Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 04.08.26 Booking Rules Of Travel / Cell Phone Bans About this episode Today - if you’ve been planning summer travel, you may have sticker shock from hotel & airfare costs. Travel inflation is real, so it pays to know Clark’s "Golden Rules" for booking to ensure you don't overpay. Also, Clark discusses the growing movement to ban cell phones in schools, restaurants, and concert venues. Some businesses and artists are jumping on the cell phone BAN-wagon. Flight & Hotel Booking: Segment 1 Ask Clark: Segment 2 Cell Phone Bans: Segment 3 Ask Clark: Segment 4 Mentioned on the show: Follow Clark Howard's #1 Rule To Travel Cheap Hopper | Book Hotels, Flights, Car Rentals & More How To Pack a Carry-On the Right Way - Clark Howard Protect Your Identity Archives - Clark Howard Why You Need To Lock Your Brokerage Account Today How To Find and Choose a Financial Advisor Which Documents Should You Keep and for How Long? Clark.com resources: Episode transcripts Community. Clark.com / Ask Clark Clark.com daily money newsletter Consumer Action Center Free Helpline: 636-492-5275 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
0:15 Speaker 01 UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management, built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.
0:50 Speaker 02 I'm so glad you're with us here on the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life. Today, if you've been planning your summer travel, there's a lot of sticker shock you're seeing right this moment. I'm going to explain what's going on, how you handle this. And later, when you eat out or you go to a concert, have you noticed how many people are on their cell phones the entire time? Some businesses, artists are
1:29 Speaker 02 jumping on the cellphone bandwagon. Yeah, bandwagon. I want to talk about
1:36 Speaker 03 Ban.
1:37 Speaker 02 Bandwagon. And I'm going to talk about that straight ahead. I like that, Chris.
1:45 Speaker 03 You like it?
1:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:46 Speaker 03 I thought you'd like that.
1:47 Speaker 02 All right. So time to talk travel. Hotel rates, airfares, gosh, gasoline of late, all so crazy expensive. I want to talk about each of those and get you ready for your summer. Okay, so rule number one with airfare. Airfares were already significantly higher before the hostilities began in Iran. Because demand has been crazy strong. So the key with airfare is your shopping for summer.
2:28 Speaker 02 You've got two friends, the calendar and comparison shopping. Because day of the week matters so much, not when you buy a ticket, but the day you fly, the day you return, and who you fly. Remember, always do your airfare searches trying them two ways. One way and round trip. The one way is really important because a lot of times the airline that's cheapest one way is not the cheapest the other. And most searches for flights, when you pick an airline going one way, it automatically only searches that same airline coming home. So you can end up paying much more money. So you search both ways.
3:13 Speaker 02 One way, which is where I usually find the best deal, and round trip. And second, never go to your favorite airline's website. You can eventually book there, but you never go there first. You search airfare multi-mode, multi-airlines. I love using Google Flights. A lot of people prefer Hopper. Those are the two most respected of the airfare search engines. You can use both of them and look again, one way and round trip. And then you can look at the fare screen and you see by day that, oh, if I go one day later and come back one day later,
3:57 Speaker 02 it'll cost me half the money or something like that. And that's all I'm going to say about airfare right now because I've talked about that strategy in the past. Hotels, we are in the oddest time for hotels. The average rate of a hotel room has actually gone up less than the overall rate of inflation over the last seven years. The average cost of a hotel room right now is about 160 bucks for a night.
4:28 Speaker 02 And you're like, and that's less inflation, believe it or not, it is than a lot of other things that we're paying more for. But that's only the smallest part of the story. Because what's happened in the hotel business, and you gotta be aware of this when you're booking your own travel, is that the price points have really spread out. I talked recently on the podcast and YouTube show about how the buckets have spread. But in the hotel business, it works a little different. What's happened is that the category of hotel you're looking at, if you're looking at one that you're paying your own money for, and your
5:09 Speaker 02 fellow travelers overwhelmingly are paying their own money for, those have not really gone crazy in price. It's the expense account kind of hotels, and especially the luxury end of the hotel market, that has seen giant increases in price. And so when you're paying with your own money, you'll see these enormous gaps in price, depending on where you're booking. And all the big hotel brands now have segmented their hotel names to all
5:49 Speaker 02 different kinds of target customers. They're reaching different kinds of people. And right now, the owners of the more budget oriented hotels are having trouble getting the revenue they'd like on a nightly basis. And at the same time, the really high end hotels, because wealthier people have done really well in the stock market and all that, and they're feeling pretty flush, they're spending bigger money pushing up the rates at the higher end. And there is one thing, though, about the expense account hotels, not the luxury ones, but the ones that the Hiltons, the Marriotts, that kind of thing.
6:33 Speaker 02 They, on the weekends, when the corporate travelers are not there, they can often be your best booking deal as a leisure traveler. So where during Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night, maybe Thursday night, they can be extremely pricey. The rest of the weekend of that week, they may be a deal if they're not at a resort kind of area. Krista?
7:00 Speaker 03 Okay. The first question I have for you today is from Nico in Utah. Nico says, I recently had the pleasure of sitting on the Atlanta tarmac for well over four hours, waiting for a gate. I was offered a flight refund and $250 in flight credit that I have to use within a year. I'm aware of that the DOT allows for a maximum of three hours on the tarmac, but the airline doesn't really seem to care. Seems like a bigger deal to me than just a flight credit and refund. Any thoughts?
7:32 Speaker 02 Okay. So Nico, the, the flight tarmac delay rule governs things like giving you access to a working bathroom, giving you the ability, if at all possible, to exit the plane if you desire after a delay of three hours, and gives you access not to a full meal, but snacks or something so that, gosh, think about people with pre-existing health conditions and no food or water. So it only deals with the life kind of things, does not require even the money.
8:12 Speaker 02 I know that your situation was the big Delta meltdown that they have very publicly apologized for. And so they are not required to give you that refund and the flight credit and all that. You definitely have some level of status with Delta because I've heard from a number of people who have no medallion status with Delta and they got nothing. They got just a pro forma apology note, no compensation at all. Delta had such an operational meltdown. They kept people on planes as long as seven hours with no gate available for them. And
8:56 Speaker 02 it was just one of those things started with a weather problem and compounded on itself. And we need, how many years am I going to say, we need a compensation system like Europe has where when an airline fails, you receive compensation and it's a clear formula that you're paid for your inconvenience, paid for your hard costs that you have because of a delay. The airlines are too powerful, their lobby is too strong, and we've never been able to get real consumer protections in the US.
9:36 Speaker 03 Okay, Elaine in Louisiana says, a question concerning two of Clark's favorite items. The New Orleans Saints are playing in Paris in October of this year. My wife and I-
9:48 Speaker 02 Gems to Saints.
9:49 Speaker 03 My wife and I are going to see the game and spend a week in France, but also want to spend a week in northern Italy, probably flying out of Milan. Is there a reason to use the same airline to go to Paris and back from Milan, or should I price them separately? Also, would you recommend flying or using the train between Paris and Milan? Thanks, and who dat?
10:11 Speaker 02 Who dat? Dims to Saints. Okay. So we got a lot of things to talk about. When the Falcons play the Saints, you know, I want the Falcons to win. Second, from Paris to Milan, it's a puzzle because it's a 90 minute flight and it's an almost seven hour train ride.
10:33 Speaker 03 Is it really? They don't have any like?
10:35 Speaker 02 That is a fast train. You look at a map of Europe, how far it is from Paris to Milan?
10:41 Speaker 03 That's true. I love the trains.
10:43 Speaker 02 Paris to Milan have a relatively fast train because, you know, the fashion capital of Milan, fashion capital of Paris, each thinks they're the fashion capital of the universe. And there's a lot of designer traffic that goes back and forth. And so there is good train service and a zillion flights a day. So if it were me, I would take the train between the two.
11:11 Speaker 03 Me too.
11:12 Speaker 02 Because by the time you get from a central city to an airport, go through security, go through whatever delays there are and all that, you get to Malpens or you get to Lanate, and then you got to get into Milan, take the train. It's pretty, you got more room than you do on a crunch class on an airline. Now to your airfare question.
11:36 Speaker 03 Can I say one more thing about the train? Sorry.
11:38 Speaker 02 Sure.
11:39 Speaker 03 I don't mean to interrupt, but I'm also wondering, I didn't look at the schedules, but maybe there's even a cool overnight place to stop in between to see one more country or something. That would be really fun.
11:50 Speaker 02 Well, this is the Krista thing. In a 10 day trip to Europe, see seven countries. That is true.
11:58 Speaker 03 Sure. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Carry on.
12:01 Speaker 02 Okay. All right. So we're going to talk about the train also. Every time I've been on a long distance train in Italy, the food is better than it is usually in restaurants. And then you go in other countries in Europe, the train food. It's not so great, not Amtrak, but not so great. Anyway, so the question you asked about the fares, you do want to do into Paris, out of Milan, not necessarily on the same airline, but on the same group of airlines. The United States and Europe allowed airlines to fix
12:40 Speaker 02 prices and enter into these co-ops where several airlines work together and they sell each other's flights and code share and they coordinate schedules and they fix fares. So you want to use the ability to shop all of them. You want to shop the, you've got Air France, KLM, Delta, you've got Lufthansa, United together, American, British Airways, trying to think who else is in these. And so you want to shop all three of them and they will come up in a multi-airline
13:17 Speaker 02 search to see going into Paris, out of Milan, who is going to be the best combination of whichever co-op you buy. So you're not necessarily, you don't want to limit yourself to a particular logo on the tail. You want to shop that co-op, that price fixing group to come up with who's going to be your best deal. And you want to buy that about April, May is probably going to be the best time to buy that October fare.
13:50 Speaker 03 Did you mention SAS?
13:52 Speaker 02 SAS is kind of out there on their own.
13:55 Speaker 03 Well, they're in the Delta. I know they're in that.
13:57 Speaker 02 They're kind of a junior member of the Air France KLM thing. So SAS has been offering better deals than others in the cooperative efforts. And I forgot to mention Aer Lingus is part of the, and Iberia, part of the British Airways, American price fixing. So SAS may stand out there on its own. It will require you take two. Two flights to get to Paris, two flights from Milan back to New Orleans. But that may be, and I didn't mention SAS because I don't think they fly to New Orleans.
14:37 Speaker 03 Oh, okay. Got it. Brent in Florida says, I have two questions. First, how do you travel with just a carry-on? We only use a carry-on for a weekend trip. If you're going to Italy, for example, you would need at least one or two checked bags, in my opinion, unless you plan on buying new clothes when you get there. Also, how can you consider yourself part of the cheapskate club when you travel so much? That's got to cost you a fortune, even though you get good deals. Is it mainly for business travel?
15:07 Speaker 02 I used to do tons of business travel. Now, most of what I do is just for fun. And yes, if you look at it as an efficient use of money in my life, no, it is not. Travel, even on bargains, it's a real expense. But it's an experience that I value so much. So, no, it is not an efficient use of money. On the carry-on, that is efficient. And my wife and I were recently in Europe for 13 or 14 days. And we each went with a carry-on. And I said to Laine, she said, I don't think I can make it through the trip
15:48 Speaker 02 without going to Laundromat or Wash and Fold. And I said, oh, we'll go to a Wash and Fold. And then, of course, we got caught up in the trip and never made the time for it. And we were on fumes with clothes by the end of the time period. But over and over again, it made it so much more convenient that we were carry-on only. And so, I pack very efficiently. You go on YouTube, you'll see video after video of strategies of experienced travelers who do carry-on only, even for long trips,
16:28 Speaker 02 and what they do using those compression bags and all kinds of other strategies of rolling your clothes to get more space in your carry-on. And yeah, it's probably an inflexible obsession of mine.
16:46 Speaker 02 With doing carry ons, but I hate standing in lines and I hate a bag taking a trip somewhere and I go somewhere else. Coming up ahead, you know, somebody's gotten so much better is when you travel using your cellphone. But there are times it's a lot better to put that cellphone down or away. I want to talk about that.
17:11 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
17:40 Speaker 01 UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay and Workforce Management.
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19:24 Speaker 02 School cellphone bans are something I've been all about from when the first inkling of that taking place happened. And this is based on life experience with my kids, realizing they would be messaging me from class, not paying any attention to what was going on in a classroom. You watch and you see kids at the school bus stop. Don't know if you've ever noticed this with middle schoolers or high schoolers. They're not talking to each other like they would have in the past. They all have that cellphone stoop, looking at their cell phones. So I've been really happy by the spreading of the restrictions on use
20:08 Speaker 02 of cell phones during school hours with kids. So they have to engage with each other again. They have to learn how to interact with each other instead of hiding behind their phones. And then I've shared with you in the past, how much it disturbs me when you look around a restaurant and you'll see a group of friends together, you'll see family, and instead of talking to each other, they're all looking at their phones. And so I was so excited when I was in a restaurant that bans the use of cell phones while you're in there. And a lot of people be like, I'm not going to a place that bans cell phones. But the advantage of
20:53 Speaker 02 it is you actually reengage with the people you're with. What a concept. And now there's something apparently going on where some concert artists don't want cell phones at their concerts. And so this is a device that is so fantastic in so many ways. Think of all the things these modern Swiss Army knives do for us. What the apps do, the way they can save us money, the way we can get around. The information we can find instantly, the entertainment we can find, and it's become too much of a good thing. So what's the real answer?
21:38 Speaker 02 It's how we handle it ourselves. And I've got an app on my phone that tells me when I'm using it too much and shames me. And I love that. I love that it gets me to modify what I do and put my phone away. And so whether it's you and me who modify our behavior, or places start saying for quality of life, we're gonna say you can't do this right now. Whatever it is, it's better when we take control ourselves. But the phone thing, it's
22:18 Speaker 02 one of those things, too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. And I'm as guilty as, listen to me with all this self shaming. Okay, I am as guilty as anybody else pulling out that cell phone too much. And I know that's not a problem for you, Krista.
22:37 Speaker 03 Well, I'm terrible with my phone, but when I'm out to eat with someone or talking to someone, I always leave it, I leave it in my purse or wherever because, and I do have a watch that notifies me. Like if one of my kids is calling, I think it's an emergency, then I would pull it out. But, and then concerts, man, it's brutal. I love it when they think people put their cell phones away because I feel like all you see are phones in front of your face, recording the show.
23:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's funny how, how much people don't just enjoy the moment, and they want to document the moment. And really, you paid a lot of money because of what a ripoff so many concerts are, you paid a lot of money to be in there. And you want to take a selfie, that's fine. But this whole thing with recording so much, but when are you ever going to watch that again?
23:27 Speaker 03 I mean, I think people do, but it's like, to me, it is, it's, it's hard in the moment and it's, it's just distracting for other people to me. That's my opinion. Okay. We're going to go to questions. Rich in Ohio sent this in for you. Clark, I wanted to ask what we can do to protect ourselves from the increasing identity theft. We did the credit freeze. We're also working on the SIM telephone number lock and we tried to complete the ACATS lock, but unfortunately Schwab doesn't have any mechanism for that. I'm asking this question as there's been an increasing number of events and I can only assume with AI there'll be even more. It seems our institutions are not learning for protection and forget Congress, they can't agree on daylight savings, let alone
24:09 Speaker 03 our security. Any thoughts from you and your team?
24:13 Speaker 02 This, Rich, you do the best you can and, and it can be overwhelming and you take the steps you should. And as for Schwab, I don't get it. I mean, they're such a sophisticated company. Why they have not come up with a simple procedure like Fidelity. As best I understand, Schwab still has no procedure for protecting people's accounts through ACATS. I'll say what ACATS is in a second. And Fidelity has a simple click. And if you're a Fidelity customer, if you haven't put in ACATS lock, do it. Vanguard supposedly in
24:55 Speaker 02 the ether, we've heard so much feedback from people. Some of the customer service people seem to know how to put an ACATS lock in, others don't. This shouldn't be so hard. Okay. So ACATS, and if you've heard this and you're like nodding off, I'll be quick with the explanation. It used to be a problem in the brokerage business that companies would not comply with the law when you wanted to go to another firm. And they'd constantly say, oh, we lost the paperwork to try to discourage you from moving to another firm. So the industry was forced to develop an electronic method that very quickly and easily migrates your assets to another firm.
25:38 Speaker 02 Criminals being sharp and smart and looking for the newest way to steal money will set up a brokerage account somewhere they pretend to be you. They'll then have hacked into your account, set up an ACATS transfer and steal your money. So having an ACATS lock requires an additional step of proof positive verification of who you are as an account holder and you want to move your money. And then, once they've verified you really are who you say you are, then the money moves. So you're doing the right stuff. We can't do everything to prevent the problems that we're having with identity theft, AI
26:22 Speaker 02 being deployed as part of it and all that. So you just do the best you can. And let's face it, the federal government is not riding in on the cavalry to rescue us. They can't even do, as you said, figure out what time it is.
26:39 Speaker 03 Okay. Renee in Florida says, "I have an upcoming phone meeting with our financial advisor and I received this request from them. I would love to get Clark's thoughts." And here's a quote from what they received. "We're participating in a financial program that uses a secure transcription and meeting summarization tool. The goal is simple. Capture every key point from your conversation accurately so nothing is missed and follow-ups are clear. When we can focus fully on our discussion instead of note-taking, the quality of our meetings improves significantly. This approach is becoming common among other professionals such as doctors, therapists, and attorneys because it helps them deliver better service and accuracy. We believe it can do the same for financial planning."
27:23 Speaker 03 And they explain how the transcripting service works through AI. So that's basically it.
27:31 Speaker 02 Okay. So I see here in your notes, Krista, who this is. They are not a fiduciary. They are a high-cost, commission-based investment house.
27:43 Speaker 02 So I would be worried that this is not for you. This is for them. That if later you were like, wait a minute, you ripped me off and blah, blah, blah. And they can go to the AI summary of the meeting and say, well, you said this sounded good to you too. And use it as a defense in the event that you later realize they weren't looking out for you. So I would not picture this as being a benign reason. And I'd also encourage you because it may be information you didn't know that this is a very expensive company to do your investing with.
28:27 Speaker 02 That is not a fiduciary that you want to be with an organization where legally they are contractually binding themselves to do what they should be doing for you first before them. And I'm not casting aspersions on your commission salesperson there. They may have really good intentions. I just want you to know that they are an expensive company to do business with. And legally, they are not binding themselves to do the best by you.
29:01 Speaker 03 But I would say in the general question, these AI transcription services are are very common. As it's very common for you to get this call be recorded for a customer. So that is going to be, you're going to be seeing that all over. Do you have an issue with that?
29:17 Speaker 02 Well, I'll tell you when I love it is when I'm dealing with an organization like cable company, something like that. And you can do the chat where you get a record of the chat and what they have told you. I think that's very valuable as a consumer because otherwise you get a he said, she said thing from a phone conversation. And later it's like you got no proof. You have the chat script. I think that is a useful thing. And that was more elementary AI before we even really talked about AI.
29:52 Speaker 03 Right. Ed in Georgia says, I've retained my bank statements going back to the late 1980s.
29:59 Speaker 02 My goodness.
30:01 Speaker 03 I want to purge this stuff. Rather than keeping every statement, I'm thinking of only retaining the January and December statements for 1988 through 2020.
30:10 Speaker 02 Wow.
30:11 Speaker 03 Please tell me what really should be my document retention policy. Thank you.
30:17 Speaker 02 If you want to keep any of it from that long ago, Ed, keep just the last statement of each year. It'll have on it normally a summary of what happened through that year. And that's more than plenty for you to keep. And Ed, when are you coming to my house to organize our records? Because that is unbelievably detailed that you have all that. And it's more than you need. I can't, I would think this way, when's the last time you needed to see one of those things from the 80s, the 90s, the, what do they call it, the aughts? And the 10s? I mean, you probably have not needed any of those things in recent times.
31:02 Speaker 02 But is the purge and the compromise, last statement of every year, more than enough? And I want to thank you so much for joining us on today's podcast and YouTube show. I hope you've enjoyed it. If you don't normally check us out on YouTube, we have a lot of content for you on our channel with YouTube shorts, where you got a bite sized bit of information as a video. And it's something that our traffic on YouTube is growing quite fast is YouTube. Isn't it amazing? YouTube is now the most watched streaming service
31:44 Speaker 02 in the world. It has become such an important source of information, teaching, propaganda, entertainment, you name it.
31:57 Speaker 02 And so our whole thing is to go wherever you are, whether it's on social media, traditional radio, television, podcasts, our newsletters, our websites, Clark.com and Clarkdeals.com, wherever you want to be reached, we want to be there to provide you information you can trust. That's what we all work on every day to empower you with knowledge so you can save more, spend less, and don't ever, ever, not ever let somebody rip you off. And you know what's coming up on the next podcast? Clark Stinks. See you on Friday.
32:45 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
33:14 Speaker 01 UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.
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