United Airlines recently announced^[1] plans to retrofit 19 of its domestic Boeing 777 wide bodies with a 10-across seating floor plan. While the idea of squeezing one more seat into a jet that was designed for nine seats abreast is not new —American Airlines, Emirates, KLM, and Air France have been employing it for several years — what is distressing is that Boeing recently said that half of its orders for new 777s were asking for the 10-wide layout. “It’s just another trend of cost savings that ultimately hurts the traveler,” says Zach Honig, Editor in Chief of the travel website ThePointsGuy.com^[2]. 

Sometimes a cheap ticket is not all it is cracked up to be, if it is with the wrong airline for your personal priorities, so you have to do your homework (don't worry, we did it for you below). And as it turns out, fitting 10 seats where there once were nine is not the only measure of cost-saving that travelers should consider. Here are some of the most egregious factors to look out for before booking your next flight:

1. Tray Tables

As airlines stuff more passengers into a finite space, they are forced to come up with creative methods to cut weight, and create more room. Frontier Airlines recently reconfigured their seating and miniaturized their seatback tables. The table is fixed in place and is not much larger than an iPad. Working on anything in-flight will be tough since you can fit your cell phone, a drink, and, if you're lucky, that bag of pretzels you brought along for the trip.

The Worst Offender: Frontier Airlines
The Best Alternative: JetBlue Airlines

2. TSA Precheck

The best way to avoid long lines, and being required to pull out your computer while disrobing from your shoes, belts, and jacket is to be part of the TSA Precheck^[3] program. If you have TSA Precheck status, you are allowed to jump into the expedited security lanes, unless you are flying with Frontier, Spirit, or WOW Airlines. To save costs, and keep fares low, they have not upgraded their systems to comply with the program.

The Worst Offenders: Frontier, Spirit, and Allegiant Airlines
The Best Alternatives: Delta, United, American, Southwest, and Virgin America Airlines.

3. Lack of WiFi

Being able to access the Internet from 30,000 feet makes long flights more palatable, and has become all but essential for frequent fliers on business trips. Over the past few years, airlines have been adding WiFi access to most of their jets. To save money, Spirit, Allegiant, and Hawaiian Airlines don't offer it, and it is available on only half of Frontier Airlines' fleet.

The Worst Offenders: Spirit, Allegiant, and Hawaiian Airlines
The Best Alternatives: JetBlue, Virgin America, and Delta Airlines

4. Seat Room

If small seats are your biggest peeve, avoid Spirit Airlines, which offers an industry-worst 28 inches of seat pitch — room between the back of your seat and the one in front — on their “pre-reclined” seats that don’t move. They are the lowest-rated American-based airline according to Skytrax, an industry-rating group. Coming in a close second to Spirit are European discount flyers Easy Jet, with 29 inches, and Ryan Air at 30 inches.

The Worst Offenders: Spirit and Easy Jet Airlines
The Best Alternatives: JetBlue and Alaska Airlines

5. Customer Service

In addition to slashing costs by cramming you into ever-crowded planes, several airlines have taken it a step further by virtually doing away with their customer service desks. Expect long hold times and spotty response times to be the norm. Low-cost airlines like Frontier and Spirit Airlines have done away with their toll-free numbers altogether, and now require you to call a 1-801 number that can charge you up to 18 cents per minute while you are on hold. Toss in the numerous fees they charge for everything from printing your boarding passes at the airport ($2–$10 for Spirit) to the penalty for not paying for your carry-on online ($60 at gate for Frontier), and you can see why these two rank at the bottom of most national surveys for customer satisfaction. You may save money up front when you book, but with all the hidden fees, you may actually wind up losing money if you aren't cautious.

The Worst Offenders: Frontier and Spirit Airlines
The Best Alternatives: JetBlue, Hawaiian, and Virgin America Airlines

6. Slim Line Seats

Most airlines are offering some form of a “slim line” seat on their planes these days. On the larger carriers like United, Delta, and American, they are found in the back part of coach away from the premium seats, while other airlines like Southwest, Allegiant, and Spirit have them more widespread throughout the plane. The thinner seats offer less padding, storage space, and many do not recline. “While they may look nicer at first glance, they can prove to be uncomfortable for longer flights,” says Honig. “It is one of the biggest complaints we get from travelers.”

The Worst Offenders: Allegiant, Ryanair, and Spirit Airlines
The Best Alternatives: Virgin America and Delta Airlines

7. Seatback Entertainment

If you don’t fly very often, you might be surprised the next time you board a plane and find that the familiar seatback entertainment system is missing. Many airlines are eliminating them in the interest of saving money and lightening the planes to fit more people on them. If you have preloaded movies on your laptop or tablet, no problem, but if you are hoping to stream their live feed, you will need to have the latest version of their app to view them. Other airlines like Allegiant and Ryan Air offer no inflight entertainment.

The Worst Offenders: Ryanair and Allegiant Airlines
The Best Alternatives: JetBlue and Virgin America Airlines

8. Overhead Storage

Today’s planes were not designed to deal with the large influx of carry-on luggage travelers are using these days to avoid fees for checking baggage. If you're part of the airline's frequent flier program, you usually can board before others and find room for your luggage, but if you're not, you might have to gate-check your bag. A nuisance, especially if you're trying to book it from the Salt Lake City airport to your noon ski session in Park City. To deal with this issue, the newest Boeing 737’s are being designed with larger overhead bins, which offers higher opportunity for profits. So far, the feature has been ordered by Alaskan, American, Ryanair, Southwest, and United, plus 32 others across the globe.

The Worst Offenders: Frontier, United, Delta, and American Airlines
The Best Alternatives: Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America Airlines

9. Headphones

Whether to listen to music, watch a movie, or block out noise, headphones are indispensable. But don’t expect flight attendants to save you the next time you realize you forgot your pair the moment you arrive at your terminal. And even if your airline still offers earbuds on board, the ones flight attendants hand out during each flight are cheaply made, and according to a recent Reddit questionnaire for airline employees, barely sanitized, and commonly recycled from flight to flight.

The Worst Offenders: American Airlines
The Best Alternatives: Virgin America

References

1. ^{^} announced (fortune.com)
2. ^{^} ThePointsGuy.com (thepointsguy.com)
3. ^{^} TSA Precheck (www.tsa.gov)

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While President Obama calls for the U.S. and Cuba to “leave the past behind” and enter a more open era, contributing editor Josh Eells motorcycled across the country to find how Cubans all around the country think of their mostly unknown neighbors to the north. Here’s what they said.

When President Obama arrived in Havana on Sunday for his three-day trip to Cuba — the first visit by a U.S. president in 88 years — the first thing he would have seen as his motorcade left the airport was a giant billboard that read BLOQUEO: THE LONGEST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY. The bloqueo, or blockade, is what Cuba calls the 56-year American embargo; on the billboard, the second O is a noose. Cuba’s propaganda may be many things, but subtle is not one of them. From the moment Americans touch down in Cuba, we know exactly where we stand.

Or do we? I recently spent three weeks traveling through Cuba by motorcycle for the upcoming Adventure Issue of Men’s Journal (on stands April 1) . I circumnavigated the entire island, visited all 15 provinces, and stayed in more than a dozen towns and cities along the way, from tranquil Baracoa in the east to bustling Havana in the west, usually sleeping in casas particulares, the private homes, of everyday Cubans. I am in no way an expert on the country, but from what I saw, Cuba is a fascinating, heartbreaking, confounding, and frequently contradictory place — and no one, not even Cubans, seems to know exactly where it’s headed.

From our isolated perch in America, it’s easy to forget that we’re the only ones who don’t go to Cuba. Far from being an undiscovered paradise, there are tons of tourists already in Cuba: They’re Canadian, British, German, Dutch, Polish, Spanish. The Chinese influence is especially notable, as China has invested in the country like they have in many Latin American and African nations that the U.S. has overlooked. Almost all my fellow motorcyclists rode Chinese bikes — Lifans and Jialings and Huoniaos — and if a car wasn’t a pre-revolutionary Chevy or Buick, odds are good it was a Geely, a Chinese make. At the DMV in Havana, I sat in the office of a friendly female clerk who had a cartoon drawing of a lady tacked to her wall, with a caption that read: “How are the Chinese like women? No one can understand them, and they’re dominating the world.”

Cubans and tourists outside Western Union office to receive money orders in Havana. Yuri Cortez / AFP / Getty Images

Obviously it’s getting easier every day for Americans to visit Cuba, as travel restrictions are loosened practically once a month. But even though visitors from the U.S. were up 77 percent last year, once you get outside of Havana, Americans are still pretty rare. In multiple rural towns I visited, I was the first American some people had ever met. Some older Cubans — many of whom came of age during Castro’s revolution and who still remember the corrupt Batista regime — were more skeptical about America, but younger ones were unfailingly warm and enthusiastic. American flag prints were on display everywhere: on bandanas, on women’s stretch pants, on the dashboards of ’56 Chevys, and even on a young man’s red-white-and-blue, beer-pong-themed tank top. (The stripes were red with white Solo cups; the stars were ping-pong balls.)

RELATED: Reaching for Viñales, the Best Rock Climbing in Cuba^[1]

Most Cubans I met were insatiably curious about the United States. Near a small village called Alto de Cotilla, in the Sierra Cristal mountains, I stopped to chat with some twentysomethings selling chocolate and oranges on the roadside. They peppered me with questions about America, both innocent and pointed: Was it cold there? Did we have different kinds of trees? Did the trees have leaves now? What kind of jobs did people have? Was it true people in the north were richer than those in the south? Why was that? What did Americans think about Cubans? What did I?

That said, Cubans are also not as isolated as we think, especially when it comes to American culture. Although access to the internet is limited and expensive and bandwidth is glacially slow, there’s an underground network of USB hard drives called “El Paquete” (“the packet”) that lets Cubans keep up with all the latest movies, TV shows, and news from abroad. One taxi driver I stayed with in Havana recounted the plot of several Fast and Furious movies to me (prompted by our conversation about the eighth installment, which is reportedly filming in Cuba later this year), and an old man I had breakfast with knew that Mets centerfielder Yoenis Céspedes (a Cuban) had signed a contract extension before I did. My favorite such moment came at a monument near the Bahía de Bariay, the pristine bay where Columbus first made landfall in Cuba more than 500 years ago. A young tour guide who’d been admiring my motorcycle hurried through a two-minute spiel about the place, then proceeded to ask me all about the Discovery show American Chopper, which has been off the air since 2010.

But often, just when I would think we were closer than I realized, I’d be reminded of how far our countries are apart. In Santiago de Cuba, I was talking to a young lawyer about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated Santiago in October 2012 before continuing north to wreak havoc in New York. In a lame attempt to commiserate, I told him the storm had knocked out the electricity in my apartment for four whole days. He smiled and told me they were without power for two months.

Near the end of my trip, I rode to Playa Girón, a small resort town on the Bay of Pigs. The road was lined with signs commemorating the Americans’ 1961 defeat: THE VICTORY OF SOCIALISM and THE MERCENARIES ADVANCED TO HERE. I bunked with a fortysomething couple who had opened their casa for business just a few days earlier: The husband was a carpenter, but there wasn’t enough wood, and the wife worked at another casa in town and saw that it was a good way to make some extra cash. A lot, actually: In a country where the average salary is 500 Cuban pesos ($20) a month, one night hosting a guest brings in as much as $30.

At breakfast the next morning, while their daughter did her homework, the three of us talked about the recent rise in Cubans fleeing the country, racing to get to the U.S. before relations normalized, out of fear that the preferential immigration policies for Cubans might be revoked. They had a friend in town who’d paid a smuggler $10,000 — the equivalent of 30 years’ wages — to get her on a boat to Mexico. She’d crossed the U.S. border by foot, and was now living and working in Ontario, California, near L.A. “There’s a lot of risk involved,” the husband said of the journey by smuggler. “But people are worried about what will come next.”

Things are changing rapidly. A few days ago, the Starwood hotel chain announced it would take over management of three Cuban hotels, making it the first American hospitality company to do business on the island. Regular commercial flights from the U.S. should resume later this year, and President Obama just announced that Google is in the early stages of bringing high-speed internet access to the country. Cubans are also getting in on the entrepreneurial act: At a motorcycle rally in Vedado, I met Ernesto Guevara, Jr., one of Che Guevara’s sons. A lawyer by trade, he recently started his own motorcycle touring company, La Poderosa Tours, named after the bike his father rode through South America, later immortalized in The Motorcycle Diaries. The poverty and oppression Che saw on that trip inspired him to become a Marxist revolutionary; now his son offers multiday tours to wealthy foreigners at $4,000 a pop. If there’s a better metaphor for the Cuban experiment in 2016, I didn’t see it.

A cuban teenager rollerblades through Havana. Lisette Poole for The Washington Post / Getty Images

Mostly what I saw was hope: hope that the American government would end its embargo, hope that the Cuban government would loosen its autocratic grip, hope that the country would soon be a normal member of the world community. I heard it from young professionals in the upscale neighborhoods of Havana and from weathered farm workers in the countryside. But the best way I heard it may have been from an old man in Remedios, on the very first night of my journey. We were sitting in the living room of his casa, watching a speech in the U.S. by President Obama on TeleSUR, the Venezuelan news network. The viejo went on a long rant about America and imperialism and economic oppression that I could only half-follow and only occasionally agreed with. But then, at the end, he said something I understood very clearly. “I am from the middle of Cuba,” he said. “Cuba is in the middle of the Caribbean, and the Caribbean is in the middle of the Americas. So I am an American. We are all Americans.”

References

1. ^{^} RELATED: Reaching for Viñales, the Best Rock Climbing in Cuba (www.mensjournal.com)

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Sometimes, you just need some space. To remedy this, we offer you Montana, with its sprawling land, big sky, and some of the best fly-fishing rivers in the nation. It’s fair to say this great state — known for its wide-open spaces — is a catch. Let us set you up, then, with a chance for a luxury, all-inclusive guided fly-fishing adventure at the Madison River Lodge in Ennis, Montana. Your first step? Enter this sweepstakes.^[1]

We’ve partnered with Amberjack, Atlas Obscura, Bootprints, The Hustle, and Howler Bros. to send you to this fly-fishing mecca, for a 3-night/2-day all-inclusive guided adventure at the Madison River Lodge^[2] in Montana. 

The place: Madison River Lodge, which sits on the Madison River, runs through the property, bending around lodges so guests can just step out and cast their lines. The lodge is also perched on the Upper Madison’s “50 mile riffle,” where there’s said to be 1,000 trout per mile. Beyond your backyard casting, Montana Angler will take the winner and one guest on a guided fly-fishing adventure that includes meals, equipment, and private water access — as you cast for mountain whitefish, brown trout, and rainbow trout. Plus, you’ll get a $300 Howler Bros Gift Card and Howler Bros X Smith Sunglasses.

For a chance to win, enter your email address and sign up to receive emails from Amberjack, Men’s Journal, Atlas Obscura, The Hustle, Bootprints, and Howler Bros. 

So, get on it^[3]!

References

1. ^{^} Enter this sweepstakes. (amberjack.com)
2. ^{^} Madison River Lodge (www.montanaangler.com)
3. ^{^} get on it (amberjack.com)

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A volcano eruption probably isn’t on the list of fears faced by most Americans, unless you saw Dante’s Peak and Volcano at a particularly sensitive moment in your life in 1997 and have had spooky dreams about ash and lava ever since. That being said, it’s a fascinating occurrence when you don’t have to be near it, so people’s eyes have been on Alaska’s Pavlof Volcano since a weekend eruption spewed ash^[1] east from the Alaska Peninsula into the middle of the state. Alaska is known for being both large and sparsely populated, but residents of Cold Bay, Alaska, a town 30 miles from Pavlof with a population of 108, got as close a front-row show to the fireworks as you’re going to want. We spoke with Chris (who declined to give us his last name), an employee of Cold Bay’s one grocery store/bar/liquor store, which also moonlights as the town's resident hotel, to see how things were on the ground in the shadow of Pavlof.

RELATED: The Complete Guide to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park^[2]

So what’s it like when a volcano erupts? Chris gave an audible shrug, noting that he’d seen four eruptions in his lifetime, and told us that the 2014 eruption “was a better show.” It’s mostly seeing ash clouds, “big tight clouds like you see in movies.” The better views come at night: “When it’s dark you can see the lava shooting up,” Chris told us.

So what else is there to do in Cold Bay if you’re not there to volcano watch? The town’s big tourist season goes from June to November and attracts all manners of fishing, for halibut and salmon, as well as bear hunters in the late summer and fall. Of course, if you’re more into the idea of looking at nature than shooting it, you can also go bird, otter, caribou, and even bear watching at the nearby Izembek National Wildlife Refuge^[3], a 315,000 acre wilderness area that borders the town.

As for the winter? Feel free to drop in to Cold Bay, “if you like snow,” Chris said.

RELATED: The 13 Best Memoirs About the Outdoors^[4]

Of course, at the moment, you might find it hard to get up to Cold Bay if you want to witness the volcano show firsthand, since the giant ash clouds are grounding flights across the state, making it tough to get to Cold Bay’s single runway airport. Don’t worry, though, if you get down to Neuquen, Argentinab in the next couple of days, you might be able to catch Copahue’s eruption^[5] on the Chile/Argentina border. Even if you miss it, at least the weather will be warmer than Alaska’s^[6].

References

1. ^{^} since a weekend eruption spewed ash (news.yahoo.com)
2. ^{^} RELATED: The Complete Guide to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (www.mensjournal.com)
3. ^{^} Izembek National Wildlife Refuge (www.fws.gov)
4. ^{^} RELATED: The 13 Best Memoirs About the Outdoors (www.mensjournal.com)
5. ^{^} Copahue’s eruption (www.wired.com)
6. ^{^} warmer than Alaska’s (www.wired.com)

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