The Titanic Awards

Name Edward Hasbrouck
Who? Author of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, blogger at www.hasbrouck.org and travel agent guru.
Age 50
Countries Visited 54 (and hoping to keep that number higher than my age!)

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Airline Emirates. Consistently incompetent and unhelpful staff at ticket counters
and sales offices on 4 continents.
2. Worst Toilet A hole in the ground behind our “hotel” in Tashkurgan, Chinese-occupied
East Turkestan, only partially screened from public view and blowing dust,
and surrounded by an ankle-breaking mound of rubble and refuse.
3. Worst Airport Dubai.  I was predisposed to dislike DXB (see my choice for Worst Airline), but it was worst than I imagined. Changing planes in the middle of the night, I want a place I can rest — not the cacophony of a shopping mall where I have to fight my way through crowds buying raffle tickets for luxury cars, or trip over rows of transit passengers sleeping on the floor for want of chairs.
4. Worst Inflight Meal (Domestic) Aeroflot: Bread and water.  (International) PIA.  Don’t ask, don’t tell.
5. Worst City for Driving Sana’a, Yemen. Deadly recklessness and unpredictability. Underpowered, ill-maintained vehicles with bad brakes and bald tires, and not enough pedestrians, bicycles, or animals to slow them down to a safer speed. (Runner-up: Townships in South Africa, where there are urban areas with more than a million people with few street signs and no maps, and where a wrong turn can put you at risk of robbery or carjacking.  Map Studio, the Rand McNally of South Africa, just published its first map to Soweto in time for the World Cup, and has none for any other township.)
6. Worst Car Rental Fox Rent-A-Car, LAX. Tried to charge me US$200 in damages because my car got a flat tire (while with the valet parkers at my hotel!), and referred their claim to a collection agency when I didn’t pay.

Famous Travelers around the world, Edward Hasbrouck, practical nomad, www.hasbrouck.org

Name Will Hide
Who? London-based freelance travel writer with a weekly column in The Times. Find him on the web at willhide.com and willhidetravels.blogspot.com
Age 42
Countries Visited 50ish

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Flight Scariest was flying Belgrade-London on JAT in November 2009 when we passed too close to the jetstream of a 747 somewhere over Austria. It’s the only time I’ve really thought “this is it”.
2. Worst In-Flight Meal I hate it on short, overnight flights from the US east cost to London when they wake you two hours before landing for “breakfast” and then just give you a muffin that has a sell-by date of June 2019 and a cup of luke-warm dirty water that they laughingly call coffee.
3. Worst City for Driving Cape Town. You expect it to be bad in somewhere like Tehran or Dhaka, but Cape Town in theory has more of an air of civility – so why are their drivers so selfish, never letting you in at junctions and cutting you up all over the place?
4. Worst Ride on an Animal On an elephant in Assam, India. Never, ever ride an elephant in shorts. Their skin is like industrial sand paper. The hair on the inside of my legs still hasn’t grown back.
5. Worst Museum There’s a Jesse James exhibition in Stanton Missouri, USA, which is basically a posh shed next to a highway. It’s devoted to the notion that JJ never died young in the 1890s but went into hiding, grew old and passed away peacefully in Texas in the 1950s, supported by a few pictures of an old guy with a similar nose and ears – except they’re not similar at all. It’s just so bad, it’s good. You’ve got to admire the belief of the people who run it.

Famous Travelers columnist, freelance, The Times, travel writer, Will Hide, willhide.com

Name Clare Currie
Who? Publishing Director of Rough Guides
Age 38
Countries Visited 30+

Titanic Nominations
Worst Airport Experience I was trying to go to Edinburgh for one day for a funeral of someone I didn’t know very well.  Got snowed in at Luton airport — no one was allowed to leave the boarding area so we spent the night there with an Irish/Scottish/Polish cocktail of  tired and emotional  travelers. I missed the funeral, so I didn’t want to get on the flight when it finally left. The kicker was that EasyJet  didn’t want to reimburse me for the return ticket because they said I  could have figured out another  way to get to Edinburgh by bus or train, despite quite clearly being trapped in Luton
Worst Kind of Hotel Not fond of B&Bs.  It’s harsh but I don’t think a single sane person runs a B&B.  And who could possibly enjoy being forced to exchange pleasantries with strangers over a fried egg?
Worst Flight Sri Lankan Airlines. We were on our honeymoon.  One man was behaving suspiciously  and it transpired he was shooting video of  some cockroaches  he’d found, so he could post it online.  The apparent death of another passenger – heralded by a great, rattling last gasp for breath – served to distract our attention from the infestation issue, but didn’t improve our general enjoyment of the flight.
Worst Airport Frankfurt is pretty bad… mostly because there are no seats. And they have the most aggressive security guards I’ve encountered. I had to redo the whole long security queue because I touched my bag too soon after it was scanned. Who knew there was a time restriction?
Worst Visitor Experience The Red Fort in Delhi – not in itself a bad place to visit – but the body search at the gate was more than a little hair-raising. Not sure what they thought I may have been hiding in the region of my bra, but they were thorough in their investigations.

Famous Travelers

Name Steve Keenan
Who? Online Travel Editor of The Sunday Times
Age 52
Countries Visited 44

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Airline Delta – did it ever have any frills?
2. Worst Flight Cuzco – Lima: had to wait to offload passenger and a goat.
3. Worst Airport Luton. It charges to drop passengers off. It even charges for clear plastic bags. And it charges to fast track immigration. Morally bankrupt.
4. Worst Hotel Mendip Lodge, Frome, Somerset, UK – don’t think the sausage touched the pan. The egg bounced. Terrible decor. Sadly, it burnt down three years ago.
5. Worst Souvenir Fake five-foot palm tree from a restaurant in Miami. (It was a bet.) Customs at Heathrow were so astonished they never checked the suspicious coconuts.

Famous Travelers Steve Keenan, The Sunday Times, timesonline, timesonline.co.uk, travel editor, worst, worsts

Name James Ellis
Who? Journalist, photographer and former travel editor for the UK Metro newspaper. Currently writes two blogs: 1095miles.com about his daily running challenge and worldofjames.com
Age 42
Countries Visited 80 plus

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Flight Returning from Bangkok to London on Eva Air, a Taiwanese airline. I’ve had some scares in the past on flights, but this was the strangest. Mid-flight, the oxygen masks suddenly dropped down, the lights dimmed and exit lights lit up. Instinctively, I put the mask on and gave it a tug to get the oxygen going. No oxygen. People are panicking. The woman behind me is whaling. The cabin crew has their masks on. It goes on for ages — or so it seemed. It may have only been five minutes. Then the pilot comes out and is clearly astonished that people are wearing masks . He goes back into the cockpit and tells us that the electric system had been refitted and it was a glitch. They had no idea the masks had even dropped.
2. Worst Guides I was in Kenya in 2004 on the Laikipia Reserve taking a camel safari. There was a guide from the hotel and we had two Samburu Warriors (dressed a bit like the Maasai) to protect us. We were walking, leading the camel up a hill when we came into a clearing and saw a bull elephant just 10 feet away. The guide pulled his gun, I froze, the Elephant mock-charged a few steps and our fearless warriors — the ones meant to be protecting us — had made a run for it and were 300 meters away within seconds.
3. Worst Alcohol / Food Combo I typically try whatever. In this case it was Icelandic hákarl. They catch a shark, buried it for a year, dig it up, and pickle what’s left of the rotting meat, then serve it up with brennivin. After choking it down, I managed to say it was good. So they served up some more.
4. Worst Food Poisoning Chicken feet for breakfast in Hong Kong. (They had asked if we wanted a typical local breakfast and we had said yes.) When it started to go bad, my guide treated me with warm sprite and salt (her favorite remedy). I then turned the color of the exorcist girl and sand blasted the wall with my vomit.
5. Worst Statue In Wellington, New Zealand, halfway up the main shopping street. is a statue/fountain known as the bucket fountain. It has buckets on hinges that are meant to gracefully tip into the next and  cascade water down to the lower ones, but it doesn’t work as it’s meant to. The top bucket violently tips and splashes everyone with water.

Famous Travelers 1095miles.com, james ellis, metro, travel editor, worldofjames.com

Name Carmen Roberts
Who? A reporter and producer for the BBC’s Fast Track travel programme, broadcast on BBC World TV.  Carmen has most recently written for Singapore Airlines in-flight magazine SilverKris, Time Out Perfect Places and BA High Life. Watch Fast Track online right here or follow Carmen on twitter @carmenlroberts
Age 33
Countries Visited 69

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Toilet Our driver assured us this particular public toilet in Mumbai would be ‘nice and clean’ as he handed over rupees for me to enter. I was subsequently squatting in a sewer with 100 Indian women. It’s all about managing expectations.
2. Worst City for Driving It’s got to be Bangkok. Who in their right mind would tackle that kind of dense traffic with tuk-tuks and motor cycle taxis to boot?! Forget about it.
3. Worst Beer In a small village near Arusha,Tanzania, the local brew had chunky bits in it and was served in a bucket.
4. Worst Flight Aerolineas Argentinas from London to Buenos Aires – no inflight entertainment (on all legs of the journey), no amenities kit and 7 hour delay in Madrid on the way home. Never again.
5. Worst Museum Koryo Museum, Kaesong, North Korea – probably less than 20 artifacts in total.

Famous Travelers

Name David Wickers
Who? David is co-founder and one of the two editors of 101 Holidays and 101 Short Breaks. He’s also the travel editor of Good Housekeeping magazine and co-founder of Bridge & Wickers.
Age 65
Countries Visited 100 +

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Toilet At a monastery in Mount Athos, Greece. Pilgrims may do all the righteous things in religious matters but their loo behavior on this particular saint’s day was disgusting.
2. Worst City for Driving There are lots of obvious candidates, topped perhaps by Indian cities, but the one city I would have expected to be civilized was among the most anarchic – Buenos Aires.
3. Worst Camping Spot In the middle of Dartmoor, in January, bathed in a blizzard. It was my choice – I was walking the Two Moors Way – but the memory still makes me shiver.
4. Worst Ride on an Animal I’m never happy on anything with four legs but would have preferred a bucking rodeo bronco to that stroppy camel at the Giza pyramids.
5. Worst Beer The fermented hooch in Peru’s Andean villages.

Famous Travelers 101 Holidays, Bridge & Wickers, David Wickers

Name Catherine Leech
Who? Catherine is co-founder and director of 101 Holidays and 101 Short Breaks and has worked in the travel industry for 27 years.
Age 51
Countries Visited 60

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Flight A jolly jaunt from Little Cayman to Grand Cayman which switched in a heartbeat to a nerve jangling “is this the end?” half hour as the pilot asked us to check the manual to find out why lights were flashing and buzzers buzzing while he grappled with the controls. Yikes.
2. Worst Inflight Meal Air Malta in the 1980s. During some 50 flights in 2 years, the meal choice never changed regardless of the time of day. It was luke-warm chicken with gloopy white stuff or ham with gloopy red stuff.
3. Worst Train Ride an overnight train and ferry journey from Sicily to Naples in August. No available seats, thick heat, screaming bambini, unintelligible Italian bullies (most of them the mamas of the bambini), stinky loos, a miserably hungry boyfriend and smart pickpockets.
4. Worst Travel Gadget The mini hand-held fan. What a great idea – that is until one of the blades flies off and hits the unsuspecting stranger standing next to you in the face. Not a pretty site and not a happy bloke.
5. Worst Beer I love Belgian fruit beers and head straight for the Kriek or Frambosen when I’m in Belgium. Belgian banana beer, however, is quite another matter – truly vile wherever and whenever.

Famous Travelers 101holidays.co.uk, 101shortbreaks.co.uk, Catherine Leech

Name Jill Starley-Grainger
Who? Journalist, editor, web editor and travel presenter. Has written about travel for Conde Nast Traveller, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, The Guardian, The Independent, Food and Travel, British Airways High Life, Ryanair Magazine, Time Out Travel Guides, Footprint Guides and numerous other travel magazines and websites, previously travel editor for Harper’s Bazaar Dubai and web editor for bahighlife.com.  Read her blog at uktraveleditor.wordpress.com or follow her on Twitter @uktraveleditor
Age 35
Countries Visited 29

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Airline Ryanair based itself on low-cost Southwest Air in the US, but unlike much-loved Southwest, everybody hates Ryanair – rip-off fees added almost daily, no customer service and clear disdain for passengers from the top down.
2. Worst Airport Abu Dhabi Airport is always packed and chaotic, and the few shops and cafes are tiny and rubbish. Expect to sit on the floor as there are only about 50 chairs for thousands of passengers.
3. Worst Train Meal On the overnight TrenHotel from Madrid to Paris, vegetarians should pack their own. Our ‘five-star’ breakfast? Cold, undercooked aubergines soaked in manky sunflower oil. When we asked for the croissants, toast and cereals our neighbours were being served, we were scowled at and told that since we’d ordered the vegetarian breakfast (must be booked weeks ahead), they couldn’t give us the normal one.
4. Worst Hotel The Travelodge in Battersea, London. It’s looks and feels like a prison – but with worse lighting and surlier staff. Rooms might start at £19, but they aren’t worth £1.90.
5. Worst City for Driving Istanbul – traffic doesn’t move – no matter what time of day. As we were sitting in a cab at 1am, a man with no legs scooted past us using just his hands for walking. Truly.
6. Worst Travel Gadget The microfiber travel towel. After the first use, it’s rock hard and only soaks up three drops of water. Plus, unless you’re hostelling or camping, you don’t need to bring your own towel. Waste of money.
7. Worst Museum The 007 Museum on the island of Naoshima, Japan, is so bad, it’s good. The island is a justifiable mecca of modern art and architecture, but this museum is an anomaly of awfulness. Based on a Bond novel, ‘The Man with the Red Tattoo”, that was partly set on Naoshima but that wasn’t even written by Ian Fleming and was never made into film, this “museum” features handmade models of some of the book’s villains, along with various bits of worthless Bond memorabilia, and a comedy cut-out where you can poke your head through to have your picture taken as Bond and Bond girl being rescued. Actually, it’s brilliant, in an OMG would-you-believe-this-place kind of way.

Famous Travelers @uktraveleditor, Jill Starley-Grainger, travel writer, worst airline, worst airport, worst train meal, worst travel gadget

Name Mark Frary
Who? Business travel editor (and ski editor) of Times Online and the author of several popular science books including The Origins of the Universe for Dummies and Freaky Science. Check out his site at markfrary.com
Age 41
Countries Visited 56

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Airline Garuda Indonesia. The week before I was due to fly with them on a particular service, part of the wing fell off. Also had oxygen masks fall down in flight.
2. Worst Flight BA flight from Heathrow to Geneva in the early 1990s. As I looked outside, the engine burst into flame after being struck by lightning. Even the cabin crew looked scared.
3. Worst Camping Spot The Leeds Festival, on a busy walkway just opposite the toilets and a 24hr burger bar – the only space left.
4. Worst Hotel Hotel Ibis, Luton Airport. The room smelled of vomit, the walls were speckled with something disgusting and the toilet seat was on the floor. Even the kids turned their noses up at the dinner buffet.
5. Worst City for Driving Athens. I thought I was so clever printing off directions from Google Maps before I arrived. Sadly the difference between Greek upper and lower case letters stumped me and there really is only space for one car (less wing mirrors) on many of the city roads.

Famous Travelers business travel editor, Mark Frary, markfrary.com, timesonline.co.uk

Name Matt Kepnes
Who? Boston native who put his MBA degree to use as a travel blogger (nomadicmatt.com) after getting the travel bug on a round-the-world trip
Age 28
Countries Visited 36

Titanic Nominations
1.Worst Airline Air Canada. Bad food, bad service- I’d rather walk than fly Air Canada.
2. Worst Airport London Heathrow.  I think my friend’s two-year-old could design a better experience.
3. Worst Inflight Meal American Airlines. Calling it food would be a bit of a stretch.
4. Worst Train Ride Vienna to Amsterdam. I was stuck next to a guy who wouldn’t stop talking and two Russians who thought playing drinking games at 4am was a good idea.
5. Worst City for Driving Atlanta. You go about 5 miles in 5 hours. They need more public transportation.

Famous Travelers Matt Kepnes, nomadicmatt, nomadicmatt.com, travel blogger

Name Jayne Clark
Who? A veteran staff travel reporter for USA Today who doesn’t mind a little discomfort as long as it makes a good story.
Age 53
Countries Visited 60 something

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst  Airline Practice Spirit Air’s $3 charge for drinking water. Is that even legal?
2. Worst Souvenir I like to buy old indigenous stuff. But sometimes it stinks. Literally. In Tanzania, I found this container made of hide. It was soot covered and used to mix cow’s blood and milk — a refreshing beverage if you grew up in the area. I guess I thought it would be cool. But when I got home and took the lid off, it reeked of sour milk and dried blood. Not sure what I was thinking. Same goes for the pair of pointy-toe Moroccan slippers I bought at a tannery in Fez. They use pigeon crap and goat pee to treat the leather and that’s exactly how they smell. They’re still airing out on my porch.
3. Worst Lodging I was in rural Virginia recently and all the hotels were booked by NASCAR fans, so I ended up in a “rustic creek-side cabin” at a B&B. If you took a bunch of shop-class dropouts and told them to rip off materials from a demolition site and said they could make a dream cabin from it, that’s what I was staying in. The floors and walls didn’t fit together, electrical cords were dangling, insulation was exposed, there were stains in the toilet… you know, rustic.  And just $135 a night!
4. Worst Bus Ride I took a bus from Tikal in Guatemala to Belize. I think the driver lived in the bus.  At the ruins in Tikal, he parked on a downhill slope because he had to let it roll and pop the clutch to start it. It also required another odd ritual. He was peeing on the engine when we arrived.  We were treated to the odor the entire journey.
5. Worst Travel Companions Years ago I was on a post-convention trip in Mexico with freelance journalists and photographers and some PR people. The dynamic was more class reunion than journalistic enterprise. I’ve never traveled with people who had such a huge sense of entitlement and such a total lack of curiosity. We were on a train going through the Copper Canyon and a photographer threatened to report the conductor to the U.S. embassy if he didn’t let him ride up front. A PR guy from Tennessee screamed at a young Mexican worker, saying, “I’m gonna whoop your ass, boy.” They were ugly, ugly Americans. I was mortified.

Famous Travelers jayne clark, nascar, SATW, spirit air, tanzania, travel reporter, USA Today, virginia

Name Andrew Hickey
Who? He is a blogger and travel writer with work appearing in USA Today, MSNBC,  New York Times and Yahoo! Travel. His blogs include TheBrooklynNomad, The Oyster Hotel Review, and CheapOair.
Age 29
Countries Visited 22

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Airline US Airways – All of my bad flying experiences have occurred while using them.
2. Worst Airport LaGuardia Airport in New York. Feels like a rundown warehouse with planes parked outside.
3. Worst Train Amtrak from Montreal to New York.
4. Worst City for Driving Although I am from NYC, Dublin and Rome streets scared the hell out of me.
5. Worst Car Rental Hertz at Spokane International. They lost my reservation and did not have my reserved GPS upon arrival.

Famous Travelers andrew hickey, cheapoair, hoyster hotel, the brooklyn nomad, thebrooklynnomad.com

Name Sture Bjarnelind
Who? Travel editor of Aftonbladet, Sweden’s biggest circulation newspaper. Spent 15 years as sports editor and, as a result, always tries to watch a live football (soccer) match wherever  he travels. Visit his newspaper’s travel section. Or this version in English (via google translate).
Age 48
Countries Visited 30+

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hotel The Sheraton in Bologna, Italy — for the price, at least. I was there for the annual book fair and all the hotels jacked up their rates. I guess I was expecting something decent for $250 a night with a major brand hotel, but it felt more like a cheap hostel.
2. Worst Food Iceland’s Hákarl. I was curious to see how the Hákarl compared to our Surströmming (formented Swedish herring). It was much, much worst. It made  Surströmming seem like lobster.
3. Worst Tourist Attraction Empire State Building. We waited for two hours, then there wasn’t much to see once we arrived at the top. Would have rather spent my time and money at the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
4. Worst Car Rental Europacar in Geneva. We got the car with about a quarter of a tank of gas, but they still demanded we return it full. And we pointed out several bumps and scrapes on the car before leaving, but they still charged us for them.
5. Worst Wine Virtually every Chinese wine I had in China.  The only bottle I recall specifically was “Great Wall” — easy to remember and nothing great about it.

Famous Travelers

Name Vivek Wagle
Who? Editor of Lonely Planet’s website and all things digital.  Born in India, Vivek has lived all over the place and is now (relatively) settled with wife and son in Melbourne, Australia.  Check out his full profile on lonelyplanet.com.
Age 32
Countries Visited 32 (curious coincidence)

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hotel Room A no-longer-existing budget hotel in Calcutta. Flying cockroaches, “living” mattress, shared toilet covered in diarrhea.
2. Worst Tourist Attraction Petronas Towers, Malaysia. Sure, they’re tall – but you have to wait forever in line and pay admission to get to the top, and then you can’t see anything because of the haze.
3. Worst Museum Gerald Ford Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. So tragic it’s awesome.
4. Worst Airport LAX. Some surly, clueless staff; outrageous food prices; no crowd management or direction.
5. Worst Bus Ride Siliguri to Darjeeling, W India – nine hours unable to move with my knees up by my ears.
6. Worst Flight Flying from Managua to Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast in a tiny, bumpy plane with an airline that “sometimes” made it (ie 92% of the time) without crashing.

Famous Travelers lonely planet, lonelyplanet.com, LP, Vivek wagle

Name Christopher Reynolds
Who? Christopher Reynolds has been writing about travel, culture and the outdoors for the Los Angeles Times and others since the late 1980s.
Age 48
Countries Visited about 60.

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hotel Room On a 1998 bus tour around Iran, I landed  in a cinder-block box in the town of Tabas. Vermin. Spiders. Open loft above the pit toilet, allowing full sharing of sounds and smells from the adjacent pit used by aged couple next door. Nearby lay the spot where two U.S. aircraft crashed in a failed 1980 hostage-rescue attempt. Cost for one night: $10.
2. Worst Ride on the Back of an Animal Camel, Sinai, Egypt. Besides the wooden saddle, the bony back of the beast and the awkward gait, there was the shame of watching my camel herder berate his little child-laborer daughter. Also, the thought of all the unexploded mines in that desert.
3. Worst Airport Near Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe. After issuing my boarding pass, the agent jogged out to the runway to chase away monkeys. A few minutes later, I swear I saw him giving flag signals to the plane.
4. Worst Flight Flew to Ireland despite a severe headcold. As landing approach, I desperately yawned, huffed, etc. But as my wife gazed out window at that gorgeous green countryside for the first time, my eardrum burst. Significant pain.  (But there’s good news– they grow back.)
5. Worst Tourist Attraction About an hour outside Guangzhou, China, somebody has built a sort of rural-living theme park, compete with cockfights, pigs being dropped into water from great heights, and throbbing music by that great Chinese folk artist, Cher.  Ideal  on a 100-degree summer day.
6. Worst Performance by a Hotel Maid Latvija Hotel, Riga, Latvia. This was in 1992, when old Soviet ways still prevailed.  I checked into the hotel, went upstairs to my room, and found a maid seated inside, smoking a cigarette and watching TV.  “Very good film,” she said. “Ten minutes.” Then she took another drag and turned her eyes back to the screen.

Famous Travelers Chris Reynolds, Christopher Reynolds

Name Ellen Creager
Who? Travel writer for the Detroit Free Press. Her stories and photographs also run in many other publications via the Gannett and McClatchy-Tribune news wire. Her blog is called Travel Diva, which, she says, may or may not accurately reflect her personality.
Age 54
Countries Visited 38

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hotel Room Queen Mary, Long Beach. Former luxury liner has rooms so awful they make you want to jump overboard.
2. Worst Flight Egypt Air flight from Cairo to New York after the Hajj. Most pilgrims were sick, hacking, sneezing, feverish. I hid under my blanket for 5,000 miles. It was like spending 10 hours in a germ factory.
3. Worst Toilet Grungy squat toilet behind the Baghdad Cafe in An Nabk, Syria. The cafe was charming. The toilet wasn’t.
4. Worst Airport JFK’s horrible old Delta Terminal 3. It makes me want to run out of there screaming.
5. Worst Souvenir Local specialty wild thimbleberry jam in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not realizing that carry-on jam is confiscated at the Houghton/Hancock airport. They must have the best jam collection in the history of US airports.

Famous Travelers detroit free press, Ellen Creager, travel diva

Name Randy Petersen
Who? This frequent flyer guru is the founder of the popular site FlyerTalk.com. Randy has flown over 17 million miles and has been dishing out advice since 1986 on the topic of frequent flyer programs.  He spends much of his days speaking to major media outlets around the world about how people can actually redeem their miles. Check out his new site as well: BoardingArea.com.
Age 56
Countries Visited 91

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Frequent Flyer Program Aloha Airlines. Tell me again the story of how you lost ALL your airline miles when the airline went bankrupt. Still tears in my eyes for that one.
2. Worst Flight Failed to make last call for the bathroom before landing. The flight ended up stalled on active runway and it was the closest ever for not being able to “hold it.” Didn’t want to not obey the Captain’s orders to stay in my seat. Call me pretzel legs.
3. Worst Airport Lima, Peru. Slept on floor of the airport’s Diners Club lounge years ago on an overnight mileage run. It wasn’t sleeping on the floor that was rough, it was the nearby canneries. I smelled like a spoiled tuna can for weeks.
4. Worst City for Driving Frankfurt. Not the city, the autobahn just outside. Rented a Porsche to drive the idea of no speed limits. Only lasted 15 minutes before returning the car. Too much speed caused too much stress.
5. Worst Car Rental Avis in Jordan (the country). Cars are rented on “empty” or with very little gas in the tanks … with no notice of that local practice. I found out hard way 41 kilometers away.

Famous Travelers

Name David G. Molyneaux
Who? A travel writer, editor of TheTravelMavens.com and former travel
editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He writes for newspapers around
the U.S. as cruise columnist for Universal Press Syndicate. His blog is
TravelMaven.typepad.com. He is president of the Society of American
Travel Writers Foundation, which oversees the annual Lowell Thomas
Travel Journalism Competition.
Countries Visited visited 81.
Age “Will you still need me, will you still feed me?” (64)

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Cruise On the old, old Galaxy in the Mediterranean in October
1982, in a tiny inside cabin, where, as the seas rolled all night, my wife
and I rolled, too, from the edge of the bed to the wall — bonk — and back
to the edge of bed, then back to the wall — bonk. Bruised, we reached
Santorini in the morning, only to stay aboard because of rough seas.
Beware of the Med on a small ship in October.
2. Worst Happy Hour With the insects at Parrot Cay in the Turks and
Caicos islands. The resort opened in 2000 without resolving the small
island’s bug infestation, which required massive foggings at dawn and
dusk. Happy Hour on your balcony at sunset? Forget it. All guests were
ordered inside to protect us from the mosquitoes, the sand fleas — and the
bug spray.
3. Worst Flight On Flying Tiger in the 1980s, a 747 rearranged from
hauling freight to people packed like freight between New York and
Europe. It was very cheap. We stopped in the middle of the night in
Brussels to add enough fuel to get the plane to Athens and back. “We
are now at the maximum weight,” warned a flight attendant, and I closed
my eyes as we tried to take off, inching with a groan along the runway –
bebump, bebump, bebump — for miles, it seemed, until we rose slowly to
treetop level and into the black of night.
4. Worst Accommodation A house in the Louisiana Bayou billed as a
getaway but more like a “what are we getting into?” The little house sat
next to a junkyard, complete with a limping, weepy-eyed dog. I was
traveling with three women, who insisted I park my bed wedged against
the front door, for protection of some sort. I slept little but we got out
alive.
5. Worst Propositions In Bangkok, where no one believed me when I
said I was not interested in hiring a prostitute. Problem was, I was
traveling alone, a clear tip-off. I was hassled at the airport and got several
calls to my room from an insistent woman who apparently had been
tipped off by my taxi driver. She said she was waiting in the lobby. She
still may be waiting in the lobby.

Famous Travelers

Name Fran Golden
Who? A travel writer and former travel editor of the Boston Herald and the 118 GateHouse Media New England newspapers. Her work appears regularly in the New York Daily News, on TravelandLeisure.com and CruiseCritic.com, and in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites. She is also author of over 20 travel books, most focused on cruises. Her blog can be found at www.getawaywithfran.com
Countries Visited 90
Age 53

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Ride on the Back of an Animal Outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand, I did my first elephant ride. I was quite comfortable on top of the beast, but the elephant with passengers in back of me appeared to have the sniffles and kept shooting gunk out of its trunk, at me. I got slimed.
2. Worst Souvenir I know it’s been updated since I visited several years ago, but when I first visited the Opium Museum at the Golden Triangle I was shocked to see the displays took you through the whole history of the opium trade including heroin and junkies (there were even needles on display). And in the gift shop were postcards featuring junkies with needles in their arms.
3. Worst Flight I was flying back from Sydney to Los Angeles.  I got a seatmate who was a teenager, off for a year abroad, terrified, already missing her family. She cried the whole flight.
4. Worst Bus Ride I had this idea that as a journalist I should try one of those 9-day “If it’s Tuesday it must be Rome…” bus tours of Italy (since a lot of my readers did them). I took along my then 13-year-old son. He was not happy – the trip included too many churches in his opinion – and during one several-hour stretch he stuck on his headphones to listen to music and refused to talk. If he had been listening he would have heard our local guide trying to entertain us with her impressions of the mating rituals of Italian men.
5. Worst Desert Tour In Dubai I was itching to spend time in the desert. So after a big meal with my hosts we headed off on a jeep tour. I had never heard the term “dune bashing” before. But I should have noticed when the guide adjusted the suspension on the jeep to make it more bouncy. The tour turned out to be a rollercoaster-esque ride on the dunes, bounce, bounce, up and down, stomach very much in throat. I got very sick. I surely left my mark in the Arabian Desert.

Famous Travelers