I don’t remember any significant improvements in the 1980s, but by the early 1990s, it was barely possible to communicate via e-mail in most civilized countries around the world. It required a low-speed acoustic coupler/modem, or a phone cord with RJ-11 jacks if you were traveling to a really advanced country. CompuServe was a godsend, because it provided local access numbers in every country that I was likely to visit. And there was a shareware program that interfaced with CompuServe in such a way that you could “batch” your email uploads and downloads, making it possible to send and receive dozens of (text-only!) messages in a matter of a minute or two. This wasn’t necessary to minimize telecommunication charges per se, but rather because CompuServe was charging for its access, by the minute.

Today’s Facebook generation is unaware of all of this, except perhaps for some dim childhood memories of their parents screaming at the telephone while trying to connect their primitive laptop computers (I once lugged a KayPro computer all the way to Australia and back) to the so-called Internet from a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro. Now we’ve got mobile phones that work in both North America and Europe, and we’ve found telecommunication carriers that make it possible to call home and say “hi” to the family for a few minutes, without taking out a second mortgage on our worthless homes. We’ve got WiFi in our hotel rooms, though they’re still pretty expensive in Europe (15 euros a day, in my hotel here in Rome, where this blog is being written).

But ironically, things have actually gotten more complex in the last couple years — so much so, that I’m planning to create a checklist before traveling abroad again, to make sure I haven’t overlooked a few critical things. Why? Well consider what I’ve brought along on this trip to Rome: my Mac PowerBook laptop, my iPhone, a Blackberry, and a brand new iPad. Maybe it’s overkill, and maybe I could have left one or two of the devices at home — but there was a conscious reason for bringing each device along, and the “care and feeding” for each device requires some conscious attention.

For example: why bring a Blackberry? Simple: my T-Mobile carrier has an economical $19.95/month plan for unlimited e-mail activity when out of the country. It’s pro-rated, based on many days you actually need the service, so I simply call T-Mobile and tell them, “Turn on the international service on day X, and turn it off on day Y.” Normally I hate the Blackberry as an email device, because (for reasons not worth explaining in details here), the messages don’t go through my normal “filtering” rules to eliminate spam and garbage mail. But it’s better than paying a king’s ransom to get my email on my iPhone when abroad.

iPhone users might ask: why not connect your iPhone to the Internet via a WiFi hotspot, and avoid ATT charges completely? Well, that’s fine if you have a WiFi connection — but if you’re out on the streets of Rome, or attending a conference in some random hotel in Rome, chances are that you don’t have a WiFi connection. And while ATT does make it possible to use its 3G cellular connection while abroad, it really does cost a fortune — as I discovered after running up $500 in charges with my iPhone during a one-week vacation in the Caribbean a year ago. So the Blackberry, with T-Mobile’s service, is essential for e-mail.

But of course, that means you have to re-route your email from wherever it normally goes, to the Blackberry e-mail address. That’s easy to do, and in my case it requires checking one simple box on a Web page where all of my email preferences are configured. But if you forget to do it, as I did at the beginning of this trip, none of your email gets sent to the Blackberry. It was a minor nuisance, rectified as soon as I checked into my hotel, and connected my laptop to the Internet via the hotel’s (expensive!) WiFi system … but still a nuisance.

Meanwhile, you’ve got to ensure that any email that normally gets sent to your iPhone isn’t going to trigger AT&T’s expensive international charges. That requires turning off “data roaming” (so the iPhone doesn’t try to grab onto whatever local telecommunication carrier it can find in Rome) and also turning off “push” notifications (so that CNN will stop sending me “news flashes” that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is even bigger than it was an hour ago).

That was fairly easy to remember … but now I have to remember to do the same thing on the iPad, too. It operates much the same way as the iPhone, in terms of the data-roaming and “push” options. Fortunately, I remembered that one just before my plane took off from JFK.

And then there’s the mundane stuff: each device has its own AC adaptor/charger, and its own cable to connect to the USB port or the iPhone/iPad port. Each device has its own adaptor for “foreign” (international) power plugs. The laptop and the iPad have different VGA adaptors if you want to plug them into an LCD projector for a presentation.

Oh, and one last annoyance: they all want to connect to the Internet via WiFi. But if you’re in a typical hotel room (either domestic or international) where there’s a per-day charge for accessing the Internet, you’re almost always restricted to a single device. I could understand that if my wife and I each brought our own laptop on a trip, the hotel would want to gouge both of us for the privilege of accessing the Internet. But I’m here by myself — and I want to use my iPad to read the New York Times in the morning, and then use the laptop for sending/receiving email, browsing the Web, and various other things. Or I want to transfer a spreadsheet or Powerpoint file (it’s actually Keynote on the Mac, but that wouldn’t mean anything to Windows users) from my laptop to my iPad; the transfer goes through iTunes and requires a “synch” with both devices connected to the Internet.

All of this is almost more trouble than it’s worth. I sure don’t want to go back to the ugly era of communication via telegram, but I’m beginning to wonder if we were actually better off in the days of low-speed, text-only communication via CompuServe. Unfortunately, CompuServe is just a dim memory. For better or worse, we’re marching into a brave new world with all of our beeping, blinking, more-or-less interconnected devices…

Even so, I’ve occasionally encountered situations — especially here in New York, where I live — where a taxi driver would respond to my requested destination by saying, “I’m sorry, but this is my first day on the job. Could you tell me how to get there?” Back in the 1970s, I lived in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn — long before it became fashionable and well known — and I could sympathize with a newbie taxi driver who had only memorized the streets of midtown Manhattan. But when I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I still occasionally ran into taxi drivers who didn’t know the difference between East 72nd Street and West 72nd Street. Duh, there’s a park separating the two!

Of course, all of this presumes that you can have an intelligent conversation with the taxi driver; in New York, for example, you would expect that conversation to take place in English. But over the years, wave after wave of immigrants have often chosen taxi-driving as their first job; so I’ve attempted to deal with these “How do I get there?” conversations in Russian, Yiddish, Arabic, Farsi, Vietnamese, and other languages that I couldn’t even identify.

But that was then, and this is now. Technology — especially in the form of a GPS navigation system — has changed the behavior of taxi drivers … though not necessarily for the better. I discovered this when I arrived in Minneapolis the other night; my destination was a downtown hotel I had never heard of (the Graves 601, which turned out to be pretty cool), but which I assumed my taxi driver would know about. Well, not so: my driver, a pleasant young man who spoke unaccented English, said he had never heard of it. Being reasonably well organized on this particular trip, I turned on my Palm Pilot, checked one of the calendar entries where I had stored the hotel’s address, phone number, and even the confirmation number for my reservation.)

“601 First Avenue North,” I told him. Hey, “First Avenue” — sounds like a pretty straightforward address, right?

“Which city?” he countered.

Huh? Oh, yes, Minneapolis has a twin city: St. Paul. And maybe there are suburbs and neighboring towns that are big enough to have a First Avenue, and maybe even a Second and Third. So I assured the driver that the address, and the hotel, were indeed located in downtown Minneapolis.

He shook his head, as if I had asked him to solve a complex math problem with partial differential equations. “I dunno,” said. “I think I’d better use my GPS system.”

Well, okay: so maybe it was his first day on the job. And maybe First Avenue isn’t as obvious as it seems. So why not take advantage of modern technology? And sure enough, the driver had his own portable GPS device, which he retrieved and turned on.

After indicating his desire to find a specific location, the GPS device spoke in a fairly robotic female voice: “City?”

Now, I may not be the world’s greatest expert on user interfaces, but it seems to me that a reasonable system would recognize “Minneapolis” after the first few letters had been pressed — after all, how many cities could possibly begin with the letters “MINNE”? But this one, it seemed, insisted on all 11 letters being typed. And my increasingly frustrated driver had enormous difficulty figuring out how to spell the name of the city in which he was employed, and was equally clumsy with the actual keying of individual letters. It took 12 times — I counted them, and I’m not exaggerating — 12 separate attempts, before the GPS device accepted “Minneapolis” and then asked “Street?”

“What street was it?” the driver asked.

“First Avenue North,” I reminded him.

“How do you spell that?” he asked.

“How do you spell what?” I replied.

“First,” he said.

Well, he tried “First,” “first,” “1st” and probably a few other permutations. Nothing worked.

By now, 10-15 minutes had elapsed, and I was desperately wishing I didn’t have a suitcase in the trunk of his taxi; otherwise, I would have gotten out of his cab, and left him playing with his GPS device for the rest of the night. But I was stuck, and he was determined that he’d figure it all out in one more attempt.

Finally, the driver had the good sense to start all over again, and ask the GPS device to display a list of nearby “popular locations,” which led to a sub-menu of “Hotels,” which then allowed him to select the first letter of my hotel. He scrolled through the list of hotels beginning with “G,” and then said — as if I had speaking to him in ancient Urdu all evening — “Oh, it’s the Graves 601 Hotel.”

“Right!” I said.

Well, it turned out that he had still never heard of it — but at least the GPS device knew where it was … and so, off we went.

At the end of the trip, the driver dropped me off on the wrong side of the street (he thought “600 First Avenue North” was reasonably close to “601 First Avenue North,” apparently unaware that odd-numbered addresses were on one side of the street, and even-numbered addresses were on the other side). And he didn’t have enough small bills to give me correct change for the $20 bill I gave him … but at least I escaped with my life.

But the experience did leave me wondering whether we might not be better off with old-fashioned low-tech approaches, like maps and memorizing of major streets in a city …

Probably the single most important change was turning off the audible signal (a chime, like someone tapping a knife against a glass) that previously announced the arrival of every incoming email message (which my computer checked for at one-minute intervals). And the second most important change was adjusting my email filters so that most incoming email gets re-routed to one of several different folders that basically say, “Do something about these messages, but not necessarily right away.” The only email that comes into the mail-program’s “inbox” are messages from family members; and as I indicated in my earlier posting about all of this, that’s significant because my Mac desktop displays a visible count of the number of inbox messages, but not the number of new (unread) messages in other folders.

I also subscribe to a few social-networking service, and the status updates and messages from those services previously came to my cell phone as well as my desktop computer — accompanied by beeps, whistles, and “tweets” (e.g., from a program called Twitterific, for those of you on Twitter). Twitter updates are visibly, but silently, displayed in a frame of my web browser, but it’s not at all distracting.

Since I used Apple’s .Mac email service, all of this behavior is also reflected on my iPhone. I mention this primarily because it might be a little more difficult to control one’s email traffic on a Blackberry — though turning off the vibration-based and audible message notifications is still the most important thing to do.

There’s a lot more in Ferriss’ book, some of which looks very interesting, and some of which simply doesn’t apply to my little world. I’ll offer some feedback and commentary when I get a little more time available, later in the week. Meanwhile, back to (uninterrupted) work…

According to the website, the club will seat 265 people, and even though it seems like there are about 250 people scattered about (of whom roughly 249 are busily typing away on laptops), it doesn’t feel crowded at all. In addition, the place has … well, why paraphrase? Here’s what the website says:

“Approximately 13,300 square feet with seating for 265 and state-of-the-art technology. Business center equipped with 7 private work carrels, complimentary telephone service to Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama area, other than those areas, two public pay phones with credit card capability. Twelve Lenovo ThinkCentre PCs provide complimentary, high-speed Internet access. Cyber-Café features four Lenovo ThinkCentre PCs with complimentary high-speed Internet access. Complimentary Wi-Fi coverage through the entire lounge. Over 100 Ethernet port connections provide high-speed Internet access, 85 duplex electrical outlets are located throughout the lounge, four IBM printers for any connection type, one conference room seating 10, complimentary copier and fax service for a fee. In addition there are lounge areas with two 50″ flat panel televisions, quiet area with comfortable recliners, five spa-like showers, and a self-service bar offering wines, beer, coffee, tea and snacks.”

I’m sitting in a row of about 8 carrel/desks at one side of the large room, looking out over a section of the airport tarmac, where a big fat American Airlines 767 is pulling away from its gate, enroute to LAX. And I’ve got free wireless access, as well as free Ethernet access, to a high-speed Internet connection. None of the usual firewall/port-blocking nonsense to screw up your outbound email. Tons of free food, munchies, soda, beer, wine, and so forth. What more could anyone want?

Why can’t we have one of these places in the U.S.? Let’s start with LaGuardia and JFK!

I just had a typical road-warrior’s experience at the Tokyo Westin Hotel, where I’ve been staying all week: I ordered a room-service meal just before checking out and heading for the airport, and it didn’t arrive. This was a surprise, because everything else at the hotel has been incredibly efficient, courteous, and dependable; but it’s something I’ve experienced at hotels throughout the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world, and I was prepared to descend into a foul, ugly mood all the way to the airport.

This might seem a bit extreme if you’re not a frequent traveler, but veteran road warriors are probably nodding their heads and chuckling at the memory of familiar experiences. Here’s what happens: on the last day of your business trip, you’ve got a well-timed countdown clock and checklist of things that have to be done before zooming out of the hotel for a final day of business meetings, or a taxi to the airport. You’ve got clothes to pack, business files and reports to organize and put away, a dozen emails and voice-mails to answer before logging off from the Internet and shutting down your computer. There’s a flight that needs to be reconfirmed, especially if the weather is problematic, and there’s the routine of checking the closet, the bathroom, the bedside night-stand, and the bureau drawers for the stray toothbrush, t-shirt, and travel alarm clock that you sometimes overlook and leave behind…

… and, if you’ve planned all of this reasonably well, there’s a final meal to order up from room service, to provide some nourishment for the long trip home. In days of yore, you sometimes skipped this step, because you could count on a decent meal on the homeward plane flight; or you knew that you could get a decent bagel and cup of coffee in the airport coffee shop. But these days, you can’t count on any of that; you’re lucky if the airline serves a tiny bag of peanuts, and the airport security line is so long that you can’t be sure you’ll have time to pick up a snack at the coffee shop. And besides, it’s probably closed, or fresh out of coffee. So a decent room-service meal is not just a convenience, it’s a downright necessity.

If you’ve been staying at the same hotel all week, you’ve already ordered up room service breakfast and dinner several times — and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how long it takes from the moment you place the order until the surly, bored hotel worker knocks on your door. The room service menu might promise that all meals will be delivered within 10 minutes — “or the meal’s on us!” — but you’ve learned that it’s more likely to be half an hour. So, on your final morning, you order your room service breakfast 45 minutes before you need to walk out the door, just to leave a little margin for error, as well as a few minutes to wolf down the food.

All of this is so familiar, so practiced, that you don’t even stop to think about it; it’s unconscious, it’s instinctive, and it almost always works. Almost, but not quite always: on one trip out of ten (if you’re having a bad stretch of luck), or one trip out of a hundred (if the Travel Gods have been smiling upon you), the food doesn’t show up at the appointed moment. Now what?

If you’re like me, you use that margin of error — the extra 15 minutes between the 30 minutes that you thought it would take, and the maximum of 45 minutes that you can allow before leaving — for a follow-up call, to see if the delivery clerk got kidnapped somewhere between the kitchen and your room, or whether the kitchen exploded in a cloud of radioactive smoke. In the U.S., for example, it’s not uncommon for the room-service phone to ring,and ring, and ring, and ring … and never get picked up. Or a slightly desperate voice will say, “Could you hold for a moment, please?!?”, after which you’re put on hold for a few minutes, and then disconnected. Or you’ll get a laid-back room-service clerk who listens to your inquiry about the whereabouts of your meal, and drawls, “Dude! Hey, dude, we’re kinda busy here, y’know? I mean, Billy Bob and Mary Lou didn’t come in to work today, God only knows if they ran away and eloped or something. And me and Wanda are feeling pretty hung over, y’know, cause we got a little high last night and partied like it was 1999. And it seems like every gosh-darn guest in this hotel wants some kind of fancy breakfast, and they all want it at 7:30 pronto, y’know? And so we’re doing the best we can — but you’re just gonna have to be patient, dude!”

In Europe, you never know what kind of response you’re going to get. I’ve had room-service clerks in Paris tell me that because I had placed my order in English, my food was delivered to the wrong room. I’ve had humorless room-service clerks in Frankfurt tell me that I must be mistaken, because they had no record of anyone in my room ever ordering anything from room service, ever. And I had a room-service clerk in Rome tell me that of course my breakfast order had not been delivered to my room, because they only served breakfast in the ground-floor restaurant (which may have been absolutely true, but doesn’t explain why they were willing to take my order, if they didn’t intend to deliver it).

So that brings me back to the Tokyo Westin — where I had learned, after a week-long stay, that when they said they’d deliver a meal in 30 minutes, it really meant 15 minutes, maybe sooner. That may sound like a minor point, but it means that you need to place your breakfast order after you get out of the shower, not before, or you’re likely to have an ever-so-polite room service clerk trying to bring your orange juice into the bathroom while you’re brushing your teeth. Anyway, things had been fine all week: the right food (don’t even get me started on the stories about getting scrambled eggs when you ordered fried eggs, or bacon when you ordered sausage, or cold oatmeal instead of any eggs and breakfast meat, or tea when you wanted coffee, orange juice when you specifically asked for grapefruit juice, and seventeen little plastic packets of mustard served with your scrambled eggs, when they intended to bring ketchup, on the theory that red-blooded Americans desperately want to slather ketchup all over their eggs and their toast and their bacon, and maybe even their orange juice and their coffee), at the right time, served with a smile.

But not today. On this final day in Tokyo, everything on the checklist was getting checked off, right on schedule, and at the appointed moment — 15 minutes before I was scheduled to march out the door with my rollaboard suitcase, I turned and waited for a knock on the hotel room door. Instead of breakfast, on this occasion, it was lunch that I was waiting for; and the timing was further constrained by the fact that (a) the official checkout time in the hotel was 1:00 PM, and (b) I was scheduled to take a 1:30 bus from the hotel to the airport. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t just hop into a taxi, the answer is simple: Narita Airport is about 50 miles out of the center of Tokyo, and a taxi ride is likely to cost as much as $200-$250. No kidding. Everyone takes a train or a bus to get to the airport.)

In any case, the knock on the door did not come at the appointed moment; so after another minute or two, I reluctantly picked up the phone and pushed a button marked “Service Express.” A polite voice answered the phone instantly, and when I asked about the status of my order, I was asked to wait for a moment, and put on hold. Uh, oh, I thought. There goes lunch.

But she came back on the line in less than a minute and said, very apologetically, “I’m sorry, sir, I was the one who took your order … but I made a mistake. Would it be okay if we brought your order to your room within 15 minutes?”

The notion that someone would actually take personal responsibility for a mistake, then apologize for it, and then offer to rectify the problem within a reasonably speedy 15 minutes, was a bit of a shock. So I could hardly respond in the surly and hostile fashion that I use with the Parisian, Frankfurtian, Roman, and American room service clerks; but there wasn’t time to accept the gracious offer: “I’m sorry, but I have to check out in 15 minutes, so there won’t be time. Please just cancel the order.” This led to a long string of sorry, sorry, oh-so-sorry, sorry, sorry apologies from the room-service clerk , which finally got me to the point where I felt that perhaps it was me who should be apologizing for creating so much anguish on her part.

So I hung up the phone, peered into my wallet to see if I might have enough left-over Japanese currency to buy a meal at the airport, and reached over to get my suitcase. But then the phone rang again; it was the same apologetic room-service clerk who said, “Sir, I’m sorry sorry oh so sorry. Could we bring your meal up to you in five minutes?”

“I’m really sorry, too,” I said. “But I’ve got to leave in ten minutes.”

“Well, maybe we could serve your meal to you in the terrace room of the hotel?”

“Thanks,” I responded. “But I have to check out of the hotel at 1:00.”

“Yes, sir, we know that,” she said. “And we know that you have a reservation on the bus to the airport at 1:30. But you could stay in your room past the 1:00 checkout time, and you would have time to eat your lunch before the bus arrives.”

Whoa! I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that they knew I was checking out, though you normally wouldn’t expect a room-service clerk to take the initiative to figure out such things. But what really surprised me was that they had also noticed that I had placed my reservation for a seat on the airport bus with the hotel concierge, had calculated that there was probably enough time between my checkout and the bus departure for a civilized lunch (after all, I had only ordered a club sandwich and a diet coke!), and that perhaps they could thus recoup their grievous, sorry sorry oh-so-sorry mistake.

How could I refuse such an offer? Sure enough, the meal arrived within five minutes, carried into my room by the sorry, sorry, oh-so-sorry room-service clerk and an equally apologetic supervisor. The supervisor noticed that I had my suitcase and briefcase strapped together and ready for departure. “May I take these downstairs for you, sir? We’ll bring them to the front of the hotel, so they’ll be ready for you when the bus arrives.”

And when I showed up at the front desk, 15 minutes later, to check out of my room, the room-service clerk stood by my side, still apologizing profusely for the horrendous error of having lost the order. She and the supervisor then insisted on escorting me out to the bus, and waved at me as the bus pulled away.

I’m writing all of this on the bus ride to Narita — which takes forever — and I couldn’t resist the temptation to peek at my hotel bill. I wonder … it really would be too much to expect, but I wonder … hmmm, yes, they did put the room-service lunch charge on the bill. After all, TANSTAAFL: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

But I’ll tell you something: next time I come back to Tokyo, I know where I’m going to stay. And if the nice people at the Tokyo Westin would like to bring about peace on earth and good will toward men, I have a long list of hotels in Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, and a dozen cities around the U.S. where the sorry sorry, oh-so-sorry room-service clerk could teach a bunch of people what service really means.

From this perspective, this blog posting is merely a snapshot in time, a small vignette of what business travel is like in late 2006. For other business travelers at this same point in time, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it; like all business trips these days, it had its high moments and low moments. But if this blog survives another ten years, I’ll be curious to see whether my children, grandchildren, or I think any of it is quaint, obsolete, or still “normal.” There’s no question that many of the services, accessories, and experiences in today’s travel world would have seemed quite exotic to me 20-30 years ago. But it’s also sad to see how many things that we took for granted (like strolling up to an airline gate to meet an arriving passenger, even if I wasn’t a ticketed passenger myself), or appreciated as quite special (like the Pan Am dinner flights to London), have now faded away — most likely never to be seen again.

I started musing about all of this a couple days ago, when I embarked upon what was supposed to be two back-to-back business trips to Miami, interspersed in the middle of the week with a day of personal appointments in New York. The Sunday-night flight from LaGuardia to Miami was packed, with every seat occupied, as most of them seem to be these days; when I asked the gate agent if there was any chance of a frequent-flyer upgrade to first class, she grimaced and gave me a look that said, “Don’t be ridiculous; you’re just wasting your time, dude.” So I got on the plane, and — as I’ve done for over 20 years — promptly fell asleep, and remained unconscious for the entire 3-hour flight. Consequently, I avoided the insulting experience of being offered a $4 “snack pack” consisting of crackers, cheese, a small candy bar, and a couple of other tid-bits of junk food. There was a time when stuff like this would have been part of the free snacks, before an overcooked meal of soggy pasta, rubber chicken, or mystery meat; but those days are long gone. But, hey, the basics were just fine on this flight: it left on time, it arrived on time, and it avoided bumpy weather enroute.

I stayed at the Miami Intercontinental on this trip, which I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting before; it’s a great hotel, overlooking Biscayne Bay, and I highly recommend it for business travelers. Since so many hotels manage to lose reservations these days (like the Jersey City Hyatt Regency, which managed to lose my confirmed early-morning check-in after a redeye flight from California, and which I will never stay in again, for the rest of my life), I make it a point to call the hotel a day before my business trips, just to make sure that the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone can confirm that my reservation still exists. No problems with the Intercontinental: the confirmation was fine; the checkin was fast, friendly, and efficient; and the room was spacious and clean. There was a 24-hour fitness center, which was great, but one small hitch: if you wanted to exercise early in the morning or late at night, you had to first go down to the front desk to get a separate key. This struck me as odd: all of the keys were the typical electronic credit-card kind of devices, which means they had magnetic stripes encoded with whatever information the hotel needed to keep track of me as a guest. So why give me a second one, especially since neither key had any externally-visible identification or distinguishing marks. How could I tell which key was which? Well, with the benefit of a college education, I finally decided to put one key in my left pocket, and one key in my right pocket; still, I couldn’t help wondering whether this was a “feature” of all Intercontinental hotels, or just a quirk in its Miami facility.

Similarly, when I looked for a high-speed Internet connection in the room, I found that they had both an Ethernet connection and a wireless connection. I was feeling lazy, so I prepared myself to accept the usual daily charge of ten, twelve, or perhaps even 15 dollars for the service. But the login procedure informed me that I would have to make a phone call to the front desk in order to receive a personalized PIN number. Huh? This is almost as backwards as the hotels I’ve visited in Amsterdam and Rome earlier this year, where a personal visit to the front desk was often necessary in order to receive the cryptic code that would enable Internet access for a day. Most American hotels these days simply add the daily charge to the room bill, making it trivially easy for lazy people like me to incur the cost; it’s annoying when you find that you’re dealing with an Internet service provider that has no connection with the hotel, and insists that you type your credit card number, home address, phone number, and half a dozen other pieces of personal data. But a call to the front desk? Bah, humbug! I sighed, and pulled out my Verizon broadband-modem card, plugged it into the side of my laptop, and was connected — independently of the hotel — in a matter of seconds. Of course, I should have done that from the very beginning; but the hotel’s quirky behavior cost them $10 they could easily have earned from me.

Still, this is all quite nit-picky: the point is that in addition to my own independent means of Internet access, the hotel provided two reasonable mechanisms (WiFi and Ethernet) for getting online. And of course, that’s been true in almost every first-class business hotel — not to mention a large number of Motel-6 and Holiday-Inn level hotels — for nearly five years. Not to have such service is roughly equivalent to not having electricity or a shower in the room. On the other hand, the electricity is “free,” as is the shower; its price is bundled into the overall cost of the room, so the hotel guest doesn’t have to be annoyed by seeing it as a separate item. I wonder how many more years it will take before Internet access is treated the same way; my personal experience is that less than 25% of the hotels around the U.S. provide free Internet service. (On the other hand, perhaps 5-10 years from now, everyone will have their own personal mechanism for accessing the Internet, in which case the hotel’s mechanism will become just as irrelevant as their overly-expensive landline phones are today. When’s the last time you made a long-distance call from a landline phone in a hotel room?)

Anyway, having sorted out these details, I turned in early so that I could get up at 5 AM and have time for a good session in the fitness center before starting a day’s work. After the slightly annoying side trip to the front desk to get the special key, I walked into the fitness center at 5:45 — and found that there were already half a dozen other guests busily running, cycling, lifting weights, and flailing about with grim determination. By the time I left at 7:30, there were well over a dozen people, and all of the treadmills were occupied. Fortunately, the Intercontinental’s fitness center is large and spacious, with plenty of room between machines; there were plenty of towels, and separate locker rooms for men and women. I’ve been in hotels — including some on the level of Hiltons, Marriotts, and Hyatts — where the fitness centers have been about the size of a broom closet, and where one or more of the machines were broken. And I’ve been in some — notably the O’Hare Airport Hilton in Chicago — that were two or three times more crowded than the Miami Intercontinental. Twenty years ago, none of this really mattered to business travelers; maybe it mattered ten years ago, but I wasn’t very conscientious about exercising at the time. Now it matters to me, and to everyone else; and one of the key items that I check on a hotel website, before deciding whether to stay in hotel A, B, or C in a new city, is the page describing their fitness center. I have a feeling that these facilities will gradually become better and better, in the years to come.

Having exercised, showered, dressed, and eaten, I headed off to my client’s office for what was supposed to be two days of work, then a quick return to New York, and two more days in Miami at the end of the week. But unexpected events arose, as they so often do in the business world, and by mid-afternoon of the first day, it was clear that the rest of the week’s meetings would have be canceled, and rescheduled for early January. As every business traveler knows, changes like this create a chain of events, as well as a few key questions. The first is: what alternative flights should I consider, and are there any seats on those flights? In the good old days, this required only one toll-free phone call, to a human being whose knowledge of the travel industry was of paramount importance when sudden changes to the itinerary were necessary: a travel agent. Well, those days are obviously long gone, and we’re all on our own now.

Because this is such a common event, I pre-program my Palm Pilot with all available flights to and from my destination, as part of a checklist of items on the day before my trip. Obviously, you can do this online — if you have an Internet connection. But if you’re sitting in a client’s office, with firewall security mechanisms expressly designed to prevent visitors from getting on their network (more about that in a moment), then you’re left with the option of using your cell phone to call the airline you originally thought would take you home, and see if they have any alternatives. I don’t bother with that any more; I used a program called WorldMate Pro, from Mobimate, to give me a list of all flights, on all airlines, on the day of departure, and the day of return; it requires Internet access to retrieve the information and download it onto my Palm Pilot, but once I’ve got it, I can access it offline. Once I see what my options are, then I can call the appropriate airline(s) to see what availability they have. I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish all of this, but it’s pretty straightforward; all it requires is a little planning before the trip begins, in anticipation of unexpected changes. Of course, a change like this also requires canceling whatever flights and reservations have already been set up; in my case, it required canceling a hotel reservation, an airline reservation, and a reservation for a car service that was scheduled to take me to the airport for the second half of my trip. Three simple phone calls on my cell phone, no big deal; but I couldn’t help wishing that an “intelligent agent” could have taken care of all of this automatically, without my having to remember which reservations had to be canceled. Once upon a time, it would have been automatic: it was called a travel agent.

One last detail about the business meeting, before we move on to the airport for the return flight home. As mentioned above, most business organizations today have fairly extensive firewalls, passwords, and other forms of security to prevent unauthorized access to the internal corporate network. That’s all quite understandable, but it’s also quite a nuisance for invited guests and visitors who plan on spending a day within the corporate environment. I’m surprised by how few businesses provide a “public” WiFi access, their reception area and/or designated conference rooms, for such occasions. Indeed, that’s one of the main reasons I originally acquired my Verizon broadband modem; even if I could access the Internet via the client’s protected network, I didn’t want them looking at the email messages I was sending, or the websites I was visiting (yes, I can use SSL-encrypted email; but I’m not so sure about the website accesses). Anyway, my Miami client did provide a public WiFi access, which I found quite civilized.

Okay, so the trip has been rescheduled; I’ve canceled all the necessary reservations, found a convenient flight home, checked out of my hotel, and hopped into a taxi for the ride back out to Miami airport. Nothing special here, other than the surprising extent of bumper-to-bumper gridlock; I was really happy I had allowed a full hour for the taxi ride, even though it would normally take less than half an hour. Once at the airport, I checked in at the online kiosk system at American Airlines, for one simple reason: there really wasn’t any option, unless you had a first-class ticket. I was flying economy, and desperately hoping for a frequent-flyer upgrade; to my surprise, I actually got one, and was ready to head for the security line.

This whole business of checking in at the airport has undergone quite a few changes since the awful events of September 11, 2001; but the kiosk system for getting a boarding pass, and checking baggage, seems to have settled down fairly nicely. I had to admit that I avoided using the kiosks for several months after they were first introduced; they tended to be overcrowded and often malfunctioned, and I simply wasn’t sure I trusted them. But I now use them regularly with American, Delta, United, and a few other lesser airlines; and with occasional exceptions, they’re fast, efficient, and user-friendly (e.g., you can even use them to apply for a one-day pass at the airline’s frequent-traveler lounge). I see these devices continuing to improve, and add new functionality; indeed, they’ll probably acquire all of the functionality once reserved exclusively for the ticket agents behind the desk, who had to memorize all of those cryptic codes for the SAABRE system, and others of its ilk.

There are a couple of things that are still a nuisance, though, especially in the post-9/11 world: baggage and the metal-detector. If my trip is only a couple days long, I prefer to carry my baggage on-line; but after the rumored terrorist incident in London during the summer of 2006, that now requires packing small tubes of toothpaste, shampoo, and other toiletries, into a clear zip-lock bag. And I’ve noticed on my last few trips that the passageway up to the metal detector now requires walking past a serious-looking guard who sits behind a large table filled with exhibits of disallowed liquid containers: bottles of water, large tubes of shampoo, and dozens of other mysterious items that may be instantly recognizable to fashionable women travelers, but not to simple-minded klutzes like me. The whole security system seems quite bizarre to me, and every time we get used to a particular set of procedures (do we take our shoes off, or leave them on? what about belt buckles? can laptops go in the same tray as the clear plastic zip-lock bag of toothpaste?), they change again. I can’t help wondering whether we’ll still be going through such rituals ten years from now; sometimes I think the whole thing will be abandoned, and other times I think we’ll all fly naked, using a separate service like Federal Express to ship our luggage. On the other hand, I think metal detectors, and the fundamental policy of allowing only ticketed passengers into the boarding area, has been with us for over 20 years now, ever since the airplane hijackings in the early 1980s; so maybe we’re stuck with this forevermore.

Because the airline food is not awful these days, but downright non-existent, I spent more time and energy than ever before trying to get a decent meal before get on the plane; and this has become more practical since 9/11, because you have to get to the airport an hour or two before the flight, so there’s plenty of time to eat. In the old days, it was hard to find anything but junk-food outlets and smoke-filled bars in airports; things have definitely improved in most airports today. Well, things weren’t quite so good in Miami — at least not in whatever section of the huge, rambling airport I found myself in. There was a Burger King, a Starbucks, a sleazy bar, a depressing Cuban restaurant, and a noisy bar/grill known as the Jose Cuervo Tequileria — with a large sign at the front entrance that said, “All work and no play means you’re missing the point.”

Well, it was the last restaurant along the long path from the check-in area to the gate, so I decided to take my chances. There were seven different brands of tequila on the menu, along with margaritas and other specialty drinks (slippers and slappers, whatever they may be ), every conceivable form of Mexican food … and some spicy crabcakes, surrounded by a fresh salad. I skipped the tequila, and stuck with a Diet Coke; together with the spicy crabcake, it turned out to be quite edible. As usual in such places, televisions blared in every corner; Lou Dobbs was throwing a minor tantrum on CNN, complaining about the state of illegal immigration. Three or four people pounded away on their laptop computers while munching on tacos, quesadillas, and taco chips; and a few others did their best to focus on paperback novels they had picked up in the adjoining newspaper shop. I suspect that if I return to this same location ten years from now, it will be a different style of restaurant — but the noise level will be the same, and the restaurant patrons will be behaving the same way. The only thing that’s really different these days is that in some restaurants — and possibly even some other, as-yet undiscovered part of Miami airport — you can sit down at a quiet restaurant, and order a really decent meal. I’ve enjoyed such meals at airports in Chicago, New York, Washington, and San Francisco, to name a few; I suspect it will become universal, sooner or later.

After dinner, I wandered up to the American Airlines Admiral’s Club for a little while. Like most airline clubs these days, it provides a commercial (T-Mobile Hotspot) WiFi service; and it’s got the usual amenities of snacks, drinks, work-cubicles, etc. The WiFi mechanism has been available for a few years now, and the latest addition seems to be half a dozen full-sized, publicly-available desktop PC’s. One was broken, but the rest were being used by people who were obviously getting some serious work done; no video games or mindless Web-surfing was evident. All of this used to be much more important to me a few years ago, but with my cell phone, my BlackBerry, and my Verizon broadband modem card, I’m no longer as dependent on the airline clubs. The snacks are still great, and several of them now offer a fairly complete menu (if you consider a pastrami sandwich, or chicken caesar salad, a “complete” menu); and they’re still a lot more quiet and peaceful than the crowded ruckus one usually finds out in the main terminal. Also, there’s one additional advantage of the airline clubs, as Christopher Elliott observes in a November 28, 2006 New York Times article entitled “The Socket Seekers“: in the main terminal area, you can rarely find an AC outline for charging your computer or cell phone, but they’re plentiful in the airline clubs.

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of the abortive Miami trip. Our flight boarded about 15 minutes late because of minor weather conditions somewhere between Miami and New York; and once again, the flight was completely full. But this time, I had a comfortable first-class seat, and I fell asleep even faster. I didn’t wake up until we were on our final descent into LaGuardia, and I fell asleep once again as I crawled into a taxi for the drive back into Manhattan.

If I had to guess, I’d say that probably half of my experiences on this trip will remain roughly the same a decade from now. Hopefully, some of the inconveniences and annoyances will fade away; but it’s depressing to think that some of it might actually get worse than today….

I didn’t even notice the assignment until I reached the gate and looked at my boarding ticket. Thinking that perhaps the flight involved a mid-size jet with only two seats on each side of the aisle, I asked the gate agent whether seat 11-B was an aisle or a middle seat. When she confirmed that it was indeed a middle seat, I asked if it would be possible to get it changed to a window or aisle seat. With a smile and a few keystrokes on her terminal, she did just that.

I assumed I had been granted a special favor until I boarded the plane and subsequently observed where everyone was seated after we took off. So what’s going on here? Why would Northwest’s seat assignment algorithm deliberately punish me — or anyone else — by assigning them a middle seat when it must have been completely obvious that there were still several preferable seats available? Was it a programming bug, just plain stupidity on the part of the system developers, or revenge upon travelers like me who don’t have a Northwest frequent-flyer account?

I wish we road warriors could somehow reverse engineer the seat-assignment algorithms used by all the major airlines, so we would have a better idea of which ones are friendly (i.e., leaving middle seats empty until absolutely necessary), and which ones are unfriendly. For now, I’ve got one more reason why Northwest is at the bottom of my list of preferred airlines.

Admittedly, the lunch and associated silverware were provided only because I bought a first-class ticket; if I had purchased a business-class or economy ticket, I probably would have been munching peanuts in the cafeteria car. But amazingly, the cost of a round-trip first-class train ticket is roughly half the cost of a round-trip shuttle flight on Delta Airlines; so I don’t feel like too much of a spendthrift. I was reasonably sure the train was cheaper than the plane, but just to be sure, I logged onto the Internet just a moment ago — while sitting here in my train seat — and checked the price on Delta’s website. When’s the last time you were able to access the Internet while sitting in a cramped airline seat? Yes, this was made possible with a high-speed wireless modem card; but the point is that it doesn’t work on an airplane, and I understand that Boeing is planning to remove its airplane-Internet connection technology by the end of the year.

The security ramifications of the metal-knife service are interesting to contemplate. I don’t understand how a knife-wielding terrorist could force his way through the reinforced doorway to the cockpit of today’s airlines, but I guess it’s a good idea to eliminate the possibility of such terrorists running up and down the aisles of the plane, randomly stabbing flight attendants and passengers. But doesn’t the same apply to trains? In theory, I could grab both my metal fork and knife, charge up the aisle and wreak havoc upon the flight … err, train … attendants before moving on to the front of the train to attack the guy who drives the train. Of course, I’m such an incompetent would-be terrorist that I don’t even know whether I’m at the front or the rear of the train right now, and I don’t even know what they call the guy who drives the train. Not “pilot,” presumably, but maybe “engineer” or “train-driver.”

While we’re at it, the security on these trains is so lax that I could have lugged two suitcases full of explosives into my comfy first-class compartment. There were no metal detectors in the train station, and only a cursory (and I mean really cursory) look at my photo-ID, after I got on the train. And the guy sitting in front of me boarded the train with 13 of his friends, and simply handed over a pile of 14 tickets to the conductor. Fortunately none of them looked like terrorists … though they did have British accents, which one could consider a suspicious character trait, if one was really paranoid.

Obviously, the bottom line is that nobody is expecting serious terrorists to blow up a train — so we’re all allowed to brandish our metal knives as we eat our lunch. I guess this is a reasonable conclusion; after all, it’s pretty hard to fly a train into the 93rd story of a high-rise office building. But I can’t help remembering the spectacular train wreck at the end of the hilarious 1976 movie, Silver Streak, with Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh, and Richard Pryor. So who knows what’s in store for us when we pull into Boston’s South Station in a couple of hours…

Heh! I’m uploading this blog entry from the train, as we zoom along the Connecticut coastline, looking out over Long Island Sound. Try doing that from a plane…

It’ sobering to remember that we sill have to transport flesh and bones from one geographical location to another in order to participate in face-to-face meetings about this hyper-connected era of the Internet. I’ve taken four or five day-trips and overnight trips during the past month, and every one of them has been delayed by two hours or more.

But this morning’s 6:15 AM flight left right on time…. Road-warror’s advice: take the first available flight, if you’re traveling anywhere on business this summer. With heat waves, thunderstorms, overbooked airlines, and overcrowded airports, the delays get worse and worse as the day progresses.

And watch out for a new twist on the check-in procedure: several airlines, including US Air, now let people get their boarding pass on-line, up to 24 hours in advance, by accessing their web site. This sounds like a great convenience, and I suspect it reduces some degree of congestion at the airport. But I experienced the downside of this convenience when I checked in this afternoon, at the airport: I got in the line to get my boarding pass at the e-ticket kiosk, got the required slip of paper, and then concentrated on the hassle of getting through security without losing my cell phone or laptop — not realizing that the kiosk had given me a boarding pass without a seat number.

I had arrived at the airport two hours before departure, and it was only after an hour that I thought to look at the boarding pass to see if I had ended up in a window or aisle seat — only to find that I had no assigned seat. Thinking it was an oversight, I asked the gate agent; she responded that “that’s how the system works when the flight has been over-sold, and there are no more seats available.”

I understand that airlines overbook some flights, but I was still confused. “You mean the entire plane full of passengers checked in before me, more than two hours before the flight?”

“Well, I guess so, sir,” she said with a shrug. “After all, they can check in from home, up to 24 hours in advance.”

And did the system bother to tell me, when I showed up in person to get my boarding pass? Nope. Did it beep, or honk, or flash a yellow warning light, to warn me that I was a seatless passenger? Nope.

So I became the desperate applicant for one of those “oversold” messages you sometimes hear at the airline gate: “Folks, if there’s anyone who wouldn’t mind getting a free ticket to wherever US Air happens to fly, plus a free meal here at the airport, we’d really appreciate it if you would volunteer to give up your seat on this flight. There’s another flight later this evening, leaving at 8:30.”

Fortunately for me, someone was kind enough, hungry enough, or greedy enough, to do just that. I got my seat after all, but my 5:45 PM departure time was delayed until roughly 7:30 PM. The person who ended up on my 8:30 PM flight probably suffered a long delay, too; I hope the airline paid for a nice dinner.

Oh, and one more thing, while I’m on a road-warrior rant: why can’t the people who design airports figure out that we business travelers need to plug in our laptops every once in a while? Sitting at the Pittsburgh airport, I looked around and spotted roughly 10 other people like me, typing frantically on their laptops while watching their batteries slowly drain away. Two of those ten people had found an electrical outlet at some random location along the floorboard, and they were squatted on the floor, like desperate Neanderthal cavemen huddling around a fire, their laptops connected to the airport’s power supply. The rest of us, alas, were out in the (electrical) cold.

From the early 70s to the late 1990s, I traveled to Europe five or six times a year; on my first visit to Amsterdam in 1971, it was a bit of a shock to find myself in a tiny little hotel with no soap, no shampoo, and no washcloth. I got used to all of that pretty quickly, but I still have bad memories of the problems connecting to the Internet all through the 1990s. Germany was by far the worst, with telephone lines that disappeared into a bullet-proof metal plate in the wall, preventing any kind of modem connection. Things gradually improved, but it was always a bit of an ordeal to figure out what local access number would connect me to an Internet service provider with reasonable rates.

Interestingly, I’ve only made two or three trips to Europe throughout the 2000-2005 time period, and those were to Rome — where 56K dialup lines were the best one could hope for. But today, I’m sitting in a comfortable Amsterdam hotel room (which, by the way, does have soap and shampoo and wash-cloths), and I’m connected to the Internet via a convenient Wi-Fi network. It’s expensive (22 Euros per day), but when I discovered that it was blocking my outbound email messages, I was able to make a quick call to a technical support center in France, where I got friendly, polite instructions in perfect English. Quelle surprise!

The Wi-Fi network is supposed to work throughout the hotel, so I should be able to post some blog entries during the conference tomorrow … stay tuned.

We drove from NYC down to rural Virginia this weekend, to visit some friends on their farm (hence the lack of blog entries on April 28th and 29th). I was curious to see if there were any signs of a stagnant economy, or any signs of the impact of high-priced gasoline. Bottom line: nope, no indication. Admittedly, things might be much different in various other parts of the country…

The cars on the highway were generally new and shiny; I don’t recall seeing anything over five years old, and certainly no beat-up old jalopies. Lots of SUVs and minivans, only one or two Hummers, but only one or two Toyota Prius hybrid cars (but lots of Lexus hybrid cars). Everyone — and I mean everyone — was zooming along the New Jersey turnpike at 70, 75, or 80 mph — despite the speed limit of 65 mph, and despite the frequent neon signs advising motorists that “slower speeds mean better mileage.” In most of the stations along the way, the price of premium gas was generally around $3.25, but business was brisk…

We stopped a couple of times along the turnpike to fill up the gas tank, and grab some lunch. The lines were long, the crowds were thick, the people were generally obese and pushy and rude, and the kids were noisy and also obese. I’ve been reading about the stagnation of wages among the middle class, and the impact of layoffs and outsourcing; but it certainly wasn’t evident here. And what ever happened to those low-priced fast-food meals? We got our lunch at a Burger King, which was promoting a “Texas Double Whopper” for $8.29; most of the other “value meals” were also four, five, or six dollars.

If we’re in the middle of an energy crisis, somebody better wake up Middle America and let them know … on the this weekend in late April of 2006, they generally seemed pretty oblivious…