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Q&A with The Good Lovelies on their Christmas Tour

Get your fill of holiday music with The Good Lovelies.

This Canadian folk group takes the stage at Shenkman Arts Centre on Dec. 13 as part of their special Christmas tour. Where Ottawa editor Misa Kobayashi caught up with The Good Lovelies in advance of their local show to find out about their travel essentials, where they love to eat when they’re in Ottawa, and more.

What’s your favourite activity to do on the road?
Well, we bought some skipping ropes about a year ago. When we get restless, we get out of the car and jump rope for a few minutes. Invariably, we make friends with any young girls that happen to be around. They join in without asking. It’s a way more fun version of the elementary school playground! And we love eating in new places, checking out the local cuisine. Recently we had some incredible Indian food in Northern Ontario in Bruce Mines. Go figure! (more…)

Getting Better Sleep on the Road

Packing your own alarm clock is one of AOL Travel's tips for getting some shut-eye. Photo by Jess J

By Carissa Bluestone

Heavy footsteps, thunderous snores, clanging air-conditioning units, and whining minifridges — it’s a marvel anyone gets a good night’s sleep at a hotel. USA Today’s travel gurus air their most common complaints regarding sleep-stealing noise, and offer a few tips to dampen ambient noise. They also point out an amusing way that North America is failing behind Europe in customer service: Crowne Plaza deploys “snore monitors” at its European properties to walk the halls, note excessive snoring that might be disturbing other guests and offer the guilty party some suggestions on how to better control the snoring.

Hotels do seem to be getting better about dealing with guest noise. Some major chains have instituted what are essentially “quiet hours,” like those you’d find at a campground: make egregious amounts of noise after 10 pm and risk incurring fines or forfeiting your room.

Guest noise is easy to control. Thin walls and loud machinery are problems that no type of patrol can solve. AOL Travel has even more tips on getting better rest on the road, and the LA Times has a good rundown on how to pick a room to minimize disturbances.

Markets, Lakes and Gorges: Guelph to Southampton, Ontario

The Southampton shore. (Photo by Alistair Edmondson)

By Meghan Wilson-Smith

Fall driving in southwestern Ontario means landscapes of lush, ready-to-be-harvested fields of rich yellows, oranges and greens, and sunny skies dimpled with heavy wet clouds whisked by on a breeze just cool enough to bring out the wools. Air-conditioning off, windows open, and nothing but the splendor of the great Canadian north in your windshield.

Start: Guelph
End: Southampton
Overnight: Southampton

Get the map.

ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

1. Guelph is already a pretty special town, a vibrant city core with a popular farmers’ market on Saturdays. It retains many small town values while delivering on big city comforts. It’s also a great take-off point to some of the quaintest of towns en route to beautiful Lake Huron.

2. Just a half-hour outside of Guelph, the town of Elora and the stunning Elora gorge are musts. Heading north on Highway 6 you’ll see a small sign for the Fergus and Mount Forest to the north or Elora to the west. Bend west a bit and head straight to Elora. The town is mostly made of limestone, as if it were an extension of the gorge it sits on. It has lovely shops and great hiking. (25 km)

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Travel and iPad Go Together

Photo by Jared Earle

By Amanda Yiu

A new study published by mobile advertising network Greystripe reveals that 67% of iPad users are frequent travelers. It also found that 91% of iPad users regularly engage with their device for travel-related activities, from booking flights to getting directions and finding the best local restaurants.

To gather the findings in the report, titled “Smartphone and Tablet Travel Insights” (PDF), Greystripe collected data from 971 iPad, iPhone (including iPod Touch) and Android users over a monthlong period. (more…)

5 Smartphone Photo Tips

An Instagram-ed image of Montreal's Tavern Le Normand. Photo by misspixels

Nothing beats the heft of an SLR lens or the cool of an artfully beat-up camera bag, but most trip photography these days consists of hastily snapped iPhone photos. A series of graphs on Flickr show that (a) the majority of the site’s photos are uploaded via the iPhone, not with digital SLRs or point-and-shoots, and (b) the iPhone beats the pants off of all other camera phones. Plus, the iPhone 5 is likely to arrive in the next few weeks; specs to be announced on Tuesday.

But no matter which operating system you pray to, there are some common tips for mastering smartphone photography:

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Review: 4 Trip-Journaling Apps

From left to right: TripColor, Moleskine, Trip Journal, HipGeo

By Carissa Bluestone

After passport renewal and seat selection, the most pressing pre-travel concern is how best to taunt our friends with real-time vacation updates. Journaling, scrapbooking, digital instigation—whatever you call it, these apps will help you share your pics, anecdotes, and geotagged minutia. (more…)

Getting to the Sweet Spot in BIXI Bike Pricing

Photo by Ian Muttoo

By Amanda Yiu

Montreal-based bike-sharing company BIXI, which launched in Toronto, Ottawa, and Boston in the past few months, may be expanding to Vancouver in the near future, and plans for a 10,000-fleet New York City launch are set for next summer.

BIXI has grown rapidly since first launching in Montreal in 2009, beginning operations in Toronto, Ottawa and Boston in the past four months and rolling out overseas in 2010, in London, Melbourne and DC. The bike-sharing program is undeniably popular, with more than 3 million BIXI trips taken since the beginning of 2010.

For visitors, borrowing a bike at a pay-as-you-go rate can be a fabulous way to explore the city. But be sure to keep your ride short. A friend visiting from Australia last month made the mistake of taking out a BIXI bike in Toronto for the full day and ended up paying over $100 in usage fees. As the breakdown of non-subscriber fees (below) shows, long trips can add up quickly. (Subscribers can pay $95 for a one-year membership, waiving the $5 daily flat fee, but the same time-of-use rates still apply.)

BIXI fees for 8 hours of continuous usage:

$5 flat 24-hour access fee (includes first 30 minutes)

+ $1.50 for 31–60 min

+ $4 for 61–90 min

+ $104 for additional 6.5 hours ($8 x 13 half-hour increments)

= $113.50 before tax

Additionally, a $250 security deposit is charged to your credit card and refunded after 10 days.

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Travel Tuesday Q&A with Travel Writer Robin Esrock

Robin looking travel-writerly in the Canadian Rockies.

You may know Robin Esrock from any of about a zillion places. This busy travel writer and TV producer is all over the map, literally. He writes regular columns for the Globe & Mail, Outpost magazine, and Sympatico.ca; he is the co-host of Gemini-nominated TV show Word Travels airing in more than 100 countries (on OLN and CityTV in Canada); has a web-video production company; and is currently developing an adventure TV show and writing a book about Canada to be published in 2012. He also manages to find time to travel (he’s been to 10 countries already in 2011), write articles for newspapers and magazines around the world; and keep his website, www.moderngonzo.com, up to date with tales of his most recent exploits. Obviously, Robin is someone who has taken carpe diem to the extreme. We stole a bit of his time last week to ask him how he does it.

First of all, where are you right now?

In an airport, as usual. I’m sitting outside Gate 50 in Edmonton waiting for my flight back to Vancouver, where I’ll have one day at home before jetting off to Kauai.

After growing up in South Africa and living in London, why did you choose to move your home base to Vancouver?

When I was at university in South Africa, I shared a house with four girls, one of whom was a Vancouverite. She would talk about the mountains, sea and forest, and I remember thinking, wow, what a cool place to live! My group of friends decided we wanted to leave Johannesburg and settle somewhere a little less…intense. I suggested Vancouver. One of us came over to check it out and had glowing reports. I was living in London at the time, feeling like I needed some fresh air. I found plenty of that in Vancouver.

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Travel Writers’ Favourite Travel Books

Photo by Simon Cocks

By Carissa Bluestone

Maybe it’s the sight of school buses or the waning daylight hours, but there’s something about fall that makes us want to read—and start allocating next year’s vacation days.

For inspiration, look no further than The Guardian’s roundup of favourite travel books. The picks, made by 18 of the world’s best travel writers, including luminaries as “Tao of Travel” Paul Theroux and expedition royalty Kari Herbert, are a solid survey of iconic tomes (Bruce Chatwin and Freya Stark) and classic cross-genre efforts (Henry Miller, Graham Greene, and Woody Guthrie). Jan Morris, who examined Canadian life in 1992’s O! Canada: Travels in an Unknown Country, makes the list for her Destinations, chosen by Pico Iyer.

Many of the books describe trips undertaken so long ago there’s no way to replicate them—imagine visiting Greece’s famous ruins today and not encountering another single tourist. The “preserved in amber” anecdotes may lack direct relevance, but there’s a reason these books have inspired so many writers and vagabonds. Each diligently and eloquently worked to answer the “why?” of travel—a question we ask whether our destination is beyond the date line or a just day’s drive out of town.

More literary travel “best” lists you might enjoy:

Oprah’s “20 Books for the Armchair Traveler” [Oprah.com]

“Five Best Books on Travel” [Wall Street Journal]

“The 20 Best Travel Books of All Time” [The Telegraph]

“The 86 Greatest Travel Books of All Time” [Condé Nast Traveler]

Travel Trends: Why Chinese Tastes Matter

The chef at Hilton Beijing Wangfujing serves Huanying breakfast items including congee, dim sum, and fried rice and noodles. Items like this are now available in 51 Hilton hotels in 13 countries.

China is richer than ever—or at least richer than any time since the Qin dynasty—and Chinese disposable income is on the rise. Savvy entrepreneurs have been eyeing this trend and scurrying to capitalize on it. Even not-so-private interests like public high schools have thrown their hats in the ring.

The travel industry is no different. In a recent interview, Ferragamo CEO Salvatore Ferragamo advocated a more exclusive shopping experience at airports, including VIP areas for, well, VIP travellers. To support this move, he cited the expectations of wealthy Chinese travellers who he says want high-quality European products coupled with as Asian-style customer service.

International hotelier Hilton recently launched Hilton Huanying, a hospitality program aimed specifically at Chinese travellers to make them feel at home abroad. For instance, the Huanying hotels offer familiar Chinese breakfast options like fish congee and turnip cakes and an in-room selection of Chinese teas; a Chinese-speaking front desk attendant is guaranteed around the clock. (As yet, the only Canadian hotels to roll out the program are the Hilton Vancouver Metrotown and the Hilton Toronto Airport Hotel & Suites.)

Those businesses—and nations, for that matter—who don’t consider the Chinese traveller may miss out. A recent New York Times opinion piece suggests that the U.S. is losing market share to countries like France with less-stringent tourist visa requirements and with shops scrambling to hire Chinese-speaking staff.

Travel Tuesday Q&A with Marc Télio of Entrée Destinations

Marc Télio on a polar-bear expedition in Canada last year.

Native Montrealer Marc Télio was just 23 when he opened a travel company specializing in high-end trips to Canada and Alaska. Seventeen years later Entrée Destinations continues to offer travelers the highest standard in service and unforgettable experiences, like helicoptering into a remote lodge in Manitoba for a polar bear photo safari or cruising British Columbia’s Gulf Islands by yacht. For some of us, these spectacular tours will be filed under “Canadian inspiration”, since they don’t come cheap. But in life and in travel, as Marc says, you get what you pay for.

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Where Cover Feature: Winnipeg Jets Land

MTS Centre, the new home of the Winnipeg Jets.

The NHL’s return spins off benefits to a hockey-crazy city

When the Winnipeg Jets play their season home opener on October 9, Lauren Robb will be at the MTS Centre, along with 15,000 other crazed fans cheering themselves hoarse.

After all, 15 years is a long time to wait for the return of the home team.

“I’ve been excited at the prospect for years,” says the 35-year-old, who runs the website Winnipegjetsonline.com.

He’s not alone. (more…)

Thunder Cove, Prince Edward Island

Every Friday we feature an inspirational travel photo of a Canadian destination taken by one of our readers. Share your adventures by joining our Flickr Group so we can easily find you. We’ll credit you and link to your photo. If you have a particular theme you’d like us to showcase, let us know on Facebook or Twitter.

Thunder Cove, Prince Edward Island. Photo by Michael Baglole.

Why we chose it: The photographer used flashlights to illuminate the red boulders that frame this lovely shot of PEI’s north-central shore. Near-perfect symmetry, unbelievably rich colour, and a creative use of light…it was love at first click.

TripAdvisor Ditches “Reviews You Can Trust” Slogan

Photo by chrisinplymouth

Travel giant TripAdvisor has removed the well-known “reviews you can trust” tagline from its website, following an investigation by the independent UK advertising regulatory firm, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA). The investigation was prompted by allegations by online brand watchdog KwikChex that up to 10 million hotel and restaurant reviews on the site were fake. Hotel and restaurant owners approached KwikChex amid a brouhaha worldwide claiming defamatory and paid positive reviews appear on the website. KwikChex has also lodged a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The UK’s Daily Mail reported that the slogan was replaced with “reviews from your community”, but our visit today to TripAdvisor’s US and UK sites, www.tripadvisor.com and www.tripadvisor.co.uk, found no slogan at all. On the other hand, slogans on TripAdvisor.ca and TripAdvisor.au read, respectively, “World’s most trusted travel advice” and “Get the truth. Then go.” TripAdvisor claims that changes to its slogans are unrelated to the investigation and are rather part of ongoing evolution at the company.

For more, go to www.telegraph.co.uk and www.dailymail.co.uk.

Interview With DobbernationLoves’ Andrew John Virtue Dobson

Dobson at a noodle house in Tokyo, Japan.

Andrew John Virtue Dobson started his blog DobbernationLoves (on Twitter: @dobbernation) after his first solo backpacking trip through Europe. The Toronto-based blogger’s day job is at Planeterra Foundation, the charitable arm of Gap Adventures, the Canadian-based travel company that hosts tours around the globe. The blog’s title is a clever play on Dobber (a nickname) and Nation (which he sees as “an authoritative stance on what I was doing and where I was going”). Dobson describes DobbernationLoves as a “lifestyle blog with an encyclopedia’s worth of information on travel, Toronto-based restaurants, cheese, wine and beer. I post consistently throughout the week all of the things I love, whether it be covering a fashion or arts based event, or some recipe I came up with over the weekend. I share whatever makes me smile.”

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Canadian Air Travel: Only 78 Per Cent of Summer Flights On Time

Photo by Robert S. Donovan

We all worry about bad weather flight delays in the winter, we even come to expect them in a country like Canada where climates are more wild than mild. Come summer, if you expect delays to go away, you’d be wrong. Data compiled by QMI Agency showed that during June and July roughly 78 per cent of flights on Canada’s three major carriers arrived on time. Compare this to the US where an estimated 76.6 per cent of flights within that country are on time, and we’re only slightly ahead.

In Canada, flights from Toronto to the East Coast look to be the most frequently delayed of all routes. You can read more on individual air carriers on-time estimates and what the impact of delayed flights on the economy, here.

Gap year students may forego Canadian travel plans due to tuition hikes

Photo by Patrick Haney

The gap year may be a thing of the past in England. According to the Daily Mail, due to upcoming hikes in tuition, students are foregoing the tradition of taking a year off before heading to university to travel and work abroad. Canada is a popular choice for gappers with 5,000 one-year work visas available to U.K. citizens age 18 to 35 this year through the International Experience Canada program. (more…)

Interview with Gregg Tilston, Global Social Media Leader, of Flight Centre

Gregg Tilston, of Flight Centre, skiing in Big White. Photo: Gregg Tilston

Gregg Tilston is the Global Social Media Leader for the travel agency, Flight Centre. In overseeing the strategy for regional Social Media specialists (in countries such as Australia, South Africa and England), he is constantly on the go and plugged in. In fact, he conducted this interview from Brisbane, Australia! We tapped into his life as a business traveller and his tips on exploring Canada.

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The CN Tower opens its latest attraction, EdgeWalk, to the public today

CN Tower Edgewalk View. Photo: CN Tower EdgeWalk

The CN Tower’s latest attraction, EdgeWalk, takes thrill seekers to new heights today. The first of its kind in North America, EdgeWalk is the world’s highest full circle hands-free walk encircling the top of the CN Tower’s main pod, 356 metres, (1168 feet, 116 stories) above the ground. The half-hour experience, which includes re-admission into the CN Tower’s other attractions (Look Out, Glass Floor, Sky Pod Levels, movie and ride) costs $175.
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Travel Tuesday – Interview with Dylan Lowe of The Grand Canadian Hitchhike

Dylan Lowe of The Grand Canadian Hitchhike. Photo: Dylan Lowe

Dylan Lowe, also known in blogger circles as The Traveling Editor, is no stranger to hitchhiking. He’s managed to travel his way through Morocco, Spain, New Zealand and Germany by the kindness of others. His current expedition is the Grand Canadian Hitchhike where he has hitched his way through each province from Vancouver to Ontario, and is continuing east to Halifax. We were able to prod Dylan away from the road for a few minutes to ask him a few questions about his journey.
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