The Travel Commons Podcast

I’ve been a regular listener to the Travel Commons Podcast for the past six months. It’s a weekly show produced and hosted by Mark Peacock, a frequent business traveler, and it concerns the minutiae of life on the road — airports, hotels, wifi, restaurants, rental cars and the like.

After hearing Mark discuss the issue of transportation to and from the airport a few episodes back, I emailed him a note:

In a recent episode you talked a little about the challenges of getting to and from the airport by various means — taxi, car, train, bus.

I wanted to point out a few of my favourite airports for this sort of thing:

Here in my small city of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada, the airport is 10 minutes north of the downtown where I live. While there’s no public transit to the airport, a $10 cab gets there quickly, and the airport is never very busy, so I regularly leave home for a 6:10 a.m. flight by catching a cab from home at 5:30 a.m. My big city friends don’t believe me when I tell them this.

My favourite U.S. city for getting into town from the airport is Boston, where a free shuttle to the ‘T’ subway system leaves regularly from all terminals at Logan Airport, and downtown is just 3 or 4 subway stops and less than 10 minutes away. When my Logan flights are delayed for a couple of hours, I often pop into the city for a bit to kill the time.

Although it’s not the most convenient thing in the world, I’m a regular user of National Express buses from London’s Heathrow airport to either Stansted, Gatwick or Luton airports — all in other areas around the city — to allow me to marry cheap international flights to London with cheap intra-Europe flights on RyanAir and easyJet. Buses leaves from the Central Bus Station at Heathrow, and generally take 1 to 1-1/2 hours depending on the destination airport and traffic. For going to destinations in Europe, and London flight, plus bus, plus discount flight can often save hundreds or thousands of dollars compared to the price of a direct flight to the destination.

Finally, I just got back from Geneva, Switzerland. There’s regular train service from a station that’s 300 m from the arrivals area that runs into the main station downtown. Tickets are only 3 CHF, or about $2.30 US. Gotta love that.

To my surprise and delight, Mark opened Travel Commons Episode #32 with my email. It was weird to turn on my iPod shuffle on the way home yesterday and hear my own words unexpectedly echoed back to me.

If you’re interested in the mechanics of travel — and Mark conveys some really useful information — I recommend subscribing to Travel Commons.

Oh, by the way Mark: it’s Charlottetown not Charlottestown (no ‘s’) and Prince Edward Island not Prince Edwards Island (no ‘s’ there either). You obviously need to pop over for a visit sometime soon!