What precautions can travelers take to protect themselves, both physically and financially, in these uncertain times?
Right now, most of the travel industry is being very flexible. The cruise industry, for instance, is saying, "OK, you booked a cruise and you don't want to go now. You can come back a year from now and we'll honor that." So you're going to find a lot of flexibility out there, but before you book anything, make sure that you ask the question, "How flexible are you? How locked-in am I on this particular deal?"
The second thing is to really try to figure out by reading local media what's happening politically, what's happening socially, what the weather is like, what's going on with the currency. It's more important now than ever to understand the context that you're entering into when you go to a foreign place.
The third thing, and I think this is really important, is to be self-sufficient. So make sure that you have the right medicine, make sure that you have your safety kit, if you will. Make sure that you're as self-reliant as you can possibly be.
The fourth thing, I would say, is don't advertise that you're an American. That could be harder for some of us than others, but in my experience, when you walk down the Champs-Élysées and you see 45 people coming toward you, you know who the American is—and so do most other people.
Any observations from your own travel experiences on the changing environment that travelers have been encountering since September 11?
Our lives have changed dramatically, and that's no news to anybody, but we have to consider differently how we navigate the travel experience. I don't think we understand right now how that's going to manifest itself a year or two from now. But I think that how we travel in America has fundamentally changed. And some of it's for the good. We've spent most of our lives flying over places that we're now going to move through. So you think about those little communities, the blue highways, the off-the-beaten-track places that we didn't visit because we could fly over them. Now we're going to reengage, and I think that's a good thing.
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