The lowdown on Russian visas

Five years from now, travelers may smile at old photographs of today's bar code labels for luggage. In addition to Las Vegas, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam using new “smart” baggage tags, London (at Heathrow's terminal 3), Paris, Milan (at Terminal 2), Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo (Narita), Beijing, and a few small airports around the U.S., are currently trialing this technology for full use in the near future. The goal is to make sure every passenger arrives at their destination with their bags—which doesn't happen for about eight of every 1,000 passengers in the U.S. right now. Here's how the technology works: A disposable paper luggage tag is implanted with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, which is a microchip that's the size of a pin and as thin as a sticker. When this RFID tag passes within several feet of an antenna, it "wakes up" and acts like it's a transponder for a major radio station, beaming out radio signals. By broadcasting its location, a smart tag makes it easier and cheaper to track a bag. Right now, it's common for bar code labels to get torn or folded, making them very difficult for scanners to read automatically. The new smart tags could reduce errors in reading baggage tags from the current 10 percent estimate to between 1 and 0.5 percent, says Pankaj Shukla, Director, RFID Business Development for Motorola. Let's say an airline worker needs to find a bag in a giant pile of luggage. Under the current bar code tracking system, an employee would have to hand sort the bags and scan each bar code individually. But using the new chip-based technology, workers can use a device like a beach-combing metal detector to beam out a signal for faster tracking of a lost bag. If the bag is in the pile, the hand-held scanner will make a noise. The smart tags also prevent the loss of luggage. Under the previous bar-code-based system, luggage tracking through airports was limited to just a couple of points, such as at a check-in counter, at an airplane's cargo hold, and at a baggage carousel, because of the high cost of the equipment. In-between these distant points are "black holes" where many bags go astray. The technology provides a more affordable means for covering the gap with a series of new checkpoints. Each time a bag passes an antenna—such as at a check-in counter, in a storage room, in a plane's luggage compartments, and at a baggage-claim carousel—it will be recorded in a computer database. These computer records will allow airlines to precisely find a bag—or figure out where a bag was last seen—by checking when and where a bag's tag was last "read" by a machine. The technology, while not new, is becoming cheap enough to allow airports to install antennas throughout an airport. Today's tags cost about 15 to 20 cents a piece on average, says Shukla. In comparison, the cost of dealing with lost and mishandled luggage is estimated to by other organizations to be about $100 per bag on average. McCarran airport, in Las Vegas, was one of the first airports to use this technology to track checked-in bags and make sure bags make their flights after being screened by L-3 explosives-detection machines. Officials at other airports look to Vegas system for its increase efficiency in handling and tracking bags. In addition, this improved “smart” baggage tracking system helps to centralize all the explosives-detection equipment in one place. Unlike other airports, which clutter the floor next to every airline's check-in counter with the security machines--Vegas uses the freed-up floor space to host slot machines and other money-making businesses. Hong Kong's main international airport has already installed the system. You can check your bags at counters at the downtown train station or at the front desks of a few major hotels. Another perk: Hong Kong is a major transfer hub for passengers. In addition to the airports’ efficient check-in benefits, the airport provides a speedier connection time because bags are more efficiently tracked, sorted, and placed onto connecting flights. The result is that passengers are able to enjoy shorter wait times between transfers and trust that their bags will meet them at their destination. One of the main things delaying the switch-over from bar codes to RFID tags is money. As the industry faces rising fuel costs, airports and airlines may put off the investment. EARLIER ON THIS JUST IN Theft from baggage: The TSA reponds to our readers (and their 127 comments)

We first wrote about easyCruise's no-frills ships in 2005, but a lot has changed: They've added port stops, a new ship, daily housekeeping, and are now including a daily continental breakfast and buffet dinner. Prices start at $349 per person for a compact double on a seven-night cruise. EasyCruise has offered trips to the Aegean since 2007, but now the budget carrier will stop at Crete and Rhodes, and several of their new trips are centered around important events such as both the Catholic and Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations and the Patras Carnival, widely considered the most important carnival in Greece. A large port on the northern tip of the Peloponnese Peninsula, Patras's annual pre-Lent party is attended by more than 300,000 revelers with events including The Bourboulia (carnival ball), a treasure hunt, and various parades and fireworks. What's neat about easyCruise is that they don't tend to sail until six or seven a.m., which leaves plenty of time to experience nightlife. The cabins still offer few amenities (no alarm clock, radio, or phone), but their newest ship, easyCruise Life, accommodates 600 people and has three hot tubs, a spa, sauna, gym, and salon. It's also got an Internet room with three high-speed connections. The new Aegean trips range from 3 to 14 nights, departing from Athens; Bodrum, Turkey; or Rhodes (airfare is not included) for islands dotting the Aegean Sea, as well as a few ports on the coast of Turkey. Tips: Save up to 30 percent if you book before August 31. U.S. passport holders traveling to Greece do not need a Visa for stays less than three months. Foreigners traveling to Turkey on a cruise are allowed to stay without visa for up to 72 hours. Are you a veteran easyCruiser? Which are your favorite Aegean islands? MORE GREECE DEALS Greece by kayak, 7 nights, from $1,995 per person including all taxes and fees

This summer an eye-popping statistic was reported by several reporters and bloggers, including ones at the Associated Press, CNN.com, and WSJ.com. Here's the Chicago Tribune's version: More than 12,000 laptops are lost each week at U.S. airports, according to a study conducted for Dell by the Ponemon Institute, a research think tank. Only one-third of laptops lost and found in airports are reclaimed, the study said. Hmm…12,000 laptops a week is an enormous number of laptops. Skeptical, I called the man who put together the study: Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute. I learned that Larry has a different definition for the word "lost" than the one in the dictionary. [Update 10:40 a.m. ET.: Larry's response has been added to the bottom of this post.] [Update: Sept. 16: A WSJ.com review by Carl Bialik and a follow-up study find that far fewer laptops are lost than the press release said. Vindication!] When Larry uses the word "lost," he mainly means what happened to his laptop ten months ago. Larry was passing through a security checkpoint at Chicago's O'Hare airport, juggling a large garment bag, another bag, and his laptop. After screening, he picked up his belongings in a typical rush. He walked about 30 feet from the checkpoint when someone shouted, "Hey Mister, you stole my computer!" It turns out that Larry had picked up the wrong laptop. The two men swapped machines and parted grumpily. By Larry's reckoning, two laptops were lost. He says a laptop is lost if it is "at least temporarily and knowingly out of my possession." I disagree. I think he and the other guy each misplaced, or accidentally swapped, their laptops. The laptops hadn't disappeared long enough to be "lost." Larry politely insists that if a laptop is out of your control, even momentariliy, then the data inside has been left defenseless. Okay. Some laptops are temporarily lost and some are permanently lost. Fine. There's still a major problem: The press release outright misled reporters when it said that most laptops are never reclaimed. Here's the damning quote: "A new study conducted by the Ponemon Institute has found that more than 10,000 laptops are lost in the 36 largest US airports each week, and nearly 70 percent of those laptops are never reclaimed." But that's not what the study said! At major airports, such as LAX and O'Hare, workers at Lost & Found offices guessed that roughly two-thirds of laptops that end up in Lost & Found offices are never reclaimed. Yet Larry told me that most of the "lost" 12,000 laptops a week never end up in Lost & Found offices. The study didn't publish an estimate of how many laptops are temporarily lost either. Confused? I don't blame you. Travel reporters and bloggers were confused, too. Many mistakenly reported that most of the laptops lost at airports are permanently lost. Curious how the Institute came up with its 12,000-laptops-a-week figure? I hope so. It's an amusing little story. Larry's team decided not to ask for official statistics from Lost & Found offices or from any spokespeople at any airport, airline, or government agency. Larry says his team "did try to go through official channels, but that seemed to stall the project." Larry's team instead interviewed janitors, baggage handlers, and TSA screeners over many months at large and small airports. His team didn't care about the "authority" of the people being interviewed. The opinion of, say, a part-time janitor who had only been working at an airport for a week was as valued as the opinion of, say, a security officer working at the airport for five years. Larry says there is a strong precedent for conducting a study in the manner he chose. His type of "benchmark study" is commonly done when sociologists "don't know the size and make-up of a population and doubt that their survey samples are representative of the larger pool." Larry is a former partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers and a respected researcher, so I'll defer to him on those points. But I ask you: Is it believable that 12,000 laptops are permanently lost at airports every week? When the statistic appeared on the news site Digg.com, several readers questioned the claim. For example, one reader said: "10,000 / 7 days a week = 1428 laptops per day or 59 every hour. how can this be possible in the most secured/patrolled and VIDEOed checkpoints in the world?" A different reader on Digg defended the statistic by doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation with government statistics: 55.5 million people flew in the month February of 2008 (Feb is usually the slowest month, by the way), that's 13.875 million per week. Assume 20 percent of them had laptops, that roughly 2.8 million laptops per week going through the airport, and if 10,000 are lost, that's only 0.36%, or roughly 1 in 278 lose their laptop. You think that's so wildly out of line (remember I picked the slowest month the airlines have)? Is this reader right in believing that 12,000 laptops are stolen at airports every week? Well, some other people also agree. For instance, a spokesman for the Airports Council International North America, who was interviewed by AviationWeek.com, said that roughly 3.5 million business travelers fly each week. "Only less than one half of one percent...would have to lose their laptops to reach the 12,000 a week number," he says. Here's my take: What the Digg reader is essentially saying is that about one out of every 278 of all passengers at a major airport today lost his or her laptop today. Or, to use the second example, roughly 1 in about 340 business travelers at a major airport today lost his or her laptop today. Imagine what these examples mean in real life. Think about the last time you were at a large airport. Every hour, there were a few hundred people passing through each section of the airport that you visited. How often have you ever seen a laptop lying unattended in one of those sections? If you follow the logic of these examples, you should see at least one laptop piling up every hour or so on average at every major gathering place at an airport. Laptops by check-in counters. Laptops by gates. Laptops at bars. Laptops in bathroom stalls. Did journalists and bloggers question the statistic? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the only print newspaper I found whose reporter (namely, Mike Maciag) called officials at a couple airports to ask their opinions. Maciag interviewed Orzy Theus, public information manager for Atlanta's main airport, who said, "I think the credibility of the methodology is really questionable." My favorite parts of his article are when it contrasts official data with the Ponemon Institute's data. For example: At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, 276 laptops were turned into the airport's lost and found last year, 269 of which were returned, according to the Washington Airports Authority. The Ponemon Institute study says, in contrast, that 450 laptops are lost at Reagan National airport every week. Most of those 450 were not reclaimed, if one believes the press release (which one shouldn't). That's quite a difference! Only 276 laptops lost and nearly all of them reclaimed in one year, versus about 23,400 lost—and a majority of them not reclaimed—in one year. Atlanta and Detroit airport spokespeople also reported very low numbers of lost laptops. (Larry would likely interrupt at this point to say that such official statistics probably fail to count the many times that laptops are lost, stolen, or misplaced at airports without being reported by travelers.) Props to Patrick Thibodeau of ComputerWorld, who called experts to put the study in context, and to the folks at an AviationWeek.com, who tried to spell out the details of the study and who posted a link to the full report. Disappointingly, a couple of the most visited travel blogs didn't put the statistic in context or express any skepticism. Gadling reprinted it and so did USA Today's Today in the Sky blog. (On the other hand, Jaunted, Gridskipper, and Christopher Elliott ignored the statistic entirely, which was probably the right approach.) One non-journalist travel blogger, Mark Peacock at BoardingArea.com, said he was skeptical about the study. Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News also expressed doubts in a blog post. [UPDATE Aug. 22, 10:40 a.m. ET: Larry Ponemon has asked for an opportunity to respond to this blog post. I've added his response, here:] I appreciate the coverage in Sean's blog, especially the excellent photo of me on my boat at Torch Lake. A good friend and mentor told me a long time ago that you have to have a "thick skin" to do controversial research. Here are just a few points that need to be made about Sean's interpretation of our research. Sean's blog piece diminishes the risk associated with lost laptops that are ultimately recovered. His article suggests that we have blown out of proportion the risk associated with a temporarily missing laptop. The fact is it only takes seconds to extract sensitive or confidential information from a computer that leaves the owner’s custody. This is why our study's numbers include laptops that are recovered. This is also why major news media found our study's results compelling enough to print. We stand behind our research methods. Since airports do not have statistics that track lost or stolen laptops, we surveyed airport employees who are in the front lines of this issue. We believe that these employees are an excellent source for understanding the prevalence of travelers who leave their laptops behind or report their laptops missing. Our study is successful because it has raised awareness among travelers in the United States and abroad. Clearly the airport environment is conducive to security risks because people are traveling with portable computers that contain sensitive or confidential information. Think about it! What other public facility exists where so much data is in one place at one time? Sean's article is entertaining. However, as a research institute that studies privacy and data protection, we believe the issue of lost or missing laptops to be a serious risk to companies and to the people whose information is on those computers. In other words, this is no laughing matter. Respectfully, Dr. Larry Ponemon Chairman & Founder, Ponemon Institute. What do you think? Feel free to post a comment below. More Links