The Wall Street Journal Guide to Power Travel: How to Arrive with Your Dignity, Sanity & Wallet Intact

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL GUIDE TO POWER TRAVEL by Scott McCartney, the paper's Middle Seat columnist, is packed with useful suggestions that will make trips easier for both novice and veteran travelers. For example, when it comes to improving your bags' chances for arriving at your destination, the author recommends: * Always mark your bags distinctly, but not with long ribbons that could get caught in machinery. Use tape, or tightly tied package ribbon, directly on the bag. And don't rely on big luggage tags-they can get torn off. Baggage has become uniformly boring black these days, and there's nothing worse than seeing fifty similar black bags on a carousel. Colorful identifying marks not only make it easier for you to spot your bag, but also keep other people from picking up the wrong bag-unless, of course, eight people on your flight all had black bags with yellow ribbons. Yet when it comes to what luggage you should actually buy, even McCartney is confused: * Even the size limits vary among airlines. At American, United, and Delta, the maximum size of carry-on baggage is forty-five linear inches-the length, width, and height dimensions added together. At US Airways and Continental, the maximum is fifty-one inches- 13 percent more. I have a Travelpro roll-abroad bag that I've taken all over the world, and every time I've raised it to slide it into an overhead bin, it has fit (sometimes snugly in older bins). The bag is twenty-three inches tall, fifteen inches wide, and twelve inches deep, when I don't unzip the expanders. At its standard size, its measurements total fifty inches-exceeding the rules at the three biggest airlines in the United States, while legal on Continental and US Airways. And airlines wonder why their rules confound travelers? So what's a traveler to do? Assuming you get on the flight, there's always this option: * Another jet lag strategy is melatonin to "reset" your body clock when you arrive in a new time zone. Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the pineal gland in the brain that helps control the body's internal clock. It's released by our bodies based on sunlight-nighttime yields the release of more melatonin. If you cheat yourself out of a night, you lose melatonin and your circadian rhythm is disrupted. Taking a small supplemental dose-doctors usually recommend 0.5 mg-about an hour before you go to sleep after arrival, and perhaps a day or two into your trip, helps some people recover quickly. Medical studies on melatonin supplements for jet leg have been inconclusive. It's worth a try, but your mileage may vary, as they say. POWER TRAVEL does its best job in covering plane trips . . . in addition, there are some good tips for booking both hotel stays and cruises . . . my only disappointment was that there's not coverage on car rentals.

Travel is often an ordeal, so it's important to have a guide in hand which is both entertaining and practical, telling how to make the most of travel arrangement, from gaining cheap fares and upgrades to minimizing lost luggage changes and avoiding delays at the airport. Advice taken from the author's popular Middle Seat column explores how bad things happen and how to prevent them, making for an excellent guide for any general lending library.

My daughter-in-law graduated from college and I gave her and our son this book along with other gifts. I also bought the book for our other two sons and their families. I read the book myself and was very pleased with all the good info about air travel and how well the book was written. I've already recommended the book to several people.

There's a lot of information in this book that most of us will never use, but it does not make it less interesting. I've started using some of the web sites and think they're great.

The author is clearly knowledgeable and is succinct & engaging. This small book has two major stories to tell about traveling well. The first is how and why bad things happen, despite your best planning. We are all traveling in an uncertain environment, orchestrated by overworked people and often frustrating fellow travelers. The author explains why many of these difficulties occur and how to handle them; this is expected and welcome. We all become smarter travelers. The second and perhaps the more important message is how to change your attitude to enjoy travel more, and effectively cope with bad surprises and even find opportunity for extra, fun, pleasure and pampering when available. We can't control the many disasters big & small, but we can switch to clever mode and put ourselves into the best position to get whatever redress is possible; sort of switching to ninja recovery mode. Highly recommended, especially if you tend to blow your top when inevitable messes occur and "service" personnel drop the ball. Mini handbook to become calibrated travelers: smart and in control.