We’ve been getting some phone calls today from one of our leisure travel clients who is feeling a bit put out because of weather-related travel delays. Fortunately for me, she’s not my client, but rather, my office-mate’s. But if she were my client, this is what I would tell her:

Relax.

There are a whole constellation of things conspiring against our client – the weather, the fact that everyone is trying to get back to Alaska after the holidays, and unfortunately, unrealistic expectations.

As a professional travel planner, I arrange a lot of airline flights, and coordinate them with our custom tour packages. One of the most important aspects of planning a trip is to make sure that potential for airline delays don’t impact your other plans. For example, when we plan a trip for clients, we never plan any activities for the day you arrive in Anchorage – the flight is long, and you’ll be tired… but more importantly, there’s no guarantees your flight is going to arrive when they promise it will. And for our Iditarod packages, we often will allow for another full day, especially if the guests are coming from the east coast or Europe.

Airline delays have become such a problem that many airlines have taken to pushing back arrival times – it doesn’t slow down the travel, but it changes the expectation. On a recent trip, all four of my flights arrived early… presumably because the airline added another half hour to the expected travel time to help pad their ontime performance.

But really, this isn’t what our client is complaining about. She wants to be here in Alaska, and she’s stuck in some airport along the way, and because of weather and heavy holiday traffic, she’s not going to arrive here when she had hoped. That’s a shame. But being upset about it doesn’t fix it. She needs to relax.

Once I was traveling from Fairbanks to Washington, DC for the Christmas holidays, and it took me twenty-four hours, four airports, and a lot of improvised scheduling to get around the weather and traffic delays.

I had a blast.

Whenever I travel, I bring a book… or two. It is really the only time I get to sit and read, so for me, the book is the treat. I also bring my mp3 player and some really nice headphones. I don’t go anywhere without my laptop… but that can be a mixed bag, because that is just one more heavy thing you have  to lug around with you. If I have a layover – whether scheduled or not – I make sure I take in some of the amenities that hub-city airports have to offer. For some, it could just be a nice lunch, or a drink a the bar. If the layover is extended, you might want to consider buying a one-day pass to one of the airline suites. Most have free Wifi, snacks and drinks, comfortable seats, a friendly concierge or two, and all the latest information on your flights. Sure they’re a little pricey, but when it comes to your sanity, it is often worth it.

The most important thing you can bring with you to the airport is a good attitude. Of course, you want to get where you’re going as quickly as you can. But if you can’t – so what? Make the most of the time you have. Be prepared to have fun. Treat yourself  to a good meal, people-watch, browse the Internet, catch up on your reading, or get to know a fellow traveler. And the key to it all is in the planning. Make your travel arrangements so that a delay of an hour or two doesn’t end up stressing you out and screwing up your plans.

After all, it’s a vacation!

There’s a certain irony about coming to Alaska to experience an unspoiled environment. The average round-trip flight to Alaska releases over 1000 pounds of CO2 per person into the environment. When you add the gasoline you use once you’re here – most of our packages are self-drive – you’re getting near one ton of CO2 per person released on a typical Alaska vacation.

That seems like a lot to me.

I started to research what a company like Alaska Vacation Store could do to become more environmentally-friendly. I thought it would be really cool if you could create a carbon-neutral vacation package.

It turns out, from a practical standpoint, you can’t.

Sure, you can get on the Internet and do a search on carbon-neutral travel, and there are plenty of web pages there… but nobody has made it easy, or even practical, to take a carbon-neutral vacation - and this is really the key. The people who are passionate about it (perhaps to the point of obsession) will do whatever it takes to be carbon-neutral. But there is a large segment of the population that believes that it is important to limit carbon emissions, but are unable or unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that you need to make for a truly carbon-neutral trip.

When I did my research, I was immediately drawn to the idea of purchasing carbon offsets. The average trip releases X-amount of carbon, and you purchase enough offsets to cover the carbon released on that trip.

But there’s a problem with that… and that is, from a consumer standpoint, purchasing carbon offsets is a lot like donating to a charity. Part of the cost goes to overhead. So in a really well-run charity, (or carbon offset company) most of the money goes where it is intended…  and in poorly-run ones, most of the money goes to overhead… or in the worst cases, somewhere else.

If I purchase a carbon offset worth a ton of CO2, I want to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. And since the whole  premise of carbon offsets is that they are like commodities, one ton of carbon offset needs to be the same as another. But they’re not.

Moreover, when you research environmentally-sound travel, a emphasis of many websites goes towards making the office more green. I think that is important, and I have made some strides there. But in all honesty, the amount of carbon my office operation has released into the environment over the years I have been in business is an order of magnitude less than the average CO2 release on a typical vacation. And I’ve planned hundreds of vacations. Fixing my office doesn’t fix the carbon footprint.

In my office I am transitioning my record-keeping to a more electronic system. Almost all correspondence with clients and vendors is done by email, and I am reducing the amount of paper I use. I have switched my old CRT monitors to flat screens – they’re both energy efficient and larger. My next project is to turn my hundred-page confirmation packet into an electronic document. One advantage of my packages is that our vendors do not require vouchers, so a guest could, in theory, take his or her entire trip and keep all the documents on a CD or DVD, and never need a piece of paper. Unfortunately, that method of delivering documents is not practical for every guest, because not everyone brings their laptop to Alaska with them. But you could create an electronic document with all of the descriptions, maps, driving directions, etc. and put them on a CD. In fact, it could be cooler than any paper document packet. You could include audio and video. It is coming, but we’re not there yet.

That addresses at least some of the environmental concerns… but the larger concern – how to remove a ton of CO2 per person for every visitor to Alaska – remains unanswered. There are some human activities that by their very nature, and not particularly friendly to the environment, and flying across the continent is one of them. I am not suggesting that people stop traveling. Instead, I think the win-win here would be to find a way to negate the impacts of the travel. As the owner of a tour company, I would like nothing better than to be able to offer my clients a way to offset their carbon footprint in Alaska. I think it would be a great selling point, and great for the environment… Not to mention that this isn’t an Alaska-only solution. You could use this to offset travel (or anything else) anywhere.

Now one could argue that reducing the carbon footprint of a 737 is the responsibility of the airline… and that’s true. But for the moment, that part of the equation is not considered, and really, we’re not talking about reducing the footprint of a jet, but rather, eliminating our footprint as passengers through offsets. A jet is always going to emit CO2. If at some point in the future they come up with a more efficient and carbon-friendly jet, or  the airlines decide to offset its emissions in some other way, that just reduces what we as consumers need to account for when we shoot for carbon-neutral travel.

When someone comes up with a carbon offset product that a consumer could buy that actually removed carbon from the environment, and assured the consumer that the money spent was actually going towards  removing carbon rather than paying salaries (and other things), my guess is that travelers will be eager to use them to make for carbon-neutral transactions.

… so are the minutes of daylight!

Rejoice, Alaskans! Tomorrow there will be nine seconds more daylight in Anchorage. In Fairbanks there will be thirteen more seconds of daylight.

Barrow, you’re out of luck until the end of January.

OK, most of Alaska can rejoice!

It is the winter solstice, and the days are now getting longer.

For people that don’t live in Alaska, it is a little hard to fathom how important this is. My partner and I went out yesterday with our cameras intent on taking some photos. There wasn’t enough light to get good ones. Winters are cold here, but they’d be a lot easier to take if there was more sun, and soon, there will be.

Nine seconds doesn’t seem like a lot. It isn’t. But in a week, we’ll be gaining two minutes a day. In two weeks, it will be over four minutes a day. By March 21, the daily change will be almost seven minutes a day – about forty-seven minutes a week.

We’re headed in the right direction… which is more than I can say about yesterday. Yesterday we lost twenty-six seconds.

Rejoice, Alaskans!

There are an increasing number of visitors to Alaska in the winter… and many of them are coming here to experience the Iditarod.

The Iditarod starts in Anchorage on the first Saturday in March, and the race lasts about two weeks. Most guests arrive on the Thursday before – you wouldn’t want to schedule a Friday flight into Anchorage and end up stuck in Chicago because of a Midwestern blizzard – you’d miss the start of the race!

Dogs discuss race strategy while sitting in the back of a musher's dog truck.

The ceremonial start is on Saturday. This is when all of Anchorage turns out and lines the the streets to watch the mushers as they head through town. Most people head to Fourth Avenue, which is the starting line… but there are many great places to watch the mushers all over town, so it isn’t necessary to fight the downtown crowds. Among the more favorite spots are on the hill on Cordova Street as the mushers head down towards Chester Creek.

The route winds its way south through the parks in Anchorage. At one point the mushers cross a bridge over Northern Lights Boulevard, and a tunnel at Tudor Centre. In 2009, the Anchorage trail ended at Campbell Airstrip in Centennial Park.

A view of the "chute" at the ceremonial start of the Iditarod.

One advantage of heading to Fourth Avenue is to see the mushers prepare their sleds and dogs for the race. While the festivities on Saturday are purely ceremonial – the clock on the race doesn’t start until Sunday – there is still plenty to see in the “chute”. The area of downtown on Fourth Avenue west of D Street (the actual starting line) is fenced off, and each musher brings in his or her “dog truck”. A dog truck is how the dogs, sleds and equipment is hauled to different locations. The most distinctive feature of a dog truck are the boxes on the back where the dogs ride. You’ll often see dogs sticking their heads out of holes in the doors of the dog truck.

This is a great opportunity to get some photos of the mushers, talk to them a bit, and see the dogs. Most people can’t imagine the preparation and training that goes into a run to Nome. While the show on Saturday is just a very small piece of the entire process, it is very clear from watching the mushers get ready that a run to Nome in the Iditarod is something that takes years of planning.

Musher heads down Fourth Avenue in Anchorage at the ceremonial start of the Iditarod.

After the ceremonial start, the mushers pack up the dogs and sleds and head for Willow, where the race restarts on Sunday afternoon. Several thousand spectators attend the restart in Willow, and this event is an even more authentic Alaskan event – people arrive by car and truck, snowmachine (this is Alaska-speak for snowmobile) and even a few by airplane.

The atmosphere is a little different in Willow; the trail heads out across the frozen lake, and spectators line the trail and cheer as the mushers head out to Nome. At the same time, snowmachines race across the lake, and airplanes on skis come and go.

After the restart, many guests head north to Talkeetna, where they catch a flight out the next day to some of the remote checkpoints in the foothills of the Alaska Range. Flights leave in the morning and head to Skwentna and Rainy Pass. The first day is often a very entertaining time to be on the trail, because this is when the fastest of the teams try to set the pace.

For guests that are serious about the Iditarod, you can fly from checkpoint to checkpoint in a “Chase the Race” package. Other guests take a few days off and head to Fairbanks where you can take in the World Ice Art Championships, do a dogsledding adventure, where you can actually learn to drive a dog team and spend the night under the northern lights in a cabin or arctic-weight tent. After your dogsled adventure, an afternoon soak at Chena Hot Springs sounds like a very good idea.

The following week the lead mushers approach Nome, and guests fly out to this Norton Sound community to greet the mushers as they arrive on Front Street.

Iditarod packages have become more popular over the last few years, but there is still time to arrange your package if you’re up for a winter adventure in Alaska. Alaska Vacation Store creates custom Iditarod packages that include lodging, rental cars, and all of the activities. Packages can be as short as four days, or last for as many as twenty.

The Anchorage Daily News reports in this piece that the cruise industry plans to remove two ships from Alaska routes in 2011, in addition to the cuts announced for 2010. This amounts to a total reduction of almost 160,000 passengers annually by 2011.

At issue is a head tax passed by Alaska voters in 2006. The $50 tax is intended to offset infrastructure costs associated with the landings of large cruise ships that would otherwise be borne by the very small communities in Southeast Alaska. The cruise lines argue that the tax is a significant disincentive for budget-conscious travelers to choose a cruise. However, a number of studies have shown that the additional cost makes little difference in a guest’s choice to take a cruise.

Supporters of the tax think that many of the cruise industry’s protests are disingenuous. The number of Alaska visitors in 2009 was down considerably, and many ascribe this decline to the state of the economy. In Ketchikan, a city that is heavily-dependent on the cruise industry, hotel stays were down about 20 percent from the previous year, while the overall cruise passenger numbers to Alaska decreased only .5 percent. In general, cruise passengers do not overnight in Ketchikan. One interpretation of these numbers is that the cruise industry fared comparatively well despite the head tax and despite the poor economy, while other segments of the Alaska visitor industry suffered.

Andrew Halcro thinks that the head tax is good for the Alaska visitor industry. At the time that the tax was being debated in Alaska, he argued that the cruise lines do not pay taxes at the same rate that other transportation providers (airlines, car rental companies, etc) pay.

For people planning a visit to Alaska, the picture is actually quite good. The reduction in the number of cruise ships in Alaska will tend to increase the cost of cruises and require that cruise guests book earlier, there is still ample capacity for independent travelers to visit Alaska. Also, since many smaller operators had difficult years in 2009, most are reluctant to raise prices in 2010, so the costs of an Alaska vacation will be very close to the prices that we have seen over the last two years.

This whole new media thing, while not all that new to me, is a bit of a gear-shift when you’re going from running a business to sitting on the computer and wading through directories of Twitter users. I was looking for Twitter users that had identified #travel as one of their main areas on interest.

In the process, I found some blogs that I thought were really interesting – the life of the flight attendant.

Another Flight Attendant Writing talks about the day-to-day life of the flight attendant. The author has been writing for a while, so there’s a lot of content there. There are also links to other flight attendant blogs – at least one of which I found on my own… and that is:

The Flying Pinto… A Flight Attendant Blog is another prolific blog that covers a lot of the bases when it comes to the life of a flight attendant.

The third one I found was Traveling with MJ, which is a little more about travel and a little less about being a flight attendant.

I think there are a lot of stereotypes we have about different professions, and perhaps one of the more misunderstood is the job of the flight attendant. The nature of the job – one where we see and interact with them fairly often, but probably don’t really understand the scope and breadth of the job itself – makes blogs like these rather compelling.

Check them out!