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A reporter at a major publication is looking to find travelers who have missed flight connections. If you have a “misconnect” story, please use the contact form to drop me a line, with your contact information. I will pass it along to the reporter. Thanks.

I was guest blogging earlier today over at the Consumerist. Nice to be invited back ! (I had the pleasure of blogging there once before, back in September last year.) Thanks to Ben and Meg for letting me sit in.

Here’s are some of the posts that went up today. Many are related to travel. Shocking!

- Can’t Drive 55? Find Out Where to Slow Down
- Recharge Your Batteries For Free At Airports
- Will More Fuel Efficient Cars Lead To Cheaper Beer?
- Howto: Get Your Name Off The No-Fly List
- Point/Counterpoint: JetBlue’s Apology Isn’t Enough

Some shameless self-promotion:
I have a piece published in the March 2007 issue of FastCompany on new and forthcoming improvements to the car rental experience.

While you’ll obviously want to buy dozens of copies of the magazine to share with your friends and family, you can also read the text online here. You’ll miss out on the snappy layout and artwork by reading it online, though!

The March of Dimes Foundation is raising money by auctioning off a first-class travel package on Continental Airlines, with all proceeds benefiting the charity. The 10-day auction starts today on eBay.

The winner of the auction gets “round trip, first-class transportation, dinner for two with executives from Continental and Boeing, a night at the Renaissance in Seattle, a tour of the Boeing plant and two seats aboard the Ferry Flight of their newest 777. All proceeds from the winning bid will go directly to the March of Dimes Foundation.”

Mmm… that new plane smell…

For more details on how to bid, click here.

THE 2007 TRAVVIES

It’s award season! The Oscars, the Grammies, the … Travvies?

As you know, travel blogs of all stripes are increasingly important outlets for great information and great writing. Travel bloggers may cover the destination, the journey, or both. They might focus on business, leisure, or some combination. But at the end of the day, they’re about a space outside of the normal confines of home and office.

Other blog “award shows” exist out there, such as the Webbies or the Weblog Awards, but despite there being thousands of travel blogs, the travel category has never been included in these other awards. Thus, the Travvies were born.

WHO IS ELIGIBLE FOR THE TRAVVIES?

Any travel blog that existed in 2006 and that generated at least 52 posts in 2006 is open for consideration. The primary focus of blogs should be on some aspect of travel. While quality travel blogs are written in many languages, we will unfortunately only consider English-language blogs for the Travvies.

WHAT’S THE PROCESS?

1) Nominees will be solicited from the general public for one week, beginning Monday, February 5, 2007. Readers will be asked to post their nominations for the appropriate category via the comments section of the post announcing that category.

2) When the nomination process is closed, a panel of invited judges will investigate and select their top 3 selections in each category. The five blogs in each category that are most often chosen by the judges as finalists will be presented as the finalists for each respective category. Judges have been invited on the basis of their expertise in travel, media, and web culture. To prevent conflict of interest, no one who themselves writes a travel blog can serve as a judge. To prevent “tampering,” the judges’ names will be announced along with the finalists, not before. As I am organizing the contest, my own site, Upgrade: Travel Better, will not be eligible for any nomination.

3) Finalists will be announced on February 21, and voting will begin immediately via an online poll. Polling closes February 28 at 6pm, Chicago time (CST).

4) The winner in each category will be that finalist that receives the most votes from the general public. Winners will be announced on March 2. While there are no prizes beyond the honor of winning, each winner and nominee will be provided with a graphic to optionally display on their sites.

CATEGORIES

1. Best Travel Blog
As the overall winner, this award will go to a blog whose travel-related writings have been consistently interesting, entertaining, useful, well-written, or otherwise worth spending time reading.

2. Best Destination Blog
This award celebrates the best travel blog focusing on particular destinations — cities, countries, whatever. Quality writing and/or photography that make you want to book a flight to that location.

3. Best Informative/Practical Travel Blog
This award goes to a travel blog that provides news, commentary, advice, or general insight into the workings of travel. Unlike a destination blog, this blog is more practically minded.

4. Best Group-Written Travel Blog
This award celebrates travel blogs consistently written by two or more authors, regardless of subtopic.

5. Best Single-Author Travel Blog
This award celebrates the best travel blog writing by a single blogger. Again, the topic is open, as long as there is only one regular poster.

6. Best Photography on a Travel Blog
Some blogs focus more on the visuals than the writing. This award celebrates the best in visual media on a travel blog.

Watch this space for updates. (No nominations now, please.) If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment or use the contact link to send me an e-mail.

The Registered Traveler program is sure getting a lot of attention. If you’ve ever participated in the Clear Registered Traveler Program or any TSA-sponsored registered traveler trials, a journalist for a major American travel magazine is interested in interviewing you. This is not the same request as posted here two weeks ago.

If interested, click the “contact” link at the top right of the blog, and I’ll forward your note to the reporter.

Have you ever participated in the Clear Registered Traveler Program or any TSA-sponsored registered traveler trials?

If so, a journalist for a major American financial magazine is interested in interviewing you. If interested, click the “contact” link at the top right of the blog, and I’ll forward your note to the reporter.

Sorry, folks, but a particularly tenacious hacker has the upgradetravelbetter.com servers hamstrung again. The site was down for hours, and it’s working sporadically right now. This is really ticking me off, as you can imagine. Hopefully back to normal posting soon.

First off, happy New Year! May your 2007 be a good one, and may all your travels be safe.

A small public service announcement: As you can tell, if you are reading this, the site is back up. Performance may still be slow, however. (A new IP number had to be assigned to the site, since the denial-of-service attack on the old server was just relentless. The new information is still winding its way through the domain name servers of the world, so it could be a day or two before we’re fully back to normal. For the record: This really, really sucked.)

Back to regular posting soon!

Thanks for your patience this last week, and once again, all the best for the New Year.

My web hosting administrators tell me that this domain’s servers are the subject of a denial of service attack right now. Pages will be slow to load until this is cleared up, hopefully soon. Thanks for your understanding.

Welcome to the new home of Upgrade: Travel Better. Same blog, different address, more features (coming soon). The old site will no longer be updated.

If you haven’t subscribed to the feed, you’re invited to do so. You also have the option of receiving new posts via e-mail; there is a sign-up option in the “Syndicate” section of the right column.

In some ways, it was hard to leave the old site (and its Google PageRank) behind. All in all, Blogger and Blogspot.com have been generally good to me, and I feel a little bad moving the site away (especially after they named the site a “Blog of Note” a few weeks ago…) But the interface has its limitations, and I’ve been frustrated with repeated site downtime and general reliability.

For those who might care, this new site runs on WordPress and is hosted on BlueHost (affiliate/referral link), which I can recommend as a fantastic bang for the buck.

All the old content will eventually appear here. The posts (including your comments!) are all already here, but the graphics haven’t transferred. All in good time. I’ll be tinkering with layout, updating categories, transferring images, etc., for weeks to come, but the transition is underway. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and welcome (back).

I don’t know why I’ve neglected to mention this — I just keep forgetting to post about it — but I’ve enjoyed sitting in with the team over at The Consumerist as a guest blogger this past week. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Gawker Media site that acts as an irreverent consumer advocate.

Here is a small sampler of posts on travel related issues that I put up over at their site in the last week:
- Laptoppa Non Gratta: Virgin Atlantic Restricts Dell and Apple Notebooks
- This Post is a Threat to Security
- J.K. Rowling’s Voodoo That She’ll Do Do
- Harass Your Way to (Eventual) Refunds

And here are a few posts unrelated to travel, but what the heck:
- Watching Stupid People on TV Really Does Make You Stupid
- Waiters Lobby for Mandatory 20% Tips
- The Geography of Usury
- Anger God by Eating Foie Gras

My thanks to John and the vacationing Ben for letting me join in the snarky fun.

tags: travel | Consumerist