Hotels and Lodging

For our May 2019 trip to Azerbaijan, my wife and I booked Elnur Babayev as our driver/guide. We found him on TripAdvisor and contacted him through his website, bakuguide.ga.

The booking processes went smoothly, with Elnur communicating promptly by email in good English, and we soon had our itinerary set for Azerbaijan. We paid $950 for a 4-day tour, including hotels with breakfast.

When traveling from city to city within Croatia, bus transportation should not be ruled out.

In August 2019, I landed in Zagreb and took the airport shuttle ($5) to the city’s main bus station, then made my way to Hotel Sliško (Ivana Bunica Vucica 7, Zagreb; phone +385 1 6184 777, slisko.hr/en), a short, 3-block walk away.

In the letter “Protecting a Bank Account from Theft” (July ’19, pg. 38), a subscriber said that, while traveling, he checks his bank balances online, not by using an unprotected Wi-Fi but using one that requires a password, such as in a hotel.

Avoiding unprotected Wi-Fi is a good idea, but no one should blindly trust a hotel’s computer network.

Two ITN readers wondered if traveling without being tech-savvy was still possible (Feb. ‘19, pg. 54), so we asked subscribers who travel without a smartphone or laptop computer to answer these questions: What tech problems or hurdles have you faced recently when traveling or even when making travel arrangements, and what solutions did you find? If you manage to get to wherever you want or to book arrangements without using any of the new personal electronics, what is it that you do to succeed?