Flying electric ferries are coming to the Maldives, a full list of debit cards that provide cellphone insurance, and what can fill the SeatGuru-shaped hole in our hearts? All that and more in this week’s Saturday Selection, our weekly round-up of interesting tidbits from around the interwebs (links to the original articles are embedded in the titles).
Flying electric ferries are coming to…the Maldives?
Over the last 15-20 years, the Maldives have ascended to being a front-of-mind luxury travel destination for many Westerners, spurred on by images of private islands occupied by exclusive resorts encircled by dreamy white sand beaches. It’s also a country of between 500,000-600,000 people, about half of whom live in isolated communities whose only access to the capital of Malé is via expensive flights or slow (and sloshy) ferries.
Soon, all that will change. In 2026, the island nation plans to launch a fleet of, I kid you not, flying electric ferries. What sounds like something straight out of the Jetsons is actually a hydrofoil that glides with the hull of the boat sitting about five feet above the water. Because of that, they claim to be much less affected by the “ocean motion,” which is the bane of many landlubbers’ digestive tracts. As you can imagine, they’re much, much faster than the current boats as well.
The image above suggests that these “flying ferries” will be nesting on beaches in small packs, waiting to come in and lay their electric eggs. In fact, only ten will be placed in service next year, operated by the magnificently named local company, “Ego Shuttle.”
RIP SeatGuru. Now what?
Most young folks don’t remember, but the late 90s and early 2000s were a dark, scary time for airline travel. Booking tickets via the interwebs was still in its infancy; some companies didn’t even have online maps that allowed you to select your seat when you bought your ticket (*gasp*). Even worse, sometimes you might select a seat, thinking that you were getting a roomy, bulkhead throne, only to discover upon boarding that it was actually a windowless, narrow flying sarcophagus directly in front of the bathroom.
In the midst of this terrifying milieu arose a knight in shining armor, beaming light into the maelstrom of hidden non-reclining exit row seats, angled lie-flat business class, and in-seat armrests. For the next 20+ years, if you wanted to discover the best seats on an upcoming flight, all you had to do was visit SeatGuru, enter your origin and destination, select your flight, and voilà, you had a (usually) accurate seatmap, complete with user reviews.
Over the last couple of years, SeatGuru’s reliability began to ebb. TripAdvisor bought it in 2007, and once the pandemic hit, updates seemed to be few and far between. It didn’t always show the correct plane operating a given route, and multiple aircraft types were missing from some carriers’ fleets. Then, within the last few weeks, SeatGuru finally left this mortal coil and went dark.
Luckily, as SeatGuru declined, a handful of other sites began to fill in the gap, and Dan’s Deals does a nice job of summarizing the best in this post. We can all pour one out for the dear, departed SeatGuru while fully resting in the knowledge that there’s no reason to ever unintentionally sit behind a bassinet seat again.
How to outsmart your autopay: Debit cards with cellphone insurance
Most wireless providers offer a per-line discount for setting up and paying your bill via autopay with a debit card or checking account. For my carrier, T-Mobile, the discount is $5 for each line, with a maximum of $40 per month/account. AT&T and Verizon both have similar schemes.
All of them have rules stipulating that paying your bill with a credit card officially invalidates your autopay discount. However, until recently, there was a workaround for T-Mobile: set up autopay with a debit card, then manually pay your bill with a credit card before the due date. Unfortunately, T-Mobile finally caught on, and now any credit card payment invalidates the autopay discount for the following month.
The problem is, not only do many of us earn credit card points on cell payments, but we also get free phone insurance. Now, we’re left facing a stark choice: autopay discount or points and insurance.
It turns out, there’s something in between, as a handful of debit cards actually offer cellphone insurance when you use them to pay your cellphone bill. Earlier this week, Doctor of Credit was kind enough to publish a list of eleven such unicorns. Cheapskates Frugal people everywhere will be thrilled!
How to find out what you need to travel where
A couple of years ago, the Frequent Miler Team’s annual challenge was called “Party of Five.” We broke up into two teams: Nick and I were “Team San Francisco,” while Carrie and Stephen were “Team Tokyo.” Each team was supposed to plan a week-ish trip for all five of us using miles and points; Greg The Frequent Miler would decide who did better.
Carrie and Stephen made sure everyone’s passport was current and told us that we didn’t need to get any visas in advance. Then, a few days before we left, I was reading an article about Southeast Asia, where someone mentioned that it was common for countries to require your passport to be valid for six months past your arrival date. Mine was set to expire in five.
I messaged Carrie to ask if any of the countries we were visiting required 6 months of validity; she checked and said, “‘fraid so.” So, the day before departure, I was at the Seattle Passport Center, waiting in line with an emergency passport application. The next day, three hours before my flight was scheduled to depart, I was in the same line picking it up.
I’ve had this sort of thing happen a handful of times over the years, be it with insurance requirements, pre-arrival visa documentation, or required vaccinations. Wouldn’t it be great if there were one place where you could find all of the entry requirements for any country on Earth in one place? Luckily, there is.
One Mile at a Time writes about the Timatic Tool, an IATA Resource that allows you to plug in a departure and arrival point, then find out all of the health, insurance, and visa requirements for your trip. If only I had known about it before Party of 5.
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I guess you can still get access to what seatguru thinks through ExpertFlyer…
Nice assortment. I’m hoping the electric hydrofoils become more prevalent.