Travel smarter this year

Electronic communication, such as disposable mobile phones, cheap and easy Wi-Fi, and social networking, is revolutionizing the way we communicate when we travel. But the digital development I am most enthused about is the smartphone. My iPhone has quickly become my favourite travel companion, whether it’s keeping me on top of my work, keeping me in touch with my kids, or simply keeping me entertained.
I’m not alone. It was predicted that by the end of 2011, 40% of all Canadian mobile phone users will have a smartphone –iPhone, Android, Windows or BlackBerry — compared to just 10% in 2008. And as smartphones get more capable, they are becoming essential tools for travellers.
For instance, if I’m in a cafe in Paris that has free Wi-Fi, I can pop onto the Internet and check sports scores back home. If an impromptu soccer game breaks out on a piazza in Naples, I can record a video of it, then use the Dropbox application to send it to my assistant, who can post it to my Facebook page. Using Skype on my phone, I can connect to Wi-Fi and call my daughter in the U.S. for free.
About the only thing I don’t do with my smartphone when travelling is use it as an actual cellphone. When roaming in Europe with a North American phone, calls are expensive (often $1.50 per minute or higher). To save money, I use a phone I bought years ago in Europe and buy a new SIM card in each country I visit (a SIM card is a removable chip that stores your information).
A phone must be “unlocked” to swap out SIM cards (but be aware smartphones can be complicated to unlock). I make a lot of calls when I’m in Europe, but if you don’t, you might find it easier to roam with your own phone.
With smartphones, it’s important to watch dataroaming charges. A three-minute video from YouTube can cost about $40. While casual browsing and e-mailing costs less (around 20¢ to send or receive a basic message), charges can pile up quickly.
To avoid these costs, it’s easiest to cut off this feature by calling your carrier to disable it and turning off data roaming using your phone’s menu (before you get on your transatlantic flight). You can still use the Internet, but you’ll have to wait until you reach a Wi-Fi hotspot. Otherwise, for better rates, talk to your carrier about international dataroaming plans.
Even if you don’t use your smartphone for calls or data roaming, it can still come in handy thanks to the many travel-oriented applications that are available. Although I still prefer flipping through a paper guidebook, many publishers also offer travel guides in e-book format.
Apps for TripAdvisor and Yelp give you access to millions of user reviews of restaurants, hotels, and sights. And my Rick Steves Audio Europe app has radio interviews and audio walking tours of Europe’s top sights, such as the Acropolis and Versailles.
If you need to search for flights, hotels or rental cars, try Orbitz, Priceline, Booking.com,Expedia’s TripAssist and Travelocity. Skyscanner searches a variety of European budget airlines to find the cheapest connection.
TripIt is a clever app that stores all of your trip details in one place. Note that many apps (such as e-books) work on their own once you download them, but others (such as flight-search apps) need to access content online. You’ll either have to find a Wi-Fi hotspot or spring for data roaming to make them work.
To figure out train schedules, DB Navigator, German Rail’s comprehensive train timetables, includes connections for all of continental Europe. For the U.K., try thetrainline. Big cities, such as London and Paris, offer subway apps that save you from having to unfold an unwieldy map on a crowded platform.
If you don’t parlez-vous the local language, download Google Translate, which lets you type or speak foreign words for a translation. You can also say or type a sentence in English to hear a translation or see it written out. With Lonely Planet’s audio phrase-books, simply press a button to hear the phrase you’re struggling to pronounce.
Other useful travel apps include Measures, which converts various European units (such as clothing sizes and currency) to North American ones; the Weather Channel and AccuWeather, which help you figure out how to dress for the day; and mPassport, city-specific apps that direct you to English-speaking doctors and hospitals, as well as local names for prescription medications.
As more people travel with smartphones, I expect that more creative apps will become available. I am something of a tech holdout but if technology can make travel smoother and smarter, I’m all for it.
Rick Steves (ricksteves.com) writes European travel guidebooks and hosts travel shows on public television and public radio. Email him at rick@ricksteves.com, or write to him c/o P.O. Box 2009, Edmonds, WA 98020.



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India tycoon’s got tons of cash, nowhere to invest

“I love India, but my customer is not going to wait” … Ajay Pirama. Photo: AP/Rafiq Maqbool

Ajay Piramal is sitting on a mountain of cash. Yet the billionaire Indian tycoon, working in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is struggling to figure out what to do with the money.
The problem isn’t opportunity, he said. It’s India.
“Every large investment, there was no transparency,” Piramal said.

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His dilemma is a worrying sign for India. With the country mired in corruption, bureaucratic red tape and unclear and changing government policies, many of the men who made their billions here are saying maybe it’s time to quit India. It’s got to be easier to do business elsewhere.
In May last year, Piramal’s healthcare business sold its generic drug operations to US pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories for $3.8 billion. Piramal, a tall big man in a country that still measures prosperity by girth, was eager to set that cash pile to work. He wanted to expand one of his chemical plants, but was told it would take five years.
“The same plant could be set up in China in two years,” he said. “I love India, but my customer is not going to wait.”
India, still a beacon of relatively fast growth despite a troubled world economy, should be a magnet for capital. Instead, since the beginning of 2010, the amount that Indians have invested in businesses overseas has exceeded the amount foreigners are investing in India, according to central bank figures.
In part this reflects the confidence and aptitude of India’s maturing companies and the current malaise in the global economy and financial markets. But it also reflects deep problems at home. India’s big coporations may be cash rich but the failure to invest that money domestically is bad news for a developing country that needs capital to build the roads, power plants and food warehouses that could help lift hundreds of millions out of dire poverty.
The frustration of India’s business elite with corruption, political paralysis, log-jammed approvals, regulatory flip-flops, lack of access to natural resources and land acquisition battles – to pick a few of the top complaints – has reached a pitch perhaps not heard since India began liberalizing its economy in the early 1990s. “If you are an honest businessman in India, it’s very difficult to start up anything,” said Jamshyd Godrej, chairman of manufacturing giant Godrej & Boyce. “Companies are going to operate where they see the best opportunities and efficiency for their capital.”
Increasingly, that’s outside India.
In 2008, foreigners poured roughly twice as much direct investment into India – $33 billion – as Indians plowed into businesses overseas. By 2010, that had reversed: Indians invested $40 billion abroad – twice as much as foreigners invested in India – a trend that’s continued this year.
There is another, unspoken element to all the complaints. To the extent that business in India ran on corruption, some of the old, dirty ways of doing things are being disrupted, freezing India’s already glacial bureaucracy, business leaders say.
Scandals in the staging of the Commonwealth Games, the pilfering of homes meant for war widows and the irregular auction of cellphone spectrum that cost the country billions has sent parliamentarians and even a Cabinet minister to prison.
With Indians tiring of the incessant graft, tens of thousands of middle-class protesters poured into the streets and pushed an anti-corruption bill onto the floor of Parliament.
Steelmakers can’t get enough iron ore because a massive mining scandal in the southern state of Karnataka prompted a court to order the closure of illicit mines that account for a fifth of iron ore production in the country.
The bureaucrats – even the honest ones – are reportedly so scared of being punished they are refusing to make the decisions needed to make the country run.
Piramal is not unpatriotic. Each room in his executive suite is named after an Indian epic hero: Arjuna, the most pure; Dhananjay, acquirer and master of wealth. There’s a quote from the Upanishads scriptures on the wall.
His office sits in a one million square foot office park in Mumbai his family built. The buildings around him – white with blue glass that flashes back the unforgiving sun – bear his own name in large black letters: Piramal Towers.
Piramal had the will and the means to build power plants and roads.
Instead, his Piramal Group’s largest investment to date has been in one of the office park’s tenants: the Indian subsidiary of the British telecom giant Vodafone Plc.
Last September, when he got the first payout, of $2.2 billion, from Abbott, the phone started ringing.
“Because people knew we had money, we had so many people approaching us for projects in the infrastructure sector,” he said. “These people had no experience and no knowledge and no track record of having built a business in any area. And yet they were coming to us saying we have licenses and approvals. That just didn’t sound right or smell right.”
Each day, they paraded through his office: The investment banker who decided to build a 500 megawatt power plant, the coal trader assured of a government coal allocation, small-time miners with pretty presentations promising land, licenses and financing.
“They’d name politicians from the center and the state who had it all tied up for them,” he said. “It didn’t sound right. Obviously there were things going on in the system.”
Road and port projects weren’t much better, he said.
Piramal also looked at investing in engineering and infrastructure services companies, but couldn’t make sense of their books.
“We couldn’t find anything,” he said. “People get greedy. In their desire to get good valuations they resort to, if I can say, creative accounting.”
Today, India’s infrastructure companies are known as great wealth destroyers.
“Infrastructure investment has become untouchable, a sure way of losing money,” said Jagannadham Thunuguntla, head of research at SMC Global Securities. He calculates that four of India’s top infrastructure companies – GMR Infrastructure, GVK Power and Infrastructure, Lanco Infratech and Punj Lloyd – have lost over 80 percent of their value since 2007. A fifth, Larson & Toubro is down 50 percent.
Piramal may have dodged a bullet, but shareholders in Piramal Healthcare aren’t happy. Despite a $600 million special dividend and share buyback, the share price has sagged since the Abbott deal was announced on May 21 last year. They’d like to see the Abbott cash productively deployed. Instead, much of it is sitting in fixed deposit accounts.
Piramal said he really does want to run a pharmaceutical company and be the first Indian company to discover a world-class drug – despite his dabbling in telecom, financial services and real estate financing. It’s just that pharma can’t absorb all his cash. He plans to sell the 5.5 percent stake he picked up in Vodafone Essar for $640 million in a few years, when Vodafone Essar issues shares in an initial public offering, he said.
He has also launched Piramal Capital, to make real estate and infrastructure loans, and spent about $50 million to acquire IndiaReit, a real estate investment company.
Meanwhile, his thoughts have turned to Boston, where he set up IndUS Growth Partners with a professor from Harvard Business School to look for buying opportunities in the US, in security, financial services and biotechnology. And he said he’s still planning to spend over a billion dollars on biotechnology acquisitions in North America and Europe.
“India was going more towards capitalism than socialism,” Piramal said. “I think we’re going back. Capitalism went to too much excess. Corruption levels went to the extreme.”
He said he’ll announce his first overseas acquisition by March.
AP
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U.S. considering travel request from Yemen’s Saleh

HONOLULU (Reuters) – The U.S. government is trying to decide whether to let Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh travel to the United States for medical treatment, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday.
Saleh was injured in a June assassination attempt that forced him into a hospital in Saudi Arabia, and transferred power to his vice president last month after months of protests that brought the Gulf country to the brink of civil war.
Earnest declined to say when a decision on whether to allow Saleh into the United States would be made, and denied a New York Times report that the embattled Yemeni president’s petition was accepted and he could arrive at New York-Presbyterian Hospital as soon as the end of this week.
“U.S. officials are continuing to consider President Saleh‘s request to enter the country for the sole purpose of seeking medical treatment, but initial reports that permission has already been granted are not true,” Earnest said in Hawaii, where President Barack Obama is vacationing.
Earlier on Monday, an Obama administration official said Saleh’s office had contacted the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa to say the Yemeni leader wanted to get specialized care in the United States to treat injuries sustained in the assassination attempt.
The attempt on Saleh’s life came after he tried to duck the power-transfer accord brokered by Gulf Arab nations, sparking street battles that devastated parts of the capital.
HUNDREDS KILLED
Hundreds of people were killed during months of protests seeking Saleh’s ouster. The political deadlock reignited simmering conflicts with separatists and militants, raising fears that Yemen‘s al Qaeda wing could take a foothold on the borders of Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter.
Allowing Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades, to get treatment in the United States could undercut Obama’s message of supporting pro-democracy movements across the Arab world and condemning crackdowns on protests like those seen recently in Syria.
Embattled world leaders often travel to politically neutral Switzerland for medical care.
On Saturday, just hours after his forces killed nine people who had demanded he be tried for the killings of demonstrators over the past year, Saleh said he would leave Yemen and give way to a successor. He did not say when he would go.
Saleh suggested he would undergo medical tests in the United States but characterized the trip as one of temporary exile.
“I will go to the United States. Not for treatment, because I’m fine, but to get away from attention, cameras, and allow the unity government to prepare properly for elections,” Saleh said. “I’ll be there for several days, but I’ll return because I won’t leave my people and comrades who have been steadfast for 11 months.”
Obama’s top counterterrorism official, John Brennan, called Yemen’s acting leader on Sunday to stress the need for Yemeni forces “to show maximum restraint” with protests, Earnest said.
In his phone conversation with Yemeni Vice President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, Brennan also appealed for all sides of Yemen’s political transition to avoid “provocative acts that could spur further violence.”
Hadi told Brennan he would do his utmost to prevent further bloodshed, Earnest said, adding both officials agreed it was important to stick to the transition path leading to Yemen’s February 21, 2012, presidential election.
“Mr. Brennan told Vice President Hadi that the United States remains a strong and fervent supporter of the Yemeni people in their quest to realize their richly deserved aspirations for security, political stability, representative government, and economic prosperity,” Earnest said.
Hadi has urged Saleh’s foes and loyalists to commit to a truce.
(Editing by Doina Chiacu)


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