TravelTube.com — Weekly News Roundup
All right, it's Mark Murphy, back with TravelTube.com, the travel expert channel — that means you, the travel advisor. I've got a great week because I took last week off. There was some news that came out, so today's going to be a news roundup. You may have seen these, you may not have. First up, the airlines are at it again — this time with lockers, basically your overhead bin, and you're going to have to pay $18 or more depending on the plane and its configuration. I'll get to that. It's currently an Australian airline, but is that coming to the USA? Stay tuned.
Also, ICE is detaining foreign citizens at airports with expired U.S. visas — that's from the New York Times. I'll get into that. Of course, we just recently had Fauci testifying about COVID. I thought it'd be a good time to address those who want it all to just go away — "let's stop talking about this, this was years ago." I'm going to address those folks.
Also, TSA discovered something incredibly unique in a checked bag — you will not believe what they uncovered. Also, I'm sitting here in New Jersey in my makeshift studio, and they just implemented a new law here in July tied to e-bikes and injuries, so I'll get into that. And I'll get into the whole Jersey Shore thing — an influencer just posted that she spent $10,000 to come to the Jersey Shore for a week, saying "no way, this is crazy, why would I do that" — I'll get into that. And: could you fly on an airplane for an entire day, 24 hours? The longest non-stop flights are about to happen. Hello, Groundhog Day. I've flown a lot, so I'm going to get into all of this — and probably, with my ADHD, touch on a few other things.
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Airlines Charging for Overhead Bins
All right, with that said — yes, the airlines are at it again. How? They're nickel-and-diming you. This time it's an airline called Jetstar. Let me pull that up for you: Jetstar is saying, "We want to charge you a little more money so you can pay us to bring your stuff on board." It's a low-cost carrier in Australia, and if you want to use the overhead lockers for bags, you're going to be paying for it.
Will this stick? Will people be okay with it? You don't really have a choice. In the U.S., four major airlines control over 80% of domestic traffic, so it's practically impossible to avoid what they're doing — if one airline moves in one direction, the others follow. It's an oligopoly. Is it collusion? Call it whatever you want, but when you see one make a move and all the others follow, you know they're reacting to what else is going on.
To me, that's the worst part of travel — my least favorite part is flying. And for a guy who's been to somewhere around 80 countries, I haven't left the country since 2020 — but I've traveled all over the world. People wonder why, since I'm "retired," I don't travel more. I guess if you call TravelTube.com retired, I'm technically retired. There are people out there who want to retire so they can travel — I retired so I didn't have to. Do I love traveling? Absolutely. Anybody who's been around the world like me sees so many great things and understands travel is really important for bringing people together. So yes, I'll get back on the road — but I've got the advantage of staying at the Jersey Shore in the summer, which a lot of people spend $10,000, $13,000, $20,000 a week for, depending on accommodations. You can spend a lot less too — a few thousand dollars. But if you rent a big house with a bunch of family members and split the cost, it evens out.
ICE at Airports
So what else is coming up? You've got ICE detaining people at airports. The New York Times is outraged that foreigners who overstayed their visas — or shouldn't have been here in the first place — are going through TSA security to fly somewhere and getting picked up.
So ask yourself: why is ICE in the airports? Because Democrats wanted to shut down the government, and that shut down ICE too. Remember, we talked about this — I was on a lot of TV networks discussing the difficulty of travel and those TSA lines. Some of you got stuck in four- or five-hour TSA lines and turned around and left because you were never going to make your flight. That actually happened. So the administration brought in ICE agents to help with the crowding and long lines — and then they just stayed.
Think about it: TSA is run by the government, and the government has access to who's booking flights for security reasons, so they can flag people who aren't supposed to be in the country. I don't see why that's a big deal. It's certainly better than trying to find someone on the streets of a city, like people were upset about before. This is cleaner — you don't have to worry about weapons, since they've already gone through security screening. It's actually safer for everyone, including law enforcement. I'm okay with it. Where do you stand?
Fauci Testimony and Looking Back on COVID
Moving on — was it a week ago? I think it was a week ago that Fauci testified in front of Congress and pled the fifth 111 times. I don't post much on Facebook anymore, and here's why: the people who come out of the woodwork. What's really interesting to me is that the people who were so pro-lockdown — shutting down businesses, your ability to travel, your ability to visit loved ones, telling you that you couldn't gather with more than a certain number of people — were the same people fine with, say, a governor gathering with a crowd at a restaurant that was forced closed for everyone else. For him, no problem. That's where I have a problem.
If COVID was so deadly, why did 1,200 healthcare workers sign a petition saying to drop all mandates for people protesting the killing (or, more accurately at this point, the overdose) of George Floyd? At the same time, the same people who were excited to shut everything down and collect government checks — don't bother working, or do the "remote working where you're not really working" thing — that was fun for a lot of you. You got puppies, stayed in your slippers, everything was great, no problem with it. Meanwhile business owners got wrecked, especially in big cities and states where lockdowns dragged on and on, kids weren't in school, and so on.
So I shared something — a picture I saw on social media — that basically said the unvaccinated were right, meaning everyone was pressured to take an experimental medical vaccine. It was experimental, folks — emergency use authorization. That's what it was; it didn't go through the normal approval process. And of course I've been called an anti-vaxxer, a "MAGA person," people saying they're praying for my death — lovely. Really shows the true colors. If you're friends with me on Facebook, I leave my page open, so all the nut jobs show up. The irony is that it's the people who were most pro-lockdown, most okay with losing constitutional rights, who now just want to move on — "why are you still talking about this?"
There are travel agents out there who've told me they won't sell travel until "this is over." Some people are still wearing masks, folks — not that they ever really worked. It's like living in central Florida in the summer and using a soccer net instead of a window screen to stop mosquitoes — that's how effective they were. The six-foot distancing rule — nobody in the medical field, including Fauci himself, can tell us where that number actually came from.
Some people still say he's their hero. One of my wife's friends saw a post from a former coworker calling him a hero. I'm thinking — do you have access to any other information? A former colleague of mine from the '90s, who I didn't hire (he was already there when I got there, and I believe he was eventually let go, though I wasn't involved in that part of the business), commented on a post I put up — Fauci's own words, from his own diaries — asking, "Where is this from? How do we even know this is true?" I said, well, maybe if you'd done any digging — you were a journalist. All he had to do was listen to Fauci's own opening statement complaining that Rand Paul released his notes. If you haven't read them, I swear, read them — you'll want to throw up. While he was telling everyone what they had to do, and talking about quarantine camps and the rest of it, he was out doing interviews and having dinner with Jake Tapper. On and on.
For those still telling me it's time to move on — no, it's not. I remember an Atlantic article a few years back basically asking, "Can we ask forgiveness and just move on?" No — because no one's been held accountable, and without accountability, it can happen again. If you're in the travel industry, or you just enjoy travel, COVID destroyed it for a couple of years. Some destinations stayed closed for over a year; some places had mandates in place well beyond that, even here in the U.S., where governors controlled what happened in their states. Everyone said, "Florida, you opened too soon, you're going to kill everybody" — but the average age of a COVID death was 80, with four comorbidities, in something like 80% of cases.
Five years ago I was in my 50s — I take no medicine, I have no underlying conditions, nothing — but I had to get a vaccine to "keep you safe." Except vaccines were supposed to mean you wouldn't get sick and wouldn't spread it — that was never actually the case. And then you find the internal notes about keeping quiet on waning efficacy, because that opened the door for boosters. Some of you are still taking them.
Anyway — anybody who thinks it's okay to just move on from one of the biggest overreaches in history, where we were stripped of basic rights, sorry, not for me. I want accountability. And how are we going to get that when Fauci received a pardon covering 2014 to 2024? COVID didn't start until 2020 — why does the pardon go back to 2014? Because those six years before COVID matter. A blanket pardon like that raises the question of whether this was an engineered virus that some people were aware of and didn't want made public — because government-funded researchers, without proper authorization, were doing gain-of-function research: creating dangerous viruses supposedly to develop countermeasures. One of those viruses got out, and people died.
But sure, move on. Businesses were destroyed. People died by suicide. CNN ran a piece about 1,200 healthcare workers saying to drop mandates for protesters — while business owners who couldn't reopen and lost everything got no such grace. These things actually happened. But we're told to move on, lectured by talking heads on TV who get billions a year in pharmaceutical advertising. I hope there's real scrutiny here — I'm not sure what they can pursue given the blanket pardon, but if there was a workaround to send funding to the Wuhan lab that contributed to a pandemic costing the world trillions in debt and devalued our currency, that's worth asking about. I didn't think people could be more gullible, but I was wrong. I hope there's accountability.
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TSA's Unusual Find
Now — did you see the TSA story? They found something unusual in someone's checked bags. Any guesses? Civil War-era cannonballs. Yes — discovered in checked luggage at an Alabama airport on July 18th.
Remember, TSA lines got bad partly because ICE funding fights shut things down for a while, even though ICE itself was funded through 2029 — so all it did was create inconvenience and pain, seemingly for political leverage. Eventually it got resolved, and this kind of story tends to recur. I wish TSA were privatized like it was before 9/11, honestly — government agencies don't have a great track record on efficiency (the broadband rollout, EV charging stations, and program fraud numbers all come to mind). But I do appreciate the win here — these cannonballs, about the size of a grapefruit and as heavy as a shot put, were inert, so not dangerous, but definitely not something you want turning up in checked baggage. They belong in a museum.
New Jersey's E-Bike Law
A few other travel-adjacent things going on. I invested in an e-bike a few years back. Would I ride one that goes 40–50 mph? No — some do exist, but that's basically an electric motorcycle classified as a bike. There are different tiers: Level 2 goes up to about 20 mph with pedal assist, Level 3 up to 28 mph, some with throttles, some pedal-only.
New Jersey passed a law requiring riders to be at least 15 or 16 (I forget the exact age) and to wear a helmet. No real problem with that — I don't need a government nanny, but fine. The bigger issue is that you now have to register your e-bike with the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles, and you have to insure it. You could already have a $10 million umbrella policy and plenty of liability coverage, but now there's a separate requirement specifically for e-bikes.
The irony: I live near the beach in the Brant Beach area of Long Beach Island, where the speed limit is about 15 mph in peak season because of pedestrian crossings. Road cyclists in packs regularly hit 25–35 mph on regular bikes — no helmet requirement, no registration, no extra liability insurance required. But an e-bike that tops out at 20 mph requires insurance you have to carry and show if you're stopped, plus a helmet, or you get ticketed. My neighbor, a full-time resident, just paid $250 per bike to insure his two e-bikes — $500 a year. Who are these regulations really protecting? It looks a lot more like a revenue grab than a safety measure — another reason I'll never have a full-time home in New Jersey. My beach house is registered to an LLC, and I'm only there two to three months a year.
And it's especially ironic given the state's talk about affordability, because e-bikes actually help cut emissions — no tailpipe output, and they replace car trips for things like grocery runs. Now there's a $250-a-year cost attached to that. Meanwhile the road cyclists going twice as fast face none of the same requirements. The contradiction is hard to miss.
The $10,000 Jersey Shore Vacation
Since we're talking Jersey Shore — I've rented a house here myself — there's a story about a vacationer who says she paid $10,000 for a Jersey Shore stay and sparked a debate about whether it's worth it.
What's nice about the Jersey Shore, coming from someone who lives in Florida, is the comfort — a light hoodie in the evening, a sweatshirt at a beach concert. The water here runs around 75 degrees, which locals think is warm and I think is chilly compared to 86-degree Florida water. But I do love sitting on the beach with a book, watching people, enjoying the weather. We see dolphins, sometimes whales.
The woman in question said $10,000 felt like a lot to essentially "camp" — bringing her own linens, cooking her own meals, hauling gear to the beach. Here's the breakdown, though: say a six-bedroom house costs $12,000 for the week. Split across six couples, that's $2,000 a couple — $1,000 a person. Most people driving in from the tri-state area aren't paying for flights or losing vacation days to travel. Check-in is early afternoon, you cook your own breakfast and lunch at the house, and there are free evening concerts up and down the island most nights — including Fire Pit Fridays in Brant Beach, where the township sets up fire pits, a band plays, and a couple thousand people show up on the beach, all free, 7 to 9 p.m.
Cooking your own meals instead of eating out saves real money too — a big group easily spends $200-plus on a single breakfast out. If she's spending $10,000, she's probably not oceanfront, more likely a few houses back from the beach — which is still a very short walk. If schlepping gear is the complaint, a $150 beach wagon solves that problem for the whole week.
My own house sleeps around 16 people. Where else are 16 people going to sleep for under $10,000, once you add airfare and everything else, for a couple traveling alone versus a big group? If it's just a couple wanting a six-bedroom house to themselves, sure, that math doesn't work — go somewhere else. The video in question got 600,000 views on TikTok, with comments ranging from "$10,000 to swim in that water? No thanks" to "$5,000 gets you the Caribbean instead." Sure — for a couple, a Caribbean trip might be more efficient. Round-trip airfare there runs around $1,500 for two, leaving $3,500 for a nice stay. But for a large multi-generational group, a Jersey Shore rental is often far cheaper once you factor in airfare for everyone. Even at a bargain $500 round-trip per person, 12 plane tickets to the Caribbean alone would run $6,000, leaving only $4,000 to house 12 people for a week — that math doesn't work either.
The 24-Hour Nonstop Flight
Last thing — could you handle a 24-hour flight? The longest nonstop routes, using the newer Airbus A350, are about to test that. One planned route departs Melbourne around 5:30 p.m. Monday, crosses near LA and Vegas Monday afternoon, crosses the International Date Line, passes over Canada, and lands around 6 a.m. Tuesday.
I've done long-haul flights to Asia — evening departure, sleep six to eight hours in business class, wake up and realize there's still 10-plus hours left. On a 24-hour flight, you might get two sleep cycles in if you're lucky, but you're still going to be watching the clock. I'd rather break up a long trip with stopovers along the way to see other destinations than sit on one plane for 24 straight hours — but if a nonstop gets you there faster, that's a real trade-off, and it's your call as the traveler.
That's it for this week. Please follow TravelTube.com on the podcast apps and social media — there's only one Travel Expert channel, and that's TravelTube.com. Talk to you next week.
