My least-replicable travel hack is now saving me money, not just time

The passport that I’ve taken for much of my international travel since the spring of 2017 finally has some stamps in it–courtesy of the Brazilian border officers in São Paolo who did the honors with my Irish passport at the start and end of my trip for Web Summit Rio this week.

While I had traveled to Rio on my U.S. passport the previous two years, Brazil has since rolled out its e-visa program for U.S., Canadian and Australian citizens. Applying for one of these 10-year travel permissions costs $80.90 and, per numerous reports from travelers, requires time and patience to deal with glitches and delays in the approval process.

Traveling with my Irish passport, however, required nothing beyond scanning it into the United app’s Travel-Ready Center, having a check-in agent at Dulles eyeball that before issuing my boarding pass for last Saturday’s flight, and showing it one more time to a gate agent during boarding.

I didn’t have any issues exiting the country on that passport either, although having two passports on the reservation meant I had go through a second doc check for my U.S. passport before getting a boarding pass for my flight back to the States.

This was the second time this year that my Irish citizenship has saved me little money instead of merely letting me use shorter passport lines in Europe as an EU national (and not getting a passport stamp in the process).

Since Jan. 8, American citizens traveling to the United Kingdom have had to pay £16 for a two-year ETA (electronic travel authorisation) and do that at least three business days before flying to the U.K. It could have been worse; the British government originally planned to require an ETA just for connecting through Heathrow before relenting.

But Irish nationals are exempt from this, in keeping with the U.K. and Ireland’s Common Travel Area arrangements. So I didn’t have to worry about getting an ETA for my two-day stopover in London between Web Summit Qatar and MWC Barcelona.

Starting in the last quarter of 2026, I’ll get one more way to save a little money when the EU implements its ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorisation System), which will cost €7 and be valid for three years or, if sooner, the expiration of the passport used to apply for it. EU nationals will, of course, be exempt from that.

I feel a little guilty ducking all of these minor administrative obstacles since all of these countries are only responding to longstanding U.S. travel-permissions requirements for their own citizens. Brazilian citizens need a visa to travel to the U.S., with fees starting at $185 for a 10-year non-immigrant tourist visa. And U.K. and EU nationals need to pay $21 for an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), good for two years or passport expiration.

No American can blame any foreign government for deciding to return a little of these favors. And every American should hope that foreign governments following news of the incarcerations of international tourists and students in the U.S. (in some cases only for their speech) under the xenophobic Trump administration have the grace not to reciprocate.

Labs64 NetLicensing is set to make waves at Web Summit Rio!

When: April 27-30
Where: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Let’s connect and explore cutting-edge licensing solutions that simplify licensing processes, boost efficiency, and drive growth. No matter your size, NetLicensing delivers scalable and flexible licensing solutions tailored to your needs.

See you at Web Summit! https://rio.websummit.com/appearances/rio25/3ffdedc3-98a4-4c2f-b62b-cebe2a563d6d/labs64-netlicensing/

Between late last Sunday night and very early Saturday morning, I clocked more than 10,000 miles in the air to cover Web Summit Rio, conduct an onstage interview at that conference, and see very little of the city outside my conference bubble. Is that why I’m feeling tired tonight? No, the gardening work I put in yesterday and today had much more to do with that.

4/15/2024: Ep 98 SmartTechCheck Podcast – Apple, NTT Research, Sony, Roku and digital privacy legislation, Mark Vena

My latest bit of podcast banter had me trying to break down the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the odds of Congress making any progress on a comprehensive digital-privacy bill.

4/18/2024: The fight for tech talent, Web Summit Rio

My spot on the conference schedule didn’t come up until the afternoon of the last day, when I quizzed BairesDev CEO Nacho de Marco on the event’s center stage about how that firm aims to meet the software-development demands of clients with a “nearshoring” strategy of connecting them to remote-working developers in Latin America. After a couple of days of other panel moderators telling me that they’d had trouble hearing their onstage counterparts in that arena, I was relieved to see de Marco ably field my questions, replying in NPR-length paragraphs that made my job of panel clock management easy.

4/19/2024: This Air Taxi Is Ready to Help You Skip the Gridlock (If Regulators OK a Flight Test), PCMag

This post was a sequel of sorts to one I filed from Web Summit Rio last year, when the then-co-CEO of Eve Air Mobility talked up the Embraer-backed air-taxi startup’s ambitions to provide fast, clean and reasonably affordable flights in eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft around major cities by 2026. This year, the pitch for Eve delivered by Daniel Moczydlower, CEO of Embraer’s Embraer-X innovation hub, came with a little more realism about how the company’s battery-electric planes won’t fly paying passengers anywhere until regulators green-light its plans.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/21/weekly-output-mark-vena-podcast-nearshoring-meets-remote-coding-eve-air-taxis/

RIO DE JANEIRO

I landed here Monday and I took off Friday, and it’s fair to ask how much I ever arrived in this city during my trip for Web Summit Rio. As in, the amount of time I spent in any public space outdoors could probably be measured in minutes.

Unlike my journey to Rio last year, when I had an entire day free before Web Summit events and the morning through early afternoon open the day after the conference wrapped up, I might as well have parachuted in this year.

And then the difficulty of getting around this city limited any remaining sightseeing to the view through car or van windows or from one event venue or another.

I blame most of that on Rio traffic on the streets and highways that seem the only feasible way to get from the beach-adjacent conference hotel to anywhere else. Which here meant taking absurdly cheap Uber rides every time outside morning and evening shuttle-van commutes between the hotel and the Riocentro convention center.

Some of those vans got an extra boost in form of an escort by police officers on motorcycles who held up traffic at merge lanes–a further isolation of conference speakers from the rest of the city that didn’t seem to save much time in practice.

Rio does have a modest metro subway and light rail system, but they didn’t go near any of this year’s conference locations. As for the enormous bus network that includes miles of BRT-only lanes: Sorry, no. Google Maps never suggested a bus routing remotely time-competitive with hailing an Uber, as if I ever could have enlisted fellow conference attendees in a transit adventure the way I have for Web Summit’s Lisbon and Toronto conferences.

(Rio’s reputation for crime, fair or not, was not absent from these transportation considerations. Also worth stating: Not a single word of this post about conference-subsidized travel should be read as entitling me to any sympathy for this first-world problem.)

But I still appreciated getting to see more of Rio this time even if it had to involve a windshield perspective.

And never more so than Tuesday night, when an invitation to a party being hosted by friends of friends–perhaps friends of friends of friends–led to an Uber ride up increasingly narrow and winding streets up a steep grade through neighborhoods we did not remotely recognize before we realized we’d gotten the wrong address, corrected the error, and made our way to an Airbnb nestled atop the folds of a rocky hilltop that could have figured in a Brazilian version of Entourage.

The view from that rock-star retreat of glittering high-rises in Barra de Tijuca, the harbor beyond and the hills above was utterly magnificent–including a look at the Southern Cross without buildings in the way–and it reminded me to try to see a little more of the city the next time.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/19/seeing-a-city-from-inside-a-conference-bubble/

I’m flying to Brazil tonight for Web Summit Rio, where I’ll be doing an onstage interview Thursday. Unlike last year’s trip to Rio de Janeiro, this one has much less free time–I’ll basically have only the end of Monday afternoon to myself before spending Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at this conference and then spending Friday on a series of airplanes–but the extra time with my family is worth it. And I know the yard looks better after the attention I was able to give it yesterday.

4/10/2024: Experts: Here’s Why Age-Verification Rules for Social Media Won’t Work, PCMag

I was going to write this at the end of the previous week but got sidetracked by the crazy story of Meta’s content-moderation machinery going rogue in a way that looked very much like the company suppressing hostile press coverage. And then I had my trip to Dallas to see the eclipse distract me further.

4/11/2024: Android 15 Steps Closer to Shipping With App-Focused Beta Release, PCMag

After Google PR provided me with an embargoed copy of its announcement in advance, I wrote a quick post about the beta release of the next version of Android.

4/12/2024: White House to Congress: Stop Stalling and Fund This Critical Broadband Program, PCMag

The White House’s press office noticed the piece I wrote for AARP in February about the impending demise of the Affordable Connectivity Program and asked if I’d like to interview one of their policy staffers. Originally, that person was going to be Tom Perez, director of intergovernmental affairs, but a schedule conflict led me to talking to Jon Donenberg, deputy director of the National Economic Council, Friday afternoon.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/14/weekly-output-age-verification-rules-android-15-beta-affordable-connectivity-program/

RT Thomas Dohmke
Hey Copilot, can you plz make my snake game prettier? #WebSummitRio https://t.co/dBKaxAGa6h

https://twitter.com/ashtom/status/1654146265280593920

I might add not “technologists” only, but everyone who deals with the technologies today.
It’s a relevant subject indeed! Privacy is a high value and deserves attention by all, respecting human dignity.
---
RT @nymproject
"I think it's a matter of how we as technologists utilize technology."

Check out the full video of our Center Stage talk "AI is better with privacy" featuring @xychelsea at #WebsummitRio
https://bit.ly/44x3uj9
https://twitter.com/nymproject/status/1654138912221085697