Travel

By Robert McGarvey

Sky Harbor and Ridesharing: The Update

It was just January when it looked as though Uber and Lyft were pulling out of servicing Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, the nation’s 13th busiest, and the issue was that Phoenix wanted to tack a $4 charge on every trip (both pick ups and drop offs) and the ridesharing goliaths cried foul.

Riders have been paying $2.66 for pick ups at the airport. No fee for drop offs.

Why did Phoenix want to hike the fares? Phoenix faces the same issue every airport does. The ridesharing companies quickly have grabbed dominant marketshares – but in many cases are paying less than taxi companies.  Many government eyes across the country were on Sky Harbor because every airport faces the same problem of plummeting taxi usage and thus radically reduced income.

That made this fight important. What happened in Phoenix is going to happen across the nation.

Spoiler: You are not going to like how this story ends. And that is true even if you don’t step into Sky Harbor in the next decade.

Back to six months ago and the history that got us here.

Phoenix may have thought it had law on its side but Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed suit against the city, claiming the charges were unconstitutional. That gave the rideshare operators potent cover.

And so the sides were clearly drawn. Phoenix said it wanted and needed the increased fee revenue. Both Lyft and Uber – which account for 80% of commercial traffic at Sky Harbor – said no way, they would pull out before they would pay those fees or pass them on to riders.

In November, Lyft plainly threw down its gauntlet: “We have reviewed our options at Sky Harbor and believe we are obligated to prevent the unfair penalization of our drivers and riders,” Lyft spokesperson Lauren Alexander said in a statement.

Not a lot of wiggle room in that verbiage, is there?

Look again because apparently there is.

In early April, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled the fees are constitutional – and the game of chicken was on. 

The new fees kick in May 1, by the way.

It did not take long for one side to blink.

Lyft, earlier this week, said this: “While we remain concerned about parity across ground transportation modes and affordability, particularly during this challenging time, our full focus is on the safety of our riders, drivers, and team members,” Lyft said in a statement to KTAR News 92.3 FM.

“We will continue to operate at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to provide travelers with access to reliable transportation and earning opportunities for drivers.”

Uber has yet to be heard from but it will fold as well.  

It’s all about the money, baby.

Uber cannot afford to allow Lyft to control Sky Harbor and all the more so because for many of us airport transit is the gateway into ridesharing.  Use it instead of a taxi and, often, the cars are cleaner, the drivers are friendlier, and the fares are typically lower.

If we started using Lyft for airport transit, Uber has to figure, soon we would become Lyft regulars and Uber cannot allow that.

Probably, too, even with the $4 fee, it will usually be cheaper to take Uber or Lyft to the airport than a taxi.

Here’s the thing, don’t cry for Lyft or Uber.  Cry for yourself.  Cry for the other passengers. We are who will pay the $4 fee. Not Lyft, not Uber.  Nor the gig economy drivers. Us.

And we will pay it not just at Sky Harbor but at airports around the country, just about all of which are grappling with unbalanced budgets and slapping higher fees on Uber and Lyft just seems an easy thing to do.

They will see what happened in Phoenix, a light bulb will click and, watch, airport after airport will impose higher fees on rideshares.

And we will pay it. You and I.

Updated: Uber as expected has told the Arizona Republic it will continue to service Sky Harbor. It provided the paper no statement.

By Robert McGarvey

Survey data from APCO Insight throws out this shocker of a number: 83% of workers forced to work from home say they miss attending in person meetings and conventions.

78% say they will attend as many such events – or more – as they had been once the threat of coronavirus passes.

49% also want to extend federal aid to convention centers and suchlike – venues that have been wiped out by coronavirus triggered closures.

Do you agree?

Understand, I am on record that there won’t be any conferences to attend this year. I am also looking at research data that suggest such events are fertile breeding grounds for coronavirus.

Of course I understand the anxiety that envelops event planners who are looking at a cancelled year.  Only cruise lines have it as bad – they likely won’t recover until 2021, if then.

Hotels, my guess is, will begin a slow recovery this summer.  But there are glimmers of hope for that business.

Not in the near-term for events and conferences in my mind, and that’s despite the  APCO Insight poll. My guess is that most of us will be gripped with fear at the prospect of sharing an event venue with hundreds or thousands of others. Sure, we may say we miss such events – I confess I do – but that does not mean I plan to go to any soon.

I do not.

What about the White House’s apparent determination to reopen the economy by May 1?

What about it?  The White House may believe it has the authority to reopen the economy but it does not.  That power primarily resides with state governors, and most of the governors of the biggest state economies will not trip over themselves to cooperate with this White House.  

The power also resides with us, especially when it comes to events, conferences, conventions.  When we said no after 9/11, the sector effectively shut and really did not begin to recover until 2002.

In 2001 it was a powerful fear of flying that grounded us. This year it’s more complicated: it’s a fear of a communicable disease. But the CDC said fears about air travel in particular and the virus are exaggerated: “Although the risk of infection on an airplane is low, try to avoid contact with sick passengers, avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth with unwashed hands, and wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds or use hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol.”

The plane itself may not be that high risk for a typical passenger. Right now may in fact be quite safe because passenger counts are very low and airlines have instituted new sanitary procedures.  

Would I fly today? Yes. I would be mindful, I would wear a face mask, I would wash my hands a lot. But I would fly.

But then there are the real concerns about the safety of large gatherings – which most states now ban or discourage. And that of course means conferences and conventions.

Many other large gatherings also are in trouble. Right now there are whispers – that get louder – that the fall college football season will be cancelled, certainly for the schools that play games in large stadiums.  That is hundreds of millions of dollars – perhaps billions.  

If college football is cancelled – and it is tantamount to a religion to many – nothing is sacrosanct.

Conventions and conferences also are huge business – certainly to Las Vegas, San Francisco, Chicago, Orlando, Anaheim, New York. But even to second and third tier cities such as downtown Phoenix (which is shockingly unpopulated, in part because there are no events now).

But the choice will be yours: Do you put your health at risk, especially in the absence of a coronavirus vaccine?

You and I will decide the recovery speed of the events industry.

When a vaccine is commercially viable, most fears will vanish – and good times will return for conventions and conferences. Some 70 vaccines are said to be in development, some experts are talking about vaccines on the market as early as this fall, and so there is plenty of reason for optimism.

But there also is plenty of reason not to want to see us rush into risky situations.  Social distancing seems to be working, crowds in some cases seem to be deadly, and when my life is on the line I am skipping the conference.  It’s the prudent choice, at least until a vaccine removes most of our fears.

What’s your choice?

By Robert McGarvey

Open your calendar. Search for events – conferences, conventions, trade shows and the rest – through 2020.  Delete them all. Every single one.

You aren’t going.

Nobody is.

Sure, the hyper-optimistic stupidity about a quick return to normalcy continues to pour out of the White House. Ignore it.  

There will be no return to normalcy until there is a vaccine and that isn’t happening until 2021, very possibly deep into 2021.

The impacts on large gatherings will be enormous – indeed catastrophic.

I had been more optimistic myself a few months ago, when I still envisioned personally attending late Spring events. All by now have officially been cancelled.

But there no longer is reason to think even fall events will happen.  Probably they won’t. There’s this from the Skift event manager blog: “the research uncovered how large events are at the core of how the virus spread. The Atalanta-Valencia soccer match, the Cologne Carnival. In the U.S., Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the whole of spring break in Florida are currently viewed as super-spreading events.

Masses of people in prolonged contact seem to be the obvious conduits for the virus’ spread.”

The piece refers to research by Prof Hendrick Streeck in Germany and it appropriately cautions that the research is in progress, that is, findings may change.

But for now the plain fact is that large group gatherings – in conference halls, churches, cruise ship dining rooms, even bustling hotel lobbies and of course airplanes and airport terminals – seem ideal breeding grounds for the virus.

The antidote is to stay away and that is what I will be doing.

Talk with people who have had what they believe was coronavirus and even the comparatively mild cases that I have heard first person stories about are miserable. A week or two of no energy.  In bed. Feverish. Weight loss of a pound a day seems typical and that’s for mild cases.

This is no flu. This often is a much more debilitating disease.

More severe cases of course entail ICU stays and possible death. There presently is no accepted treatment.

And there will not be a vaccine until well into 2021.  

Thus the headline on the AP story: “Virus Puts Event Planning Industry on Brink of Devastation.”

The frightening reality is that, really, 2020 is a wipe out for the industry.  Who knows how many small businesses – which the AP story points out are the engine for most events, from weddings to company picnics to convention center extravaganzas – will shutter and never reopen.  

That’s the other worry. Even once there is a vaccine, the events business infrastructure will be in tatters.  It cannot just pick up afresh.

My personal belief is that there will be a big, sweeping rethink of what it means to meet, and how and where.  I believe a longterm consequence of coronavirus and the associated economic recession will be a huge reconfiguration of meetings – and really it’s about time.  They aren’t much different from the first ones I attended a half century ago. Sure, there are Power Point shows, Skype call in guests, and a few other nods to technology.

But mainly a 2020 event is still a 1970 event and that makes no sense.

It’s time to rethink events.  Eliminate most in person events.  Add a new life to the in person events that survive.

It’s will be a brave new world and, honestly, it’s about time in the meetings world.

—-

H/T Joe Brancatelli.  There I was, pondering the mysteries of making a face mask as I planned a trip to the pharmacy across the street.  I do not sew. I have no construction or painter masks. And then I read Brancatelli’s reminder that the eye masks in airline amenity kits make dandy facemasks.  A quick search found a never opened Continental Air kit, also a Finnair kit and I was in business. No needles, no thread,.  Probably I have more such kits – which I pretty much never used but for some reason often took with me – so my mask problem is solved.

By Robert McGarvey

In other news on March 31, Marriott disclosed what it called a “Property System Incident.”

We interrupt that to report a shoplifting at a dollar store, cutting now to the live police feed of this dramatic story.

You probably missed the Marriott news because it was an otherwise busy day with acres of – grim – Covid-19 reporting and with projected US death totals now reaching into six figures, shortages looming for ventilators, inexplicable mask shortages, and, well, who really had the bandwidth to process yet another report of a hotel data breach?

Not us.

Marriott doubtless hoped you would miss it because the company’s statement is calculatedly blah.  It says just about nothing and that’s tipped off by the word “incident” in the headline. Meaning absolutely nothing.

But the Marriott statement does note the personal info of about 5.2 million Marriott loyalty members apparently was compromised in the “incident.”  It elaborated:

“At this point, the company believes that the following information may have been involved for up to approximately 5.2 million guests, although not all of this information was present for every guest involved:

* contact details (e.g., name, mailing address, email address, and phone number)

* loyalty account information (e.g., account number and points balance, but not passwords)

* additional personal details (e.g., company, gender, and birthday day and month)

* partnerships and affiliations (e.g., linked airline loyalty programs and numbers)

* preferences (e.g., stay/room preferences and language preference).”

Marriott added: “Although Marriott’s investigation is ongoing, the company currently has no reason to believe that the information involved included Marriott Bonvoy account passwords or PINs, payment card information, passport information, national IDs, or driver’s license numbers.”

The real take away from this: the continuing indifference of the hotel sector to protection of guest data. How many breaches have to occur – from Trump hotels to Starwood and Hilton and just about everybody else? How many stories have to be written? Somebody needs to say, this is a problem.  It needs to be fixed.

Actually we’ve been saying all for that for some years now and nothing has changed.

We need a new campaign.  Complaining about hotelier incompetence is not enough.

Real change will start with us. 

We share culpability. We put up with it.  For some time I have suggested that probably the only safe way to stay in a hotel is with a bogus travel credential (a novelty Irish driver’s license for instance) and using a credit card paired to the bogus ID. Then annually burn that identity and create a new one.

Shop for ID online. Here for instance.  Note: I am not suggesting using any such ID to drive a car or any similar activity – many of which might be illegal.  Rather, I am suggesting we take a trick from the oldime restaurant critic’s playbook – from the era where they practiced anonymity – when every big newspaper and magazine handed out credit cards in bogus names to their critics so they could make anonymous reservations. As long as the bills got paid, no harm done.

We’d be a lot safer in hotels if we did something similar today.

A lot of work? Yeah. But so is the persistent credit monitoring we all do because we have been involved in so many data breaches, many involving hotels and restaurants.

In Marriott’s defense this breach was detected quickly by hotel standards – often years go by. In this case, just months.

But worrisome is that two employee accounts were apparently the tools.  And that they were used to perpetrate large amounts of data exfiltration that should have been detected and stopped quickly.  Screens against substantial data exfiltration just are good practice in well run organizations.

Not apparently in Marriott.

So what should you do now?  Paul Bischoff, privacy advocate with Comparitech, said: “The biggest threat Marriott guests might face as a result of this breach is targeted phishing. Guests should be on the lookout for targeted messages from scammers posing as Marriott or a related company. Don’t click on links or attachments in unsolicited emails. Check email addresses and don’t just trust display names. If you’re uncertain as to whether a message is legitimate or not, ask Marriott using contact information found through Google.”

Remember that. If you are among the 5.2 million you will begin getting targeted phishing emails as soon as the data sells on the dark web. And it will go on for years.

That novelty driver’s license is making ever more sense? 

It’s up to us to protect ourselves.  It’s become that obvious.

by Robert McGarvey

The Global Business Travel Association had to know so it popped the question we have all been pondering: when will we be back in full business travel mode?

The organization conducted a poll and it found – no surprise – that coronavirus had wiped out lots of business travel. One metric makes the impact clear: asked what percentage of trips that had been slated for March were cancelled, the answer was 89%.

41% said all business trips had been canceled. 53% said “essential” travel was still allowed.

Exactly 0 percent said their organization had not canceled or suspended business trips.

We are in a no travel mode and the question becomes, when will something approaching ordinary business travel levels resume?

GBTA asked exactly that question: “When do you expect your business travelers to resume regular travel to the countries or regions that have been canceled or suspended due to the Coronavirus? Do you expect travel to resume within the next. . . “

Understand, 40% said they were unsure.

0% said more than 12 monhs.

1% said 12 months.

The eye popper of a number is that 40% said within three months.

17% said within six months.

That makes 57%, a solid majority, who believe something approaching normalcy in business travel will resume by September.

What do you think?

Color me skeptical.

Here’s a metric on the impact of 9-11: “In August 2001, the month just prior to the attacks, U.S. airlines boarded 56.3 million passengers for domestic service, a number that plummeted to just 30 million in September. And for two anxious days after the attacks, the passenger count was zero. It would take three years for carriers to once again reach the 56 million mark.”

Many factors came into play in the aftermath of 9-11: real fear of flying coupled with an economic downturn but, in many respects, we have the same issues at work now. Some people are afraid to fly because of fear of catching coronavirus and then there is the near economic malaise that the nation is slumping into.

Airlines again are taking it on the chin in the coronavirus age. Best guesses are that they have years of pain in front of them.

Then there is the hotel question. How many will be closed? How many will be enlisted into service as homeless shelters? Perhaps as makeshift hospitals?

Some guesses are that half of all hotels in the US will close for some period due to coronavirus.

It will take some time to re-open as a hotel. Staff needs to be recruited. Trained. The big brands probably will navigate these issues with some skill. Many independents won’t. Many independents – which comprise 40% of the US hotel stock – probably will not reopen soon.

Meantime, other, transformational changes that are reshaping business travel are afoot. For instance: many of us – perforce – are discovering the ease and effectiveness of meetings via Zoom and similar tools.

Do a few Zoom meetings and you may not see the need for oldfashioned face to face. Will Zoom replace the traditional face to face sales call? Probably not. But similar tools will eliminate the need for many face to face meetings.

And the hustle and bustle of traditional events seems ever more dated to me. I do not expect a quick rebound in events business, mainly because so much of how we come together just is oldfashioned and no longer appropriate.

One GBTA question hints at the possibility of broad impacts: Do you think the coronavirus will change the way your company conducts business
once there is no more threat from the disease?

54% said yes. That’s the number to watch. There are many reasons for business travel to undergo a transformation and one factor is the generational shift of the travel burden from Baby Boomers to Millennials and it just is not clear that Millennials want to travel the way Boomers have.

Add it up and I am profoundly skeptical that business travel will rebound in three months. My guess is that we will see an uptick in the fall and probably spring 2021 is when we can begin to think something akin to “normalcy” has returned. That’s about a year from now.

And as for event design, watch for huge changes. It’s overdue. And now it will flourish. Be very skeptical about signing up for distant events – many just won’t be happening.

The era of business travel change is upon us. And that’s a good thing imo.

What do you think?

By Robert McGarvey

It’s become a gripe fest.  People complain that they have to work at home, that the supermarket shelves are stripped of toilet paper, and – above all in the circles in which I move – we complain that business travel is basically on hold and just about every meeting and event has been cancelled.

That might seem fodder for lots of ranting from me in these columns. But, personally, I am struggling to stifle it.

Yes, I am impacted. Yes, trips have been canceled. Events have been canceled. Even a milestone college reunion of mine has been postponed.

Yes, the ineptitude inside the White House has made a fraught situation wretched – and it is hard to explain why there are nowhere near enough test kits, why the White House communications are packed with lies, and why six to eight weeks were lost due to incompetence at the top.

But here’s the deal: complaining would do no good.

And the cancellations and isolation that are our norms today are apparently doing some good.

The Skift headline frames the issue: No, It’s Not Fine to Keep Hosting Live Events. 

People have gotten sick with the coronavirus due to meeting attendance.  Proceeding with a meeting or event is foolhardy. That’s why so many have been canceled. 

Ditto business trips.

Sure, I get it, if the White House had not been inept we probably would have made much greater progress in taming this disease. But it wasn’t and so we use primitive but probably effective techniques such as social distancing and self quarantines and the impacts on life as we knew it have been profound.

But many have it a lot worse than we do.  I groan when I think of my canceled college reunion – I am Reunion Chair! – but then I think of the millions of college kids across the country who have in effect been evicted and told they are doing tele courses, like it or not.  Yes, I can see big lectures working fine as tele courses but many of my classes were small philosophy seminars with maybe a dozen students and lots of discussion and argument. How does that work now? And what about the social learning that makes college such a useful and perhaps distinctly American institution?

Then there are the impacts on the neediest. Andre House in Phoenix, which nightly feeds 500 or so homeless, has put its sitdown dinner on hold. Sacks of food will be distributed instead – but wouldn’t you much prefer a sit in a convivial atmosphere where volunteers treat you like you matter (and I have volunteered a number of times).  The homeless won’t starve. But they will be deprived those human moments that for many made dinner at Andre House special.

Now think of the many whose employment has been cancelled, or at least hours and income have been sharply reduced. Tens of thousands of restaurants are closed, or trying to make it on delivery only, and literally millions of employees and thousands of owners are scrambling to make it another week.

Think of the tens of thousands of flight attendants whose hours have been sharply reduced.

Or the hotel housekeeping staff who don’t have rooms to clean because there are no guests. Innumerable hotel workers face unpaid furloughs.

In China, it is difficult to see any recovery of the hotel business this year and maybe not next year.

Italy has major recovery struggles ahead.

Big questions loom. Will business travel ever return to its previous levels? Will events and meetings? Will flygskam rule?  Maybe our old habits will never resume.  

Etc. etc. and before we even get to the recovery phase we have to get out of the sickness and death phases and we have to be ready to mourn perhaps millions.

Easy it is to complain – and trust me I was annoyed when I saw shoppers last Saturday had stripped a central Phoenix Whole Foods bare of frozen pizza, dry pasta, and of course toilet paper, dish soap, and hand soaps.

But who to complain to?  

So many of us, in a panic mode, have slipped into a comfort zone where hoarding produces a kind of comfort and cursing out people who cancel our events seems normal.  It may not be rational but it is how we seem to think.

Do I want to look in a mirror and shout at myself?

No, that’s why I keep telling myself to stay cool.  It’s not easy. Not these days. But what better strategy do we have?

by Robert McGarvey

The questions are tumbling in: Can my boss force me to travel in the age of coronavirus? And I have much more often heard the flipside: My employer has cancelled all employee travel but I want to go, in some cases to a conference, in the other on sales calls to a potential whale of a new customer – and how hard is that opportunity to ignore?

And if you go, you just may ride in a private plane!

Whoa, who saw this coming – but who saw the head of the Port Authority diagnosed with coronavirus?

First off: as for my plans I still have travel on my to-do list and I have no plans to cancel. But I have made no firm commitments to air, that is, I am hanging loose. My advice to all travelers is similar. Make bookings that can be cancelled easily, certainly that can be changed without fees (and many air carriers are offering that flexibility). Right now we are deep in the age of the unknowns so operate accordingly.

I will not tell you what to do however.

But can your employer? Should your employer? Should you listen?

Let’s tackle the easy question first. Probably an employer can in fact force an employee to travel, even in an era of coronavirus, but it would be unwise to force employees to go to, say, China or South Korea. Noted employment lawyer and Forbes contributor Tom Spiggle, “Employers need to think about how it will look when they are forcing employees to travel to countries that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of State warn people not to travel to.”

China is effectively a no per the US Dept of State, and South Korea isn’t much better.

In the New York Post, employment columnist Greg Giangrande tackles the question, can an employer force an employee to go to Italy which by the way is singled out for a CDC Travel Health Notice which says avoid all non essential travel. Giangrande’s advice: “Even if the chances of contracting the virus are remote, given the current travel restrictions and government advisories, you have every right to decline and not suffer any recrimination as a result. “

But here’s the deal: I am actually hearing more from employees who want to travel than from those who don’t – and yet a growing number of cautious employers are banning employee travel, from 21st century behemoths such as Amazon to legacy employers such as Ford. Part of the logic is that a traveling employee could pick up the virus – then infect the workpace when he/she returns.

But that employee could pick up the virus in the supermarket, at a movie theater, in a shopping mall, at a house of worship – the list goes on and it’s not only in travel that our chances of exposure rise. Yes, we have greater risks in many foreign countries (here’s the CDC data, here’s WHO’s). But coronavirus definitely is spreading in the US.

What do you do if your employer says stay at home?

Face reality: such policies usually aren’t hard and fast. If you have a chance for a face to face with a heavy hitter in Italy, say, or New York – and you are comfortable with the risks (and have researched the facts) – my advice is go to your boss, lay out the case for going, offer up a fallback if in fact you get infected (“I’ll self quarantine and will work at home for as long as it takes” – or whatever prescription will work in your company) and very probably you will get an okay to go.

My experience with companies, Fortune 25 and 15 person businesses alike, is that there are rules and then there are the exceptions. If you want to be the exception, come up with the argument, state it succinctly and you just may get the green light.

Don’t ask to go to conferences – they are on just about every company’s don’t lists. But a good sales call, an intimate meeting with a small group of heavy hitters, a potential merger or acquisition target – those remain reasons travel will be approved.

And maybe make a grab for approval of travel by private plane. Am I nuts? Know that many, many executives are fleeing common carriers in an age of coronavirus and flying private because it’s perceived as the healthier way to fly. Rates are up, but what price health?

By Robert McGarvey

Call it deja vu all over again: A March 2, 2020 Travel Weekly headline screams: “Latest targets of fraudsters are hotel and airline loyalty points.”

I first recall writing about this in 2014: The Hilton HHonors Hack: Loyalty Programs Under Siege and How to Protect Yourself.   

Again in 2015: United’s MileagePlus, American’s AAdvantage Loyalty Programs Have Been Hacked.

I wrote about it most recently a year and a half ago in this space: Do You Know Who’s Stealing Your Airline Miles?

You might think the bad news is that nothing has changed. You’d be wrong.  The worse news is that, yes, nothing has changed and cyber thieves – knowing we now have so many ways to accumulate miles and points – are more energetically emptying out our accounts because, apparently, neither hotels nor airlines have done much to batten those hatches and secure their loyalty program against pickpockets.

What’s the allure for crooks? As I wrote in the Hilton story six and one-half years ago: “Huge buckets of Hilton points – sometimes in the hundreds of thousands – have shown up in hacker bazaars, where one vendor, for instance, offered 250,000 points for $3.50. At the Hilton shopping mall, an Apple iPad Air 64G is yours for 489,000 points – so at that criminal exchange rate, maybe $7 (payable in Bitcoin) will grab it. There are other, reported cases where around $10 in Bitcoin bought enough points to claim over $1,000 in hotel room nights.”

What a deal.

The Loyalty Security Association meanwhile estimates that 1% of airline mile redemptions are fraudulent.

But that number may be growing, oddly in part because of a consumer friendly gesture on the part of carriers. Reported Travel Weekly, “Jeff Wixted, vice president of product management and operations for Accertify, an American Express subsidiary that provides fraud-prevention services, said loyalty fraud has especially accelerated in the past 15 to 18 months, with fraudsters buoyed recently by the growing trend among airlines to do away with point expirations.”

That of course meant there are more miles to steal from more inattentive consumers.

Wixted added that the value of US loyalty accounts is around $100 billion.

US consumers belong to some 3.8 billion loyalty programs, according to Clarus.  54% are inactive and those dormant accounts of course are prime for thievery.  If you haven’t checked your Delta account in years, would you even notice if miles had been pilfered?  Of course not.

I know I wouldn’t and, yes, over the years I’ve left multiple airline and hotel loyalty accounts go fallow and I have no idea if the zero balances I see are because the vendor wiped the account after X months of inactivity or if an enterprising thief hoovered them out.

Amex’s Wixted, by the way, predicted to Travel Weekly that the value of loyalty fraud will eventually eclipse the value of credit card fraud.

As for how criminals get our loyalty program details, the surest answer is the many breaches suffered by travel companies.  From Starwood to BA, there have been massive breaches involving hundreds of millions of us, probably billions of us all accounted.  

Experts warn that many of us also fall victim to phishing schemes – where we get a tasty offer from what appears to be a known travel provider, we respond with our program details and they are off to the races, while not only don’t we get the proferred deal, our loyalty balances are emptied out.

Criminals also are known to erect sham great deal pages where they harvest credit card and loyalty program info from bargain hunters who stumble in and can’t resist a prime New York hotel room at $49, for instance.

Know this: smart crooks increasingly are determined to rob our loyalty points and miles and they are succeeding at this larceny.

That does not mean the situation is hopeless.

Here’s our best defense: check loyalty programs regularly. My habitual practice was to review an account only when I wanted to cash in miles or points.

No more. Now I check the few accounts I  have decided to maintain – three airline programs, two hotels, one credit card – monthly. I do not rely on the hotels and airlines; their track records don’t breed confidence. So I provide my own vigilance.

Nope, I have detected no fraud.  

You might want to check more often, or maybe quarterly.  A right answer varies with how many miles and points are at stake.  And what those balances mean to you.

But accept this: in 2020, protection of our loyalty balances is on us.  

by Robert McGarvey

Here’s what the US government is telling foreign travelers to the US, business travelers very much included: Just stay home.

The numbers of foreign arrivals are plummeting, a reality that long predates the coronavirus scare. Here’s a Washington Post story from July: More people are traveling the world than ever. But the number coming to America is dropping.

Of course coronavirus is making matters worse but know this: even when the virus is tamed, foreign travelers will stay clear of the US. And this means business travelers – maybe business travelers in particular – who will stay away from trade shows, expos, conferences, even in person sales calls.

Why? “Crossing U.S. borders has never been easy, but today’s business travelers face an unprecedented range of issues amidst a constantly-shifting legal and regulatory landscape. Within the past month alone, the U.S. government has rolled out three new sets of travel restrictions: an expansion of the ‘Trump Travel Ban,’ a so-called ‘birth tourism’ ban, and a travel ban designed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus from China,” said Rebecca Bernhard, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney specializing in U.S. immigration and labor and employment law.

Bernhard continued: “Travelers must be ready for increasingly-hostile questioning from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents about the nature of their travel, itinerary while in the U.S., and whether their planned activities violate U.S. work authorization laws. Without fluency in facts, travelers can be refused entry and even permanently banned from the United States.”

You read right: she said hostile questioning. And if a traveler fails the quiz, or worse still, gets annoyed by the questioning, expect border delays to extend. That traveler may even be turned away.

Welcome to the US, baby.

How did we get this hostile? Here’s the big change, per Bernhard: “Travelers should be prepared to face ‘law enforcement’ culture at the border.” She added that we all need to expect this “enforcement-oriented environment due to President Trump’s administrative priorities.”

International travelers need to know you may be quizzed about your travels – and you need to know the details, warned Bernhard. I will confess that I have often traveled and not known where I was going to be the next day until I checked my itinerary. What did it matter? I was trying to be “Be Here Now” and in many cases, a “handler” simply told me where to go and so I went. But apparently it may no longer be good enough for foreign travelers at the border. Know your travel details.

Also know that your electronics are fair game, said Bernhard. The CBP personnel may want to search your devices – that means your phone and laptop – and your best bet is to carry little or no data cross border. Leave it in the cloud. Bring a burner phone.

This is sounding like a lot of hassle? You bet. And where there’s hassle we often just don’t go and that’s what smart foreign executives are deciding when a possible US trip looms on their schedule: “Send the junior person, boss. I’m too busy to go.”

How did we get to be a place to be avoided?

What’s this to you, you’re a US citizen? Listen up. First off, Bernhard warned that “4th amendment evaporates at the border – most normal rights are suspended, even for U.S. citizens.”

That also means your electronics too, which CBP may seek to search even if you are a US citizen. Yes, a judge has ruled that searches of a US citizen’s electronics without a “reasonable suspicion” are not Constitutional. But we are still discovering what amounts to a “reasonable” suspicion. Me, I am continuing to leave most data home which of course also is a good idea when traveling into most other countries (China, Israel, Russia may top the list of places to never bring data). My work is in the cloud, I travel with a cheap, old Chromebook and I now have a burner phone with little data on board.

But here’s my biggest worry about how our border policies will impact me: We are treated at the borders of other countries as we treat their citizens at our borders. Don’t be surprised when on your next trip to Singapore or Shanghai or Tokyo or Sydney you are subjected to the third degree. It’s noting personal. Just payback for how we have treated them.

This has always been true. As we treat others so shall we be treated and, right now, we are treating foreign nationals miserably at the border. It will be likewise for us. Instant karma.

By Robert McGarvey

I am getting a question I never thought I’d be asked: Is it safe to go to a conference- from a public health perspective? Sure, we have heard concerns about terrorism and criminality that sometimes prompt attendees to question when they want to go to another conference, trade show, or similar.

Now I am hearing: Is a public conference suddenly an unsafe place because of health concerns? Note the cancellation of Mobile World…in Barcelona!

Start here: just cross off any conferences you are slotted into in China.  Very probably the organizer will cancel anyway. Panic about Chinese meetings and shows, even ones in Beijing (around 600 miles from Wuhan, the apparent epicenter of the coronavirus) and Shanghai (maybe 450 miles distant), is feverish.  Air carriers are cancelling all flights to China and the whole country – which is about the same size as the United States – is becoming a giant no-go zone.

People are also telling me they won’t go to Bangkok or Singapore for conferences.  

Asia events are easy to figure: the answer is do not go.

It’s the rest of the world where there are questions – even events at home in the US, where there have been exactly zero deaths attributed to coronavirus as of this writing.

Yet panic is rising, at a level I do not recall ever seeing in the US or Europe.  Sure, there was anxiety around SARS in 2003, an epidemic that hopscotched globally, infected perhaps 8000 and killed maybe 800.

But coronavirus – right now, today – is terrifying a lot more people.  Surgical masks are selling out globally, even though the CDC advises not wearing them and evidence is scant that they do much to prevent spread of a disease like coronavirus.  People are stampeding to try to cancel cruise bookings, an industry that has had horrific quarantines of vessels.  Airline flight crews are threatening not to fly. And entire countries are blocking entry of people arriving from China and/or Chinese passport holders.

We haven’t seen exactly that, ever, in our lifetimes (the 1918 flu pandemic is one that rivals the current disease in terms of panic but it killed maybe 50 million in a much less populous world, compared to low five figures for coronavirus deaths – and experts say flu is presently killing more than is coronavirus).  

Right now what we have is ignorance that fuels hysteria.  We just do not know that much about coronavirus, China is typically opaque and it’s not clear what to do to avoid the disease (other than – obviously – don’t go to China).  

But CDC, WHO, and other world health organizations are on this.  I am optimistic that we will soon – probably within days – know how the disease spreads, maybe even what caused it in the first place. And then the search for cures commences.

That brings us back to our central question: events and us, what to do?

The answer depends upon your optimism regarding science and coronavirus. If, like me, you think researchers will get a tentative handle on it within weeks, go ahead and commit to conferences certainly in the spring.  You may want to hold off on attending big meetings this winter – again, we know little about the disease and that dictates caution in attending large gatherings and spending time in places with recycling air such as planes.

What if we don’t know what we need to about coronavirus within, say, a month? Then you know what hit the fan – in this case, raging fear – and it will get worse, more events will be canceled, and probably we will all sit home for many, many weeks to come.  Meaning more decisions will get made for us.

My advice: make flexible reservations with the right to cancel without penalty and, no, not many actual shows will allow that – airlines and hotels do of course, for a premium price; pay it – but my guess is that events sign ups will lag for months to come and many will be welcoming walk ins through this year. It is going to be a very slow year for meetings – use it to your advantage.

Me, I am still planning – happily – on several spring meetings. Have I booked anything yet? Nope.  No need to.

Hang loose. Now is the time to do it.