Recently in Travel Category

A meeting at work this morning reminded me of something I noticed on the flight over to Florida at the tail end of last year and which is worth sharing.

Inspired, possibly, by reading Runway Girl who has talked about this as a possibility, I had my iPad all loaded up with movies, TV and games ready to entertain me for the near-9 hour flight. And it did the job just great. I still had around 40% battery life left at the end of the flight. (Can anyone name the film I'm watching in the photo? :-) )

But that wasn't the thing that was interesting. Here's what was: the guy next to me was also using an iPad (he was watching opera videos). And so was the woman across the aisle from me (playing Fruit Ninja, mainly). And so were two other people in the block of five seats she was sitting in. And so were other people all up and down the plane. As many people were using iPads as were watching the in-flight entertainment - and this was just in the economy class.

We found out earlier in the week that Apple has shipped 15m of these things. And it's beginning to show...

After a fairly drawn-out journey (I always forget how darn slow air travel can be if you're starting in London, especially if I don't fly for six months or more), I'm in Berlin, for two purposes. First of all, I'll be attending and blogging the Web 2.0 Expo here (as one of their premier bloggers, no less). And I'm looking forward to that.

However, I'm also using this as a springboard for a new project within the day job, which I'll fill you guys in on tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some Berlin scenes I grabbed with my Flip Mino earlier:


Arrival in Berlin from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.

So far, so good. The taxi drivers are far more competent that their Parisian counterparts (the first taxi driver I used in Paris for Le Web last year took me to the wrong part of the city...), the city looks beautiful in the autumn sunshine and I'm only 10 minutes walk from the conference venue. But what about the hotel?

It's enough to put you off flying for life:

From a protest I ran into while in New York last week.

I'm a long way from home and very, very tired right now.

I'm in downtown Manhattan, here to visit our US office and speak at a conference on Wednesday.

However, I've been up for 17 hours at this point, so I need coffee before I can write anything more useful.

Things I've noticed on my journey:

1. For some reason, French trees look distinctly French. They're the same species on the whole, so I suspect it's just planting patterns.
2. I was busy plugging my laptop into the covenient power outlet next to my seat, when it struck me that it was odd to offer just a French socket on a London/Paris train. A little later on, the lady the other side of the aisle from me headed to the bar, and I noticed that the socket on her side was a UK one. A quick scout down the train confirmed it: France and UK sockets alternating. What a strange way of doing it. They clearly don't assign seats based on where you booked, or I wouldn't have ended up with a French socket.
3. There's so much more countryside in France than the UK. Intellectually, I've known that for years, but watching it fly by on the train makes it that much clearer.

Here's a first for me: I'm blogging somewhere under the English Channel. I'm off to Le Web 3 in Paris and finally getting to travel by Eurostar.

And, hmm, well, it's a touch disappointing. All the adverts they show you of the service certainly don't show you the economy class which, like a good corporate citizen, I've chosen. It's cramped, just a little too warm and feels ever-so-slightly grimy. In future, I'll see if I can wing it into business class.

Busy work day today. I'm off on a conference that took up the whole of this evening and will eat up pretty much all of tomorrow. And I'm looking forward to every minute of it. When did that happen?

However, the really cool thing is that both the conference venue and the hotel I'm staying in tonight have completely free internet access. Free WiFi at Sandown Park and free wired broadband in the room at Oatlands Park.

So, I'm keeping up with e-mail, IMing family and friends, listening to podcasts and even getting some blogging done, without it costing me a penny extra. That's customer service. That's what will bring me back to places like this.

Technorati Tags: business, business travel, conference centres, hotels, internet access, mobile working, wifi