Tod has recently been writing a series of posts about his work as a professional public speaker, possibly in preparation for writing an ebook on the subject. First, let me encourage him to write that book–I’d buy it.
His posts thus far have been on research, working with a speakers’ agency and air travel. Tod hates research, and recommends that you outsource it to a service like UClue. I, on the other hand, quite doing the research and forming a talk’s thesis. That is, of course, when I’ve got enough time.
I do some professional speaking. With our (slowly) forthcoming book and a little effort, I could probably do more. Besides the page on this site, I don’t market my speaking–all the work I get comes unsolicited, via word of mouth. I couldn’t achieve Maffinesque success, but I’d imagine that, in time and with some luck, I could become a full time professional speaker.
But do I really want to? Maybe it’s the six talks in four days I just completed talking, but I don’t think I could hack the lifestyle. I find air travel pretty wearing. If I’m doing the speaking correctly, then I’m usually exhausted after a talk. On the other hand, if all I was doing was writing and giving speeches, the energy output would be more manageable.
It’s fun to jet off to Toronto on a Tuesday and come back a Wednesday, but it takes a lot out of me. And all that less travel gets less fun with repetition. It feels a lot less exotic when you also have to fly to, I don’t know, Medicine Hat or Baltimore and sustain yourself on hotel food. Plus, there’s the whole environmental impact of that much travel. I do eight to 10 of those trips a year, and that feels like enough.
I’m really just kicking this around and thinking out loud. I’d be curious to hear from others who are or aspire to be professional speakers. I’m going to harass Tod to come by and comment on the lifestyle.
On a CBC podcast last week, I heard about Solar Taxi. This Swiss dude named Louis Palmer is, with the help of academics and experts, driving a solar-powered vehicle around the world:
On 3 July 2007 I set off on my first journey around the world with a solar powered vehicle. Admittedly, as a regular citizen I cannot change the world but I can demonstrate to the world just how dire the global climate situation has become and how many sophisticated solutions to lower the greenhouse gases already exist, which bring with them many other advantages. So that we can have a better world and a more secure future. The solar taxi should rekindle hope and a zest for life, set an example to counteract resignation and stimulate reflection. And show that every single one of us can take a step towards preserving our planet.
Check out his route. Thus far he’s gone 34,644 km, with a goal of over 50,000.
He sounded really charming on the CBC, and his great videos bear that charm out:
Via TechCrunch, TripKick is thin-slicing hotel reviewing on the web. Instead of just reviewing hotels (far too vague!), TripKick offers user-generated reviews of individual hotel rooms. It’s kind of the hotel room equivalent of SeatGuru:
Tripkick.com is designed to make your hotel experience an effortless one. We prepare you with the little known facts about each hotel room so you can make an educated decision when choosing your perfect room.
Each hotel page on our site offers a variety of helpful information. You can use us before you’ve chosen your hotel, or once you’ve already booked your reservation.
Here’s a sample page, for the the San Francisco Fairmont. The site has a nice aesthetic, though I have serious objections to the way they abbreviate headings. If you check out the ‘Compare Rooms’ tab, they have a table which includes column headings like “GREAT BATHRM” or “OVERSZ”. I may just be an old grammarian, but I miss those vowels.
I bought the latest issue of Wired magazine. Why do I only read magazines when I travel? I’m not sure why, but that’s not the point of this post.
Reading through the magazine, I encountered a full-page ad for Delta Airlines. I snapped a photo with my incredibly old and lame camera phone:
If you can’t read that (and I don’t blame you), the main text goes like this:
CHANGE IS:
NO BOGUS “BOOKING FEES”
SKIP TRAVEL WEBSITE BOOKING FEES AT DELTA.COM
First off, that’s a various dubious use of quotation marks. That usage is usually meant to imply that something is not what as it’s described, as in:
Our “free” flight that we bought using Air Miles cost $300.
It’s not like a booking fee is actually something else. It may be questionable business practice (though I don’t think it is for the big travel sites), but it’s still just a plain old fee for booking a flight.
Questionable quotes aside, I thought that was a bizarre message to feature in Delta’s ad in Wired. Booking fees usually are quite small, and they’ve actually been around forever. That’s how travel agents make (or used to make) money.
Is That Really a Differentiator?
Do they really think that Wired readers would eschew the obvious benefits of the Travelocitys (plural agreement? Arg!) and Expedias just to save a few bucks?
Other full page ads in Wired are for cigars, executive class travel with Air Canada and Hyatt hotels. I’m not implying that Wired readers are rich, but other ads suggest that they’re willing to pay for luxury goods.
I just don’t see ‘no booking fees’ as a compelling differentiator? Surely Delta has other offers that would be more compelling.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon and evening working in a hotel room. I got into Vancouver yesterday in good time, and had a ton to do. I ensconced myself at the Days Inn (oddly, they don’t use an apostrophe) and went to town.
I find that I’m very productive in hotel rooms. There are no distractions, and the essentials of life–bed, bathroom, food–are close at hand. Douglas Adams, a noted procrastinator, wrote most of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish in a hotel room, under the constant supervision of his editor.
Maybe it was because we ran a corporate writing workshop last week, but I’ve recently been paying more attention to how ordinary things are described and labelled. I noticed a trend in my room. See if you can spot it:
The writing isn’t awful–you can still get the message–but it ain’t good. They have “a variety of sundry items available”? It must be a real mess behind that front desk. And the other pieces are terribly overwritten.
I was otherwise quite happy with my room at the Day’s Inn. It was nothing to write home about, but it was comfortable and they had free wifi. In fact, they may be near that tipping point of hotels where the hotel gets too nice to offer free wifi. Maybe there’s a rule of thumb here: less than three stars, free wifi. More than three stars, they screw you on wifi access.
Over the last few years, I’ve done a fair bit of international flying. For sundry reasons, I’m hoping to curtail it. Among them is the fact that flights from Europe and Africa all the way to Vancouver can be pretty heinous, and I often suffer from some serious jet lag. What are the worst bits?
Long layovers in Heathrow, a special kind of hell on Earth.
Changing terminals in Heathrow, or changing airports across London.
When they take you in a bus from the tarmac to the terminal. I’m not sure why this bugs me so much, but it does.
Absurdly long lines at passport control.
I could go on. However, I’m pretty pleased with the flights I’ve got coming back to Vancouver this time. Check it out:
On Sunday, a driver takes me to the Marrakesh airport in the afternoon, a trip of about two hours.
I fly to Heathrow. Yes, it’s Heathrow, but I immediately leave the airport to stay over night at a nearby airport hotel.
The next day, my flight leaves at the extraordinarily civil hour of 12:00pm.
The flight to Vancouver is direct. No stops! I get in at 3:00pm, drag myself around for a few hours, watch a hockey game and go to bed.
Thanks to the conference I’m speaking at, I’m staying at the Wall Centre in Vancouver for a few nights when I arrive. I find that hotels are excellent for overcoming the jet lag.
I suppose the perfect trip would avoid Heathrow and include first class, but this is as good as it gets on the cheap. No layovers, eight hours of sleep between flights and very reasonable arrival and departure times. Now, if I can secure an exit row, life will be sweet.
Today this story is getting a lot of attention. It’s titled “‘Euros Accepted’ signs pop up in New York City”. Here’s the lead:
In the latest example that the U.S. dollar just ain’t what it used to be, some shops in New York City have begun accepting euros and other foreign currency as payment for merchandise.
This is just lazy journalism. Why?
Sum total of stores referenced in article: two.
Sum total of people interviewed in article: two (both shopkeepers).
Sum total of actual signs referenced in the article: none.
The media loves a big, controversial, easy-to-articulate idea. And they love a trend story. Does two stores make a trend? Absolutely not. Did the journalists bother to interview anybody else–a European tourist, a finance expert, a chamber of commerce rep? Nope.
I appreciate that the media industry is struggling with shrinking staffs and increasing demands, but this shouldn’t have been published by a reputable agency like Reuters.
Plus, the final quote has the distinctive scent of a PR professional:
“I’m happy if I take in 200 euros, because what I do is keep them,” he said. “So when I go back to Paris, I don’t have to go through the nightmare of going to an exchange place.”
That feels like it’s right out of a press release. The fact is that most travelers–especially those going to Europe–don’t exchange money anymore. It’s much easier, and often cheaper, to use the ubiquitous bank machine. Plus, European currency exchanges have never been nightmarish. They’re usually quite efficient, especially now with the marked decline in business.
Caution: travel snobbery and tourist judgment ahead.
So we’ve been living in Essaouira for about three weeks now. It’s a tourist-friendly town on the coast, and we’ve already noticed a slight up-tick in the tourist numbers since first arriving. I’m glad we’ll be leaving before the full weight of the spring tourists descends on these cramped streets.
As you probably know, Morocco is a Muslim nation. It’s quite a liberal one (the most liberal, I’m told), but you still hear the haunting call to prayer five times a day, and there are mosques–with very unassuming doors–on every major street.
As such, men and women dress conservatively. For women, the dress varies from cover-every-but-the-eyes djellabas to conservative, professional attire that covers everything from the neck to the ankles. Here in Essaouira, the rate of women who wear a head scarf covering at least their hair is probably about 75%. In larger cities, that rate would be lower.
Your choice of attire still may be perceived as a sign of respect for yourself, your family and your hosts (or lack thereof)…So if you want to make your family look good, and don’t want to miss out on some excellent company–especially among older Moroccans–do make a point to dress modestly.
For men and women alike, this means not wearing shorts and sleeveless tops. Even in trendy nightclubs, clingy clothing, short skirts and low-cut and midriff tops could be construed as, ahem, the oldest kind of professional attire.
That advice is reflected in online forums I’ve read. You’re always going to be recognizably a tourist (more on this in an old post), but it’s easy to respect the local dress code.
And in Essaouira, 19 out of 20 tourists do. Unfortunately, the twentieth always manages to embarrass themselves horribly. It’s not such a big deal for men, but they should leave the shorts on the beach (frankly, that advice ought to apply to the whole globe) and they should not, at any time, wear one of the local’s full length, hooded djellaba. I saw one North American doing that the other day, and he was getting all sorts of smirks from the locals.
Women are more restricted in what they should wear. As such, their fashion faux pas are more egregious. Shorts, short skirts, midriff-baring and low-cut tops, sleeveless shirts–it’s all pretty shameful.
A Few Brain Cells and Jedi Robes
It doesn’t take too many brain cells to:
Read a guidebook or travel forum and follow some basic sartorial advice.
Look around. See how much skin the locals aren’t showing, and dress accordingly.
Once every couple of days I see a ridiculously-dressed tourist that I just want to smack.
On a related note, the djellaba was almost certainly the inspiration for Jedi robes (and, come to think of it, the Jawa costumes). In fact, I suspect the costumer on the earliest Star Wars movie just bought one off a Berber’s back in Tunisia and threw it on Alec Guinness.
