When even the wealthy travelers with money to burn start complaining about how expensive staying in London is, you know it’s gotten bad.
Whenever the dollar plummets and U.S. travelers get stung, which is pretty much a regular thing now, I get a bunch of calls from reporters, on my cell phone, at times when I probably should say, “Um, can I call you back?” But I don’t say that, because even though it may be happy hour and it’s noisy and I’m not thinking straight, when I ask, “When’s your deadline?” they mumble something about how the story is due in, like, two hours.
Apparently that explains how I showed up in a Forbes story someone alerted me to, called “Tourist Dollar Pounded.” The reason it didn’t show up on my radar before was probably because the guy spelled my name wrong. As in three letters that aren’t in my six-letter last name. Say what you will about new media leading to a decline in journalistic standards, but I can’t recall a blogger ever butchering my name that badly. But hey, enough whining, since they did spell the name of my book right and the article gives us this golden quote:
In London, it could be called the “one-to-one fallacy”; the list price is the same as back home (5£ lattes, 300£ hotel rooms), it’s just that the actual cost is twice as much. Said Brancatelli, “I don’t care how wealthy you are, you DO notice when you are in London and everything is twice the price. It’s simply stunning–and noticeable because it does seem like a nice, round double-the-price thing.”
But surely you can save money by being frugal right? Like taking public transportation around the city? Um, no. That’ll kill you too. Seems the prices for the Underground went up 33% and you now have to pay almost eight dollars for a single stop fare. Yes, one way. No, that’s not a crazy typo. So how about hopping on a train and getting out of London? Well, you might want to check into a bargain flight instead of the train:
Passengers using the Virgin West Coast trains will see fares go up by an average of 6.6%, meaning a standard open return ticket from London to Glasgow will now cost £240.
