Letters to the Travel Editor
In praise of Airbnb
I always enjoy reading your Travel magazine in the Herald because travel is always positive, fun and exciting, however it really disappointed me to read the extremely negative article on Airbnb [“Pack your bags, Airbnb”, December 4]. Fully agree on the info of the voyeur but the writer’s comments regarding Airbnb were totally adverse to my many enjoyable experiences with Airbnb, along with many colleagues.
My wife and I have enjoyed Airbnb so much that this year we built our own apartment at home and are now very happy hosts enjoying and being rewarded so much in sharing our beautiful country with fellow travellers from all parts of the world. All our guests are lovely people because Airbnb give us the option to choose who stays with us.
Airbnb is an excellent organisation with great systems and only charges us 3 per cent of our earnings. Your writer seemed hell-bent on degrading the company it just spoiled your positive paper. Gordon Stewart
Not all queues are equal
Given that Tim Roxborogh pens a travel column for a travel publication, one could reasonably expect him to be better informed.
Passengers do not queue for 40 minutes to declare food to Customs [Travel Bugs, December
4]. The queues passengers encounter after collecting their luggage and before heading out the exit, are in fact MPI (Ministry for Primary Industries), who are responsible for all food and other biosecurityrelated items. So Tim's advice to the airport to employ more Customs people (to solve the MPI queues) is of nil value.
Passengers encounter Customs at Passport Control, much of which is now automated, and should Customs officers want to take a closer look at any particular passenger after baggage collection, they achieve it in a much different manner to current MPI processes. Phil Chitty
Discomfort discontinued
Further to Kate Roff’s article on the Southern plantation [“Southern Discomfort”, December 11], we have just come back from a tour of the Southern states and while in New Orleans we took a bus trip to the Whitney Plantation. The owner has returned the buildings to what they were like when the slaves were there: the accommodation, the punishment areas and also memorials to all the people who died. There was also one to the people who tried to escape and were later captured and killed. This was one of the most thought-provoking parts of the trip.
Ellen Collings
I read Kate Roff's sanctimonious account of a tour of a plantation in the US South and was left wondering why she went in the first place. Was it a perverse desire to have her obvious moral outrage reinforced? Brian Wyllie