Matt Gross is a veteran food and travel writer. His work has appeared in Saveur, Afar, WorldHum.com, and The New York Times, where he wrote the popular Frugal Traveler column from 2006 to 2010 and where he’s recently begun a new regular series, “Getting Lost.” Gross also writes “The Voyager,” a column for Currency, a personal finance website run by American Express. Visit his personal site, The Minor Glories, to read more from Gross.
Cheapflights: What’s your personal routine when you fly?
Matt Gross: If it’s a really long flight, I’ll stretch and get some water, make sure I have enough reading material and that my electronic devices are fully charged. I’ve gotten good at being pretty stoic while flying – I can be like a Zen monk while flying and not mind the discomfort.
CF: What is your biggest travel pet peeve?
MG: There are so many, it’s hard to come up with just a few. Mine tend to be more “philosophical” rather than “practical” ones. Maybe traveling to countries that have overdeveloped tourist economies to the point where all tourists are exactly the same to the people working in the industry. Sort of like Croatia or Ireland, where they don’t care about [tourists], other than to get them into the hotels and restaurants. It’s all so calculated after a certain point, and finding access to something different in the culture is difficult, but I also don’t expect people to treat me as some super-magical being from a planet that’s never heard of tourists. But pretending that everyone (visitor) is special should be a hallmark of a tourist economy.
CF: What kind of trip type do you prefer?
MG: I just like things to be generally open-ended, though it can be hard when you’re a travel writer and have to plan stories. I much prefer going somewhere for a couple of weeks with a hotel reservation for maybe just the first day or two, and seeing where it leads me. Maybe I’ll go to the city, maybe I’ll go to the beach; I like the freedom to move and figure things out. And not going to just one place and staying there, no matter where the destination. I travel to keep traveling.
CF: Although it’s hard to choose, tell us what your favorite destination is.
MG: Vietnam and Argentina. They may be seem like odd choices, but they share a lot in terms of having really outgoing people, great food, amazing natural beauty, and a certain visible energy on the street, everywhere you go, immediately. I tend to think of countries as having a ratio of how much energy you have to put in to how much fun you get back. In most of those places, you don’t have to do anything at all; you’re sort of instantly entertained. There are always things going on, and people talking to you, there’s just action, and it’s just there, waiting for you. Buenos Aires, which has been around for a while, but is not Paris or Madrid, it still has a young entrepreneurial spark, that you might not always get in a place that has a thousand years of history.
CF: Cheapflights is all about value. What location do you think offers the best value for travelers?
MG: This is always something I ran up against when I was doing Frugal Traveller – that value destinations are pretty obvious. If you want to go somewhere that’s going to give you good value for your travel dollar, just look at the developing world. Almost all of Asia, with the exception of Japan, Singapore, or South Korea, all of those places are really, really affordable. Pretty much anywhere east of the Bosporus is affordable region of the world, as is Central and South America. These places are not secrets. The challenge in doing Frugal Traveller for me was, ‘how do you find affordable ways to find value in places that are traditionally expensive. Value’s everywhere; it just depends on what kind of trip you want to have and what parts of the experience are important or unimportant to you, hotels or a hostel, for instance. Other people aren’t into food, as much as I have a hard time believing it, and focus on other parts of the experience. But it takes a while, a couple of trips, to figure out what you want to do when you travel; it’s not obvious really, and it’s not the same for everyone. There’s no real universal solution, and depends on the individual traveller.
CF: What is your ideal airport, and what’s your advice on how to best enjoy it?
That’s a good question – They’re all generally pretty bad. Hong Kong airport is really great because you can check-in in the city at the train station and get on the train to the airport and not have to carry your bags around – a really smooth, brilliant system. Taipei airport is pretty decent since they’ve been renovating Terminal 2, and is pretty spiffy with lots of space. Since I travel with my wife and daughter now, I’m always happy if there’s a play area for kids. Those are very nice to have in an airport, and not an obvious thing. They take up space, and don’t really make money, but it’s great to just be able to set your child free to run wild in a space designed not to be destroyed.
CF: If you had to sit in the middle seat on a plane, who would be your chosen (or most feared) seat mates?
MG: Mark Twain would be nice, and Jean Seberg, the actress who was in “Breathless.”
Everyone else? There’s no one I’d really not want to sit next to, except “everyone.”
CF: What would you classify as a hypothetical travel nightmare?
MG: A travel nightmare would be not being able to travel, being stuck at home for the rest of my days. That’s the ultimate nightmare. Besides, death and dismemberment, I don’t really have a problem with sickness, hunger, loneliness, getting scammed; those things are all fascinating to me. And being able to deal with them has made me into a much better, more independent, resilient traveler. A failure in one place makes me want to go back there to reconquor the place. The worst that could happen is to come away from a country, a city, or a trip and feel “Big Deal? So What?” That’s definitely not going to get me to go back.
CF: How does what you do for a living give you a unique angle on travelling?
MG: Learn to explore your own neighborhood, your own city, as if you would a foreign destination. I like to view my everyday world as I would a place I had just gotten to and had to explore quite quickly. If you could learn to see your home base as you would see the most exotic place you could imagine, that’s good practice, good training.
CF: Share with us a few insider tips on how to improve the in-flight experience, in general.
MG: The unfortunate part of flying is that these airlines have to make a profit. If they could somehow figure a way not to lose lots of money by giving us plenty of space, good food, and little bit of dignity and respect, then that would be great, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Likewise, it’s the same situation at airports; these places have to make money, and have to protect us, no matter how useless and ineffective the security systems are. The forces that change the way airports and airlines work are mostly out of our control.
