Debunking Travel Myths

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That being said, my friend Leonora was bumped up to business class last year because she had the right shoes. Leonora has a bad right hip and needs to fly in a coach seat with an aisle on her right. When she booked a flight to visit family in London, I called a friend at the airline and asked him to flag her request. He did—and also apparently marked her as a V.I.P. When Leonora appeared at the gate, the agent looked at her comfortable shoes and asked, “Do you have a pair of high heels?” Leonora produced a pair from her carry-on, slipped into them, and the gate agent proceeded to put her in the last available seat up front.

The Hacked Key Card

Hotels have switched from traditional metal room keys to computerized plastic key cards, giving rise to a weird urban-travel legend. Paranoid travelers are concerned that hotels encrypt credit-card details on the magnetic stripe of the key cards; then, once a guest checks out and returns the key card to the front desk, unscrupulous hotel clerks hack the credit-card number and go on spending sprees.

Pure fantasy. Although hotels can encrypt your key card with credit-card information, they almost never do. And despite an endless series of “tips” in the last year, I’ve never seen a police report or legal documents that prove a person’s financial details were lifted from a hotel key card.

Not convinced? Then do what I do: Take the key card with you when you leave. No hotel in the world requires you to turn it in when you check out. I’ve never even been asked to do so. If you really want to worry about hotel key cards, consider this: If there’s a power failure, and the hotel doesn’t have back-up power, those electronic locks won’t always work, and you may be locked out of your room for the duration of the blackout. Unlike the key-card scam, this has actually been known to happen over the years.

The Despicably Dirty Hotel

Of course, not every tale is a myth. Sadly, the one that claims hotel maids do terrible things while “cleaning” your room can be all too true. Hygiene standards at hotels are, frankly, in the toilet.

The exact shape of this rumor changes from time to time. One year, horrified guests whisper that maids are using water from the toilet to clean the mugs next to your in-room coffeemaker. Another year, someone will claim that black-light inspections of hotel duvets and bedspreads reveal colonies of germs and parasites. Travelers routinely swap tales of hotels plagued by bedbugs. Eventually some local television station, usually during a ratings period, will send its intrepid “investigative” team to uncover the despicable sanitary conditions at area hotels. (An Atlanta station’s recent exposé of how maids clean glassware is on YouTube.com.

Hotels in every price range underpay and overwork their housecleaning staff, who then take appalling, unsanitary shortcuts in order to get their work done. And that’s no surprise: Noted lodging consultant Michael Matthews once estimated that the average hotel maid “has just four seconds per square foot to clean a guest room and is paid half a cent per square foot for her labors.”

Makes you long for the days when hotels put cheap, disposable plastic glasses in your room, doesn’t it?

The Fine Print…

A followup to my column about the hidden fees on overseas A.T.M. transactions: Effective January 26, Citibank will now charge a 1 or 2 percent fee for using any overseas A.T.M., even those located in Citibank branches.... The British government has lifted the one-carry-on rule that hobbled travelers using London’s Heathrow Airport. The ban has also been lifted at London’s Stansted Airport and many other British airports. However, the one-bag rule remains in force at Gatwick and Luton, two other London-area airports.

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