Travel Craft
Being offered your own currency abroad is a sales pitch, not a courtesy
When a foreign card terminal asks whether you want to be charged at home, somebody is choosing the exchange…
Travel Craft
Packing, paperwork, money and timing, treated as skills rather than tips.
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Travel Craft
Packing is a volume problem until an airline turns it into a weight problem
Two separate constraints govern what you can carry, they are enforced by different people at different moments, and most packing advice addresses only one of them.
Travel Craft
Passport rules are counted from the wrong end of the trip
Validity, blank pages and permitted days are all measured against dates and quantities that travellers…
Travel Craft
School holidays set travel prices more reliably than weather does
Demand for travel is concentrated by institutional calendars rather than by climate, which is why the same…
Travel Craft
Fares move because seats are sold in batches at different prices
Airline and rail pricing is a system for rationing a fixed number of seats over time, and understanding the…
Travel Craft
Getting by without the language is a matter of narrowing the question
Communication across a language barrier succeeds when the range of possible answers is small, which is why…
Travel Craft
A forecast is a probability wearing the costume of a picture
Weather apps present model output as icons and certainties, and knowing what is underneath explains why…
Travel Craft
What a guidebook is for once the listings have gone stale
Printed guides have lost the practical information race to the internet and kept the thing the internet is…
Travel Craft
Each kind of accommodation is really selling something different
Hotels, guesthouses, hostels and rented flats are not points on a single scale of price and comfort; each…
Travel Craft
Travelling alone and travelling together are different jobs
A group has to convert individual preferences into one decision at every junction, and that conversion cost…
Travel Craft
Travel insurance is a pool, and the exclusions are how the pool survives
A policy works by collecting small sums from many travellers to pay the rare large claim, which explains…
Travel Craft
Health preparation for a trip is mostly a calendar problem
Most of what makes a journey medically straightforward has to be arranged weeks in advance, which is why…