April 23, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for boston

Frequent Flier: Flying the Surly Skies, Stay Positive

September 2, 2013 by

I do have some things that work that make travel less tedious. I bring a Kindle instead of a book, and that means I gain about 30 minutes each flight during takeoff and landing when I can’t use electronics. I realized I was gaining time to do other things. Now I meditate, go through some Spanish flash cards, write a quick thank-you note to someone I met during my previous business trip and then pick up the airline magazine and learn one new fact about the world. I have a blast.

When you’re traveling for business, it can be hard to remember things that happened on a trip, especially if you travel alone. Researchers found that taking just two minutes to jot down notes in a travel journal about things that you did and how you felt doing those things can make the experience more meaningful to you. I know business travel can be tough, but many of us get to see new things and new places. It’s worth making the effort to try to remember those experiences that we enjoyed.

One time I was delayed at O’Hare for a while. I wound up being thrilled that my flight wasn’t canceled when many others were. When I play badly at tennis, I get frustrated. When I play great, I assume that’s my normal. When my plane is on time, I assume that’s normal. But in the normal world, travel delays happen all the time. As the comedian Louis C.K. points out, we need to keep things in perspective. He says we forget how good we have it, even in our frustrating times.

I worked with a group of critical care nurses in Boston who had a great idea. They make an “In Case of Emergency” folder. They print out pictures of family and friends, as well as great e-mails or notes that made them smile. They put all of this stuff in a folder. Then, when they were having a particularly tough day at work, they would open their folders and be reminded of all of the good things in life. I think it would be a great idea to make a folder like this, or even scan stuff onto a laptop, and then when a flight gets canceled or you’re sitting next to someone who does nothing but complain, you could find a little solace.

Some of my colleagues do give me a hard time sometimes when flights are really late or canceled. I’ll get a comment from them like, “So how are you doing now, Mr. Happy?” All I can say is that I try to find the positive. That’s important because our brains pick up on negativity easily. One of the things we like to do when traveling is a little experiment with “mirror neurons.” These brain neurons show activation when you see someone yawning, for example, raising the likelihood of you doing the same behavior.

Sometimes my colleagues and I will mess with people at the gate and start tapping our feet or looking at our watches, as if we’re anxious to get on board. Within about two minutes, several other people will start to mimic the same behavior. I never do this experiment at my gate, though. I don’t want to be on the plane with a bunch of anxious people. On the other hand, if you smile and act relaxed, people are going to pick up on those behaviors and possibly even create a ripple effect of, well, happiness.

By Shawn Achor, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/business/when-flying-the-surly-skies-stay-positive.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Public Radio’s Midday Show to Include Local Contributions

June 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

After weeks of appeals, public radio stations nationwide have chosen their new midday programming to replace NPR’s 21-year-old call-in show “Talk of the Nation,” which signed off last week.

For the moment, NPR has lost some midday real estate. The replacement program it is offering — an expanded two-hour version of “Here Now,” an existing newsmagazine from Boston’s WBUR-FM, which NPR will now co-produce — will be carried by 302 stations, starting on Monday. These stations include seven of the top 10 markets and 16 of the top 25, according to NPR.

“Talk of the Nation,” by contrast, attracted 3.53 million listeners weekly on 407 stations, including nine of the 10 largest markets and 21 of the top 25, NPR said. (New York City’s WNYC did not carry “Talk of the Nation” and is not broadcasting “Here Now,” but the new show will be heard on some suburban stations.)

Another program that has also tried to expand its midday distribution, “The Takeaway” from WNYC and Public Radio International, will now be heard on 190 stations reaching almost 55 percent of the country, up from 82 stations two months ago, WNYC said.

Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s chief content officer, called the new “Here Now” lineup a huge success. “We’ve exceeded the goals we set,” he said.

Charles Kravetz, WBUR’s general manager, said that the lineup hit “the numbers we needed to reach to pay for the expansion of the program.”

While “Here Now” costs more to produce than “Talk of the Nation,” Mr. Wilson said NPR is sharing the financial risks with WBUR. Already, WBUR has added Geico as a corporate underwriter, Mr. Kravetz said.

“Here Now” will tap into NPR’s reporters and its online blogs like “Code Switch,” but both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kravetz said contributions from local stations would be crucial. A hastily assembled contributors’ network of 15 stations nationwide, which will eventually grow, is meant to “make sure that the program has a very broad geographic sound,” Mr. Kravetz said.

Phoenix’s station, KJZZ-FM, is part of the contributors’ network, but is also working with “The Takeaway” on content-sharing, and on assembling joint reporting teams with other stations on topics like energy. The old model of buying an NPR program and simply broadcasting it is “dated” in the digital era, said Jim Paluzzi, KJZZ’s general manager. His goal, he said, is to “have more and more of the midday produced by us live,” with contributions from all the collaborators.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/media/public-radios-midday-show-to-include-local-contributions.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

The Haggler: When Hotels Add Resort Fees to Priceline’s Price

September 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Seventy-five bucks. Much of this went to the city and state — one surcharge was to chip in for a new convention center in Boston, another for “handling parking tickets and related debt” — and the rest went to Hertz. The company charged a “vehicle licensing cost recovery” fee and an energy surcharge, which Hertz started imposing “at the end of 2008 due to the increase in energy costs during that year,” according to a printout offered by a manager.

Hey, Hertz — 2008 was, like, three years ago. But the larger point is that if these fees are unavoidable, isn’t it sneaky for Hertz to state, as the company did when the Haggler clicked his way through Expedia, that the car costs $126 for the week? It seems so, given that the Haggler couldn’t drive out of Logan without coughing up an additional $75.

It’s enough to give you the totally crazy, deeply bonkers idea that companies are purposefully using fees as an underhanded way to juice revenue. Which brings us to a letter:

Q. Your recent column on Priceline brought to mind a different issue I have with the company and its “name your price” system of hotel booking. The price you name often doesn’t include fees that the hotel requires you to pay.

Let me give you an example, based on an experience last year. I bid $110 for a hotel on the North Strip of Las Vegas.  Priceline quoted me $110, plus the company’s own fees and taxes. I accepted and wound up at the Trump International.

But that hotel charges a $15-a-night “resort fee.” To everybody. Now, if that fee is unavoidable, why is the Trump International considered by Priceline to be a hotel that charges $110 a night? It’s like walking into a grocery store and seeing an item priced at $20, which you can’t actually buy unless you hand over $25.

Or maybe it’s worse, because at least at a grocery you can return that item to the shelves once you discover what it really costs. With Priceline, you find out about the added fees when you check in, and by then it’s too late. Priceline has already charged your credit card for your stay; the resort fee is charged by the hotel when you check out.

What is going on here? Is it beyond the technology of Priceline and the hotel it lists to include mandated fees? And is it acceptable — or legal — for Priceline to require a nonrefundable payment from customers before they know the actual price they will pay for the hotel?

Hank Youngerman

Morrisville, N.C.

A. It turns out that Mr. Youngerman is far from the first person to complain about a resort fee surprise after booking through Priceline. The issue was even fodder for a class-action lawsuit, filed in California in 2006 and alleging fraudulent inducement, breach of contract and an assortment of other no-no’s.

So none of the questions posed by Mr. Youngerman are new to Priceline. Which might be why a spokesman for the company, Brian Ek, needed only a few hours to e-mail the Haggler a response:

“We encourage hotels to include all mandatory fees (resort, safe, etc.) as part of their base rate,” Mr. Ek wrote. “To date, some do, and some don’t. Those that do charge these fees will charge them regardless of whether the room is being booked through an online travel agency like Priceline, or directly through the hotel.”

Mr. Ek also noted that Priceline alerts travelers to the possibility of fees — resort and otherwise — during the “name your own price” buying process. Which is true. In a heads-up that appears before you type in your credit card data, customers are alerted about “additional hotel specific service fees or incidental charges or fees that may be charged by the hotel to the customer at checkout.”

Clearly, Mr. Youngerman and many others don’t notice this warning. But it’s there, and in that previously mentioned class-action case, a judge determined that the alert was prominent enough to pass legal muster. Dismissing the lawsuit in 2010, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl of the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles. described Priceline’s fee disclosure as “appropriately clear and conspicuous.”

Fair enough. But given that some resort fees are inevitable, why is it up to a hotel to decide whether to include them in the price listed by Priceline? A system like that seems to reward hotels that essentially disguise a portion of their price by labeling it a fee and punish those that don’t.

Shouldn’t Priceline just stipulate to hotels: “If you want to show up on our ‘name your price’ list, you need to give us your actual price. The whole thing. All in?”

Forget it, Mr. Ek says.

“Most of the hotels charging resort fees have told us that, operationally, they can’t bundle the resort fee into the base rate and then guarantee us that their front desk personnel won’t go ahead and charge it again at the front desk,” he wrote in a follow-up.

Weird, isn’t it? The world has made some amazing advances in recent years — new vaccines, Wi-Fi, the Slanket. But a resort fee that neither takes a traveler by surprise nor is charged twice — this dream eludes us. Why? The Haggler will pose this and other questions to some resort-fee-charging hotels in our next episode.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c1b6b64b5dad5eef5cdb8115971c4a72

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: , ,