TripHunter

Found this in Vilnius, Lithuania. A new one for us, it seems to be similar to a Big Mac but with bacon, red onions, lettuce and a mayonnaise-based thoughts. From what I can tell it’s a regular menu item.

During a recent trip to Shanghai, China, I decided to continue TripHunter traditions and explore what was on offer at McDonalds in China.

My journey to this particular branch of McDonalds on Niajing Road was an interesting one. The golden arches called to me from across the street and an arrow pointed down some stairs. I continued down the stairs and was greeted by more McDonalds signage halfway down. Sensing I was almost at my destination, my pulse quickened. I skipped down the last flight of stairs two at a time and out into the warm, welcoming glow of…..Burger King. Wait, what? I looked back from whence I came; sure enough, a McDonald’s sign. A wave of nausea swept over me. Was I losing my mind? Had McDonald’s and Burger King merged overnight and no one told me? Was Ashton Kutcher about to jump out and yell “you’ve been punk’d, bitch!” before punching me in the face? Just as I was about to fall to my knees and scream “what’s happening?!” I noticed the McDonald’s just to the left of the Burger King counter. I apologised to the startled custodial worker standing next to me and carried on.

Glancing at the menu, everything looked in order. The usual ratio of 70:30 was maintained: 70% global McDonald’s fare, 30% local specialties. The local variations were surprisingly tame, considering what we’ve come across in past explorations. There was the cup o’ corn, the fried chicken, some interesting breakfast choices, and a purple pie, but other than that, nothing that made me think “Gosh! I would never have thought of combining those two food items and calling it breakfast.” The only thing that made me feel slightly uncomfortable was the conspicuous absence of Diet Coke (or Coke Light.) But this could have been an issue with this particular branch, and not a true regional variation.

Quietly disappointed, I ordered a couple of the more interesting menu items and paid my Yuan to the very friendly teller, who acrobatically slapped down my tray in anticipation of my feast’s arrival. It was at that moment…..I saw it. Staring up at me from my tray mat was this beauty:

I imagine the commercial voice over going something like this: “We take a soft green tortilla, that’s right, green. We fill it with juicy, wet cole slaw, warm mayonaise, ripe red tomatoes and top the whole thing off with a deep fried pork chop, rind and all. Finally, the deliciousness of a pork chop, in the convenience of a tortilla. Only at McDonalds.”

I don’t know what it’s called, I don’t know how it’s sold, I don’t even know what else is in it. All I know is that I can get a pork chop to go and that’s pretty much the greatest advancement in fast food since the self-serve ketchup dispenser. How did it taste, you ask? It was everything a pork chop covered in cole slaw and mayonaise could be, dear reader. Magical. This is what Prince was talking about when he sang “This is what it feels like when doves cry.”

Oh and here’s the ad that is running in China at the moment. Quite a different positioning than I would have gone with. Brave, almost. “If you’re a healthy, active woman then you need to eat more pork. We’ve got you covered.”

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Have any of you tried this particular McDonalds menu item? Can our Chinese-speaking friends even tell us what it’s called?

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This deserves a much longer post (which will be forthcoming) but…

Using your frequent flier miles to book a flight is almost never a good deal. You may think “But it’s a free flight! I’m not paying for the ticket!”  Yes, yes you are. You’re paying a lot. When you factor in the taxes and fees PLUS what you actually paid to earn those miles (i.e. the cost of your previous flights, hotel stay, credit card purchases, etc you end up paying a substantial amount of money for that “free” ticket.

Let’s look at an example…

If I want to fly from San Francisco to London next month on Virgin Atlantic it would cost me 50,000 miles PLUS $529 in taxes and fees. Here’s the breakdown:

That’s a lot of coin for a “free” flight. For context a full fare on the same dates is $1022 and that includes taxes and fees of only $172 (and that fuel and insurance charge has mysteriously disappeared.)

Here’s a few more numbers for you. To buy 50,000 miles straight up would cost you $1300 so you could argue you’re using miles which have a base value of $1300 PLUS $529 in taxes and fees so that “free” ticket is costing you close to two grand. Ok I know we don’t always buy miles but it gives you a sense of value.

So here’s my tip: instead of using your miles to book a full flight, buy a regular ticket and use your miles to upgrade to a better cabin.

Again, let’s use Virgin Atlantic as an example:

We know that a regular ticket is $1022 including all taxes and fees. A full fare premium economy ticket on the same route on the same dates is $2475 BUT it’s only 20,000 miles to upgrade your entire flight (i.e. roundtrip) from Economy to Premium Economy. 20,000 miles cost about $500 to buy and even with the slight bump in taxes (no fee increases on an upgrade), you’d still save well over $500 vs the full fare Premium Economy ticket, and you’re saving even more out-of-pocket if you’ve earned those miles on previous flights.

Of course this is a simplified example employed to prove a point but those numbers are real and the principles almost always apply, irrespective of the airline. I use Virgin Atlantic because it’s a FF programme I’m very familiar and while your mileage may vary (see what I did there?) the theory is applicable to almost any airline. So do your research, spend some time crunching the numbers, especially on those overnight long haul flights – it’s almost always worth it.

Got any frequent flier tips? Let us know in the comments below!

LEAD DEVELOPER

We are looking to recruit an experienced, professional lead developer to lead the continued development of an exciting new travel website.

You will need good communication skills as well as technical ability and strong back-end development and DB skills. You will also need to understand the importance of building structured code that is fast, scalable, reliable and robust. You will need to thrive working independently and in a fast-moving, low-structure environment.

Required skills:

· Ruby/Ruby on Rails (Heroku experience preferred)

· Very strong DB skills

· HTML 4/5 / CSS 3

· Good Javascript (JQuery / Ajax)

· Experience with templating frameworks

· Experience with APIs

· Good understanding of web practices for standards and efficiency

· Attention to detail

Useful extra skills:

· Search engine optimisation

· Travel / vertical search websites

· Crawling/scraping

· large scale text manipulation

· filtering/moderation tools

The site is based around a new travel search concept and our mission is to help people make the best informed travel decisions possible and simply enjoy better trips. The business has been founded and funded by two experienced web entrepreneurs who have built a number of multi-million revenue companies in the last 5 years with similar business models, with extensive expertise in marketing and monetization of these businesses. The initial focus will be on the UK, but we expect to expand internationally over time.

Initially the role will be on a contract basis at market competitive salary, however there is the opportunity for this to become a full time role and to earn an equity stake in the business over time.

Location is flexible, the role could initially be home-based or we have access to office space.

To apply, please send resumé and covering email including examples of sites you have worked on to ahunter(at)haebc.com

Are you struggling to find somewhere to have your wedding? Want hearty food, refreshing drinks, unique gifts, and a festive atmosphere? Well do we have the place for you…

Yes, that’s right, you can you have your special day at your local McDonald’s. During our recent TripHunting mission, we discovered that Hong Kong is the only city in the world to offer this unique matrimonial experience – all due to overwhelming requests from couples hoping tie the knot while basking in the warm, polyunsaturated glow of the golden arches.

For around £800, you and 50 of your nearest and dearest can enjoy a McDonald’s wedding experience, complete with a balloon archway, burgers and fries for everyone, and a wedding cake made of stacked McDonald’s apple pies.

For an additional £110 McDonald’s will provide the radiant bride with a custom-made wedding dress, made using only the finest white balloon animals money can buy. If you’re willing to go all out then you can upgrade the dress to red balloon animals with a train of red cellophane flowers. A series of tasteful balloon centrepieces are also available for your cordoned off section at the back of the restaurant.

McDonald’s even provide the entertainment with an MC (MC. That works on so many levels.) organising games, coordinating guests, and distributing McFlurry’s – after the toast, of course. At the end of the party, your guests won’t leave empty-handed. They’ll receive a goody bag bursting with McDonald’s toys including Grimace AND the Hamburglar. I’ve heard rumours of a Mayor McCheese figurine but they remain unsubstantiated.

Your guests might grumble about the lack of booze (they’ll have to satisfy their thirst with a Coke Light as McDonald’s has a strict no alcohol policy in their restaurants) but you can take their minds off it with a 5 foot tall balloon replica of the happy couple for less than £100. A small price to pay to have your special day immortalised in latex.

The days comes to a crescendo when the bride-to-be walks through the balloon arch way with her balloon bouquet to receive her balloon ring (yes, really) from her (hopefully non-balloon) husband-to-be. I’m lovin’ it, indeed.

All that remains for me to say is , Honey, pack your bags, we’re renewing our vows at McDonald’s!

Yes, *this* is what we’ve been working on! We’re delighted to announce that our hotel search engine is now officially in alpha testing. The TripHunter team has worked their butts off over the last year to get to this stage and we’re proud to finally be able to showcase all of their effort. Right now you can read over a million reviews and opinions on 125,000 hotels around the world, and find a great price once you’ve decided on the right hotel for you.

Our goal with TripHunter is to eliminate the need to jump around from website to website checking user ratings, reading reviews, finding prices, looking at pictures. We want to have it all in one place and we’re going to work hard until we get there.

We’re proud of the whole site but one of the features we’re most proud of is the TripHunter Score. We analysed the individual rating systems for tons of hotel websites and built an algorithm that would create a universal score for every hotel in our database, based on the hundreds of thousands of user ratings that are spread across the internet. Now you can quickly and easily compare apples to apples……or hotels to hotels, I guess we should say.

But this alpha testing release is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re not satisfied with just having lots of diverse data and reviews on a ton of hotels around the world – we’re building a lot of cool new features that will make the travel search process even easier, with an understanding of who you are and what you like, so you get your perfect hotel every time. We’ll also be adding more review and booking partners, oh and fixing any little bugs that might pop up, as they are bound to do during these alpha testing stages!

In the meantime, we’d love your thoughts on what we’ve created. Just click the feedback button on the left of the main TripHunter  site to tell us what you think of the site so far and how we can improve it.

I may have lived in Hong Kong for several years but this is a constantly changing city and several things struck me during my recent trip to Asia’s World City:

- They have Shakey’s pizza in hong kong. They don’t even have Shakey’s in Northern California.
- Some of the best Peking cuisine you can find is at the very deceptively named American Restaurant in Wan Chai.
- The average retail rent in hong kong is US$1,697 per sq ft, the second highest in the world.
- The star ferry carries 26 million people a year. That’s more than the italian national airline Alitalia carries in a year.
- Hong Kong has made the jump from diet coke to coke light.
- The shopping scene is still world class but you have to look a little bit harder for the real bargains.
- 30 words of Cantonese and a passing knowledge of Chinese etiquette will get you a long way.
- Yahoo is still the number 1 web property in Hong Kong.
- The pollution problem is getting so bad that people still speak with a sense of wonder about a 2-week period of extended clear skies in May 2010.
- Hong Kong has near-mythical status as a shopping destination for mainland-Chinese tourists. It’s now to the point where visitors will buy products in Hong Kong that are freely available in China just to say that they were purchased in Hong Kong.

To prove we didn’t make it up…

Visiting London this summer? Quick tip: The Heathrow Express and Gatwick Express are a rip off. The tube will get you to central London quickly and easily from Heathrow, and the scheduled national rail services from both Gatwick and Heathrow are a quarter of the price and not much slower than their overpriced “Express” cousins. In fact, on the longer Gatwick-London journey the difference between the Gatwick Express and regular rail service is a measly 5 minutes but the price difference is substantial.

And remember, once you get to London don’t forget to grab an Oyster Card. You’ll save a good chunk of change during your stay.

We’re sending out a request today on behalf of burger lovers everywhere. What’s the greatest burger you’ve ever had? Inquiring minds want to know. So tell us in the comments below about your best burger experience. What, where, who, how – we want all the juicy details.

For the record, I think In ‘n’ Out’s Double Double (animal style, of course) has got to be a front-runner, no?