Download this one app, and you’ll never be caught off guard by flight delays again.
Flighty is expensive for an app, like $50 per year, but somehow it knows when I’m going to get delayed before they make any announcements. If I board a flight, I might get a notification from Flighty it’s going to be 15 minutes delayed—and then five minutes later, the pilot will say the same thing.
How never to be stranded after a canceled flight.
Remember the Three-Hour Rule: If you’re stuck on the tarmac for three hours, they have to go back to the gate and let everyone off. It will take 30 to 45 minutes to get everyone off, then maybe they’ll let you back on or they might cancel it if the crew times out. There’s uproar when that happens, but if you’re three steps ahead of everyone else, it makes everything much more decent. If you think a flight is going to be canceled, call the airline and ask them to protect you on a seat on a later flight, too. I’ve done that, where I was basically on both flights until one of them got canceled. Or you can go online while you’re sitting in your seat and book a ticket on the next flight as a backup. If your first flight is canceled, you can ask for a refund. And if you don’t need the second seat, you can cancel that for free because you booked it within 24 hours.
Global Entry has counterparts across the world.
For places you travel to often, check to see if there’s an expedited entry program. Doing that has cut down my time in the immigration line by 90% sometimes. Hong Kong has a program where if you visit more than a certain number of times a year, you can sign up for the Frequent Visitor e-Channel. They actually have automated kiosks for immigration when you arrive and when you depart. They approve you for it, you get a sticker in your passport, and you bypass basically all of the manual checkpoints on arrival and departure.
The best in-flight amenity kit is the one you make yourself.
I’ve become very particular as I travel more. On every business-class flight, there’s an amenity kit, but I wish the products were better. So now I pack my own, full of a bunch of stuff I’ll need in-flight. It means I don’t spend the whole flight getting up, rummaging through my bags, and disturbing everyone. I pack silicone earplugs from Savears. I learned about them when I was sitting next to someone who was a sound technician. He was wearing the same earplugs on the plane that he used backstage at concerts. He said they were perfect, and now I use them for everything. I also pack rinse-free hand wash from Byredo instead of Purell hand sanitizer; it smells really good and is less drying. And I put on Barbara Sturm antipollution serum before flights. Air travel is not great for your skin, so if you can keep it clean and moisturized, you’re good to go.
She loves this tiny Canadian surf town so much that she just bought a house there.
British Columbia is known for Whistler, but I love Tofino, a tiny surf town on the westernmost coast of Vancouver Island. It’s where my fiance [Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield] proposed to me. It’s hard to get to, but that’s kinda why I like it. Anyone who bothers making the effort to go, they’ll really appreciate it. You fly to Vancouver, and then there’s a scheduled floatplane service [to] Tofino Harbor. Once they started offering that, I bought a house there. The population is probably a couple thousand year-round. The climate is temperate rainforest, so it’s within the same 10 degrees always. There’s a beach, mountains, and it’s become a place for surfers, too. There’s also an amazing farm-to-table, or sea-to-table, foodie culture. I love Wolf in the Fog.