Best Hotel: Le Prieuré, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon; runner-up, Graves 601 in Minneapolis.
Best Hotel Room Service: Wood pigeon in apricot sauce, Le Prieuré, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. But you should really just go to the restaurant if you can get a table.
Best Hotel Toiletries: L’Occitane shampoo and soaps, Le Bourget Aero Suites. My bar of bath soap lasted for another three months after I took it home with me. And it smelled great.
Best Airline Flight: British Airways, Club World. This is a better class of air travel than I usually fly, so unless I get lucky with a seat upgrade again, or have some occasion to fly Silverjet, I don’t think it’s likely to get knocked out of top rank any time soon.
Best Airline Food: An SAS flight from Newark to Copenhagen (not recorded here — this is back in 2001 or so) where they served a fabulous lox breakfast in economy class. I’ve no idea what first class got. Probably gilded caviar.
Best Long-distance Bus Service: Jury’s still out on whether there have been any good enough to be called “best”.
Best Train Service: Possibly the Eurostar from London Waterloo Station to Paris Gare du Nord; possibly the German Intercity Express.
Best Sushi: A tough field, but I think I would have to call Mashiko in Seattle my personal favorite.
Worst Hotel: The Lantern Inn in Ukiah, California, encountered in November of 1987. Nothing since has been able to under-perform its collection of shabby furniture arranged in a dimly-lit cavern of a room, through which insects skittered all night long. But then again, as far as I can tell this property has been redone and put under new management as the Sunrise Inn, and may no longer be such an embarrassment.
Worst Airline Flight: Air Transat, though a runner up would be the Olympic Air flight from Athens to New York back in 1999; I asked for nonsmoking, but it turned out there was no real barrier between my nonsmoking row and the next row which was, you guessed, the Smoke Like A Chimney section.
Worst Airline Food: “Yorkshire pudding” by Thomas Cook.
Worst Long-distance Bus Service: Jefferson Lines. I feel a little bad listing this one, because I’m pretty sure I just encountered someone kind of, well, nuts. But if this is even remotely a sample of their customer service concept, …
Worst Train Service: A nightmarish local train ride through southern Germany during a summer thunderstorm back in July of 2000. The train was packed with people — lying in the aisles, often — and there was no air-conditioning and nothing to eat or drink left in the cafe, even if one could have gotten to the cafe car through the ranks of fallen riders. As the clouds moved over the horizon and the lightning touched down on the plain, it really felt like the end of the world.
Worst Sushi: “Tuna roll” by Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Made with canned tuna. Really.
Most useless mini-bar item: Oxia Personal Oxygen.
