Two years ago, I would never travel without a laptop computer. Today, sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.
Like many other travelers, whenever and wherever I go, I must stay connected with office and home. Early in this electronic age, I learned that one of the best ways to do it is by e-mail. It enables me to reach out to the world from wherever I am and to store incoming messages for reading and response if I’m not immediately accessible by phone.
In order to do this two years ago, I lugged my laptop with me. I also packed an extra long telephone cord, because in hotel rooms the best place to use the laptop was often far from the place to plug it in. When I traveled abroad, I took a bag full of plugs and adapters suitable for assorted foreign connections. I carried technicians’ tools that I thankfully never had to use.
Today, however, the scenario is changing. On the one hand, more and more hotels around the world are making sure that their rooms are computer-suitable. That means, at least, providing a large, comfortable workspace and two-line telephone with port for computer connection, so that you can surf the Internet and receive phone calls simultaneously.
Meanwhile, more and more hotels, particularly those with a large clientele of frequent business guests, are equipping rooms with fax machine and computer work stations with high-speed Internet connections and printers. You’ll probably pay extra for such a room, but it may allow you to leave your laptop at home.
In any event, you’re increasingly likely to find computers you can use in hotel business centers and Internet kiosks and/or computer work stations in hotel lobbies, airports, shopping malls and other public places. The problem today is that they don’t always work as promised.
At Los Angeles International Airport in late February, I stepped up to a Quick-Aid Internet kiosk near Gate 71 to get my e-mail via a connection to America Online. The machine accepted a swipe of my Visa card and charged $2.50 for 10 minutes.
There was no mouse as such; instead, to control the mouse arrow, I had to move my thumb across a mouse pad. To be precise was extremely difficult. Finally I was able to click on the AOL logo, but instead of reaching America Online, I was switched to an airport directory. I never got my e-mail. When I clicked to sign off, Quick-Aid asked how I liked its service. I complained and, in response, was told electronically that my $2.50 would be refunded.
Two months later, also at LAX, I went through the same scenario again.
The message here is that in today’s hyped-up electronic world, the promise is often far ahead of reality.
In a recent dispatch to the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition (www.wsj.com, by subscription), Joan Indiana Rigdon described e-mailing from the small Portuguese town of Castelo Branco. At the front desk of the local Best Western hotel, she said, she heard “the same thing we had heard many times in Indonesia: the hotel was about to install Internet access, but not for another week.”
Rigdon used the hotel’s phone line to connect her Newton message pad to CompuServe in Paris at about $10 — the cost of a fax.
Even leisure travelers are feeling a stay-connected urge. Many passengers on longer deluxe cruises, for example, are top business executives who can afford to travel lavishly but not without a foxy eye on the office. So top-of-the-line Crystal Cruises prints a personal e-mail address on each cruise ticket so it can be left with business associates, family and friends.
Internet access is also offered by Princess Cruises on several ships, by Royal Caribbean International and on Norwegian Cruise Line’s new Norwegian Sky.
Earlier this year, when my wife and I cruised the South Pacific, I left my laptop at home. I didn’t want to pay onboard transmission fees, and, as it turned out, our ship didn’t have Internet access anyway (although it offered personalized stock market quotes by fax at $6 a day). So we relied on Internet cafes — coffee houses with computer work stations and Internet access — along the way.
Before leaving home, I had printed out the addresses of cyber cafes in the ports we would visit. My source was the Internet Cafe Guide (www.netcafeguide.com), a site compiled and updated by a journalist named Ernst Larsen in the remote town of Vadsoe, Norway, near the Russian frontier. At this writing it listed 3,800 cafes in 115 countries. (A printed version is available from the site for $12.95 plus $4 shipping and handling.)
The guide led me first to Cyber City, run by an accommodating Asian couple in downtown Auckland, New Zealand. Unfortunately, the computer I was assigned insisted that before reaching America Online, I install a plug-in called Netmail 2.0, beta version. No one knew exactly what that meant, so I transferred to the Net Central Cybercafe around the corner, where a successful half hour of e-mail receiving and sending cost about $6 U.S.
The next stop was Suva, capital of Fiji. Everything worked fine at the Citinet Cybercafe, and I spent 15 minutes on-line for $6. Then we sailed to Nuku’alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, a Pacific island practically on the international dateline. After some searching I found the second-floor Kahlia Cafe, run by a woman from Miami and her Australian husband.
In early March they had been there seven months. The cafe had a coffee bar and half a dozen Compaq Presario computers, all new, bright and appealing. In June, however, a note on the on-line Internet cafe guide said that Kahlia had closed.
I’m writing this in Room 905 of the Hotel Saint Paul in St. Paul, Minn. — on my personal laptop, plugged into the data port of my in-room telephone. Before leaving home, I sent an e-mail to the hotel’s concierge (I got the address from its Web site) asking about electronic facilities.
I always ask such questions these days. I want to know about two-line phones, data ports in rooms, computer availability in business centers — and, of course, charges. They vary widely, and can be steep.
Even after receiving the answers, I’m still wary. I’ve learned that having two or three computers available for guests in a hotel business center may be highly inadequate in the early morning or late afternoon during a major convention. I’ve learned how to receive and send e-mail via the World Wide Web rather than via a membership service like America Online, because many public computers don’t have AOL access.
In short, I’ve learned that we are indeed entering a new exciting era, but we’re not quite there yet.
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Paul Grimes’ e-mail address is paulmark@aol.com.
