in Belgrade and even more so in Skopje, where I'd been a few days previously, and the cool morning felt like a luxury. While I was waiting for my cab to the airport there was no one on the street and the light looked amazing. I reached for my camera.

I'm thinking about Belgrade a lot these days; there's the independence of Kosovo on the horizon, for one, with any number of unpredictable repercussions to come; there's also next year's Eurovision contest, which will be held in Belgrade. About the former I have some half-baked thoughts. About the latter I'm fully enthusiastic, already eagerly anticipating the debuts of Azerbaijan and San Marino.

Incidentally, Hotel Royal is a great budget option. Rooms are kind of institutional and worn, and the lobby is done in an uncategorizable Yugostyle. Receptionists are stern, though not quite terrifying. I paid right around €30 per night for my room.

Eleuthera in January with Mr. Armendariz

Just today Matt Armendariz and I finalized plans for our first collaboration, a travel essay on the Bahamian Out Island of Eleuthera. We'll travel in mid-January and spend three nights exploring.

Matt runs an amazing food (and design and travel) blog titled MattBites. His blog is a gorgeous and enthusiastic labor of love, and it made an huge impression on me when I first came across it. I spent about an hour looking through its archives before I wrote Matt and suggested outright that we find a way to work together some day. He responded quickly and in a very friendly way, apparently not at all frightened by the possibility that I was a deranged stalker.

I've already begun to assemble a list of things to check out on Eleuthera, including what remains of a deserted Club Med (apparently not much in the way of physical plant), some quiet beaches, and, of course, places to eat local grub.

We've already been extended an invitation for cocktails, a propitious sign if there ever was one.

Waiting for Porter. Thinking about Porter, Too.

For months and months I've been waiting for Porter Airlines, the swank Canadian carrier on Tyler Brûlé's Winkreative design agency client list, to begin flying to New York. The airline announced its intention to fly in and out of Newark months ago. Thus far, no dice.

I'm getting impatient. I'm distressed by how expensive it is to fly from New York to Toronto and Montreal, not to open up the question of pricing on connecting flights to cities farther west, like Winnipeg. But if flying to Canada from New York is going to remain artificially expensive, I'd like for it to be at the very least exciting. The options currently consist of dusty US airlines and Air Canada. The former, with the exception of JetBlue, which does not fly to any airports in Canada, are shoddy and unexciting and bland; Air Canada, quite tragically in my view, doesn't offer much better. (Air Canada has squandered one of the greatest branding opportunities around. Ahh, to think of the physical and cultural material that could be manipulated into a stunning Air Canada branding maneuver! How thrilling it would be to take that particular project on.)

More on that another time, perhaps.

It's my spendthrift side—not my shoestring essence—that wants to fly Porter. The airline is not a low-cost carrier by any means. It is, rather, a niche business-oriented carrier that offers a particular experience of flying, from decent in-flight service to beautiful modern airport lounges to (apparently) smart flight attendant uniforms, and all without the exorbitant fares that one might assume that a business-primed airline of its ilk would demand. Porter flies Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, which are far more fuel-efficient than most other commercial airplanes. Best of all for those wanting to get in or out of central Toronto, Porter flies from Toronto City Centre Airport, a five-minute ferry ride from downtown.

I can't comment on Porter's ad campaigns, which I've heard are a bit of a mess, but the airline's brand is both cozy and elegant. Its straight lines and restrained modernism are broken only slightly by the choice of a raccoon as brand icon. That said, I find the Porter raccoon to be cute and woodsy, a pairing that, um, fits Canada awfully well—though I sense from brief online research that I am in the minority on the raccoon's iconic merits.

All these observations boil down to this: I can't remember the last time I left an airline Web site with a sense of that airline's personality. Against this trend, Porter exudes a sense of itself. To put the airline into a meaningful comparative context, look at the Porter site next to the VLM site. VLM, a Belgian airline that also pursues a business demographic, runs a site that flees from brand identity altogether. The images appear to have been carelessly, randomly chosen. Meanwhile, Porter communicates a kind of accessible luxury through its consistent style.

All this may be irrelevant. Porter's imminent demise was forecast this past spring by Barry Avich, a Toronto ad man; a subsequent piece in TIME made many of the same points (and quoted Avich, to boot.) Both articles point out that the airline is not fillings its seats. If these comments are on target and the airline still isn't able to fill its seats, then it would appear that Porter won't be around for long.

I for one am hoping that things have already turned around.

The Carbon Offsetting Fetish

I think carbon offsets are great. I do. I'll never bash them. That said, I was thrilled to see Tim Leffel's take on the sloppy embrace of green issues in US consumer travel magazines.

Especially good was his job on the rush toward singling out air travel as somehow the most evil activity in environmental history, a rush that completely ignores lifestyle choice balance and lets car travel off the hook.

I'm reminded of a very good friend who asked me a few months ago how she could get from her major European gateway to the Yucatán without flying. I told her that if she were able to snag a repositioning cruise from England to South Florida and then find a way to drive around the Gulf of Mexico and south to Mérida, she could do it. But at what cost? I'd love to find a way to calculate the carbon emissions of such an itinerary versus the two flights that would deliver her from Europe to Mexico.

I agree with Leffel when he suggests that we need to think beyond flying. We need to think about how we travel and how we behave when we're not traveling. Carbon offsets are part of the puzzle, but they're not the redemptive answer, nor should they be made into a fetish.