AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Airline Travel Tips and Online Shopping and more

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody, Welcome. Hey, its Craig Petersson here. I am so excited about Thanksgiving. We've got some family in town going out to breakfast today together, which is going to be fun and then we got a great Thanksgiving day tomorrow all planned out smoked turkeys that we're making today. This is really going to be something my wife was up making some baking some pies, including a very cool one that she saw on I guess on the British baking show or maybe it's a Paul Hollywood pie, but it's like a three-layer pie. I'm so excited. You guess it, I am not doing keto tomorrow. And I won't be doing a whole lot of fasting tomorrow either. So I'm breaking a couple of my normal things here to really celebrate the time together with family and I hope you guys can too. All right, I'm going now to WGAN by the way this weekend's radio show is going to be "A best of Show" So, you know, no calls please they say. Here we go talking about Thanksgiving type stuff with our friends can and Matt.

Ken Altschuler
All right, it is the day before Thanksgiving ladies, gentlemen, or the day after the day before the big day and Craig Peterson joins us on this fine Wednesday to tell us all about what's happening in the world of technology, including a lot of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Holiday related topics, perhaps even

Matt Gagnon
Craig, how are you this morning.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Hey, good morning, gentlemen. You're right. The big days coming up only What now? two more days. Black Friday.

Matt Gagnon
Are you talking about Black Friday?

Craig Peterson
Yes, I am. Then we have Cyber Monday. Did you know that there's a day and I didn't even know about this. It's called Travel Tuesday. No, you haven't heard about this? No, well apparently over the last couple of years and this is supposed to be true this year is Well, the airlines have the best deals of the year coming up this Tuesday. So most of the really good deals are only starting January 1, but you have to buy them on Tuesday. So get online, poke around. And if you're planning on flying down to Florida or someplace slightly warmer than Maine in January in February, you should really look on Tuesday. Now, there are some great tools you can use for airlines as well. I think you guys have like a favorite site or a tool you use for finding and booking airfare.

Matt Gagnon 
The site that I use to find in book airfare is the one I can find the cheapest possible. I go to Hopper to compare them, right? I hate to be cliche, but I'm, I'm Expedia or Travelocity if I want to book it but then I kind of go the look at the deals then I go the airlines themselves because the problem is of the airlines and The flight gets messed up and Travelocity won't really help you out there.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, Boy it is going to be really bad this Thanksgiving as far as flights go because of all these storms. Well, I'm glad you use Hopper. That was my recommendation last year and is again this year. Hopper is an app that you can get for your smartphone or tablet. And what it does is it allows you to track the prices on airline flights and hotels now as well. It looks at all of this historical data. So examining hundreds of million prices here over the last, I think there's about five years worth of data right now. And so they can kind of predict when the best time to book is and it'll pop a little message up on your smartphone, saying hey, you know that trip that you wanted to make to Naples, Florida, the best time to buy it is right now and then it tells you, hey, coming up in two or three days, the price is going to go up by $30. It's a good one. Can I think you're right about that? Another one you guys might want to check out. And our listeners, of course, as well, is Google has Google flights that have been out there now for a good couple of years. And Google won't show you some of the really inexpensive airlines. Like, for instance, Southwest Airlines is one of the leading in the price category plus you get free luggage. But with Google flights, you can tell it I want to take so many bags are so many people. Here's where I want to go. And it will compare all of the major airlines. It's tied right into their databases. So those are good ones. And then you guys mentioned like, Matt, I think you mentioned Expedia and some others. They are not bad at all. But I'll tell you my big secret to save money on these things. I do use hopper for the airline flight And then I'll double-check on Google and make sure everything looks legit. And I'll go to the airline flight, I tend to buy it right from the airline flight not from Hopper or not through Google either. I'll get my airline flight and I will not book a hotel. Now, the exception to booking a hotel is if I'm going to a conference or something, right, but if I'm going out to visit friends or families, I will not book a hotel. And then when I get there, I use hotwire. And hotwire has this feature where you don't know what hotel you're getting. But you do know that that particular hotel that is offering to you, you do know what the ratings are of the people that have been there. And I felt the ratings on hotwire to be way more accurate than those on Travelocity or Expedia or most of the other sites. So I'll show up and I'll be saving 50% or more on the hotel price, the best price I could find anywhere. So I'll try to book at two or three in the afternoon. So if you don't mind a little, a little uncertainty in your travel, you don't necessarily you don't know what hotel it really is, you know the area it is going to be in, generally speaking, it's usually a few miles by a couple of miles. So, if you don't have a car might be a problem, but today with Uber and lift, what the heck. And you also don't know exactly which hotel it's going to be, but that's what I do. I booked them. It's been kind of fun. I used it in Europe as well. When we traveled around, we just decided where do you want to go today? And we went on hotwire. It worked in France. It was really kind of cool. So those there's a couple of techie travel tips for everybody. Or there you go.

Matt Gagnon
Craig Peterson joins us as he always does on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology. And speaking of that world of technology. How scary can it be Craig, we've got lots of scams, probably that are related jams, all the deals that are out there, you've got Black Friday. You know, sales like $11 for a DVD player or whatever and a lot of places and you can I'm sure sees a lot of stuff online. So how do you kind of judge the garbage and the scams and the lies and the whatever from the real stuff? Like what should I be looking for this Black Friday to protect myself if nothing else?

Craig Peterson
Well, the best tip I think for everybody you mentioned, like the $11 DVD players, is Matt, who uses  DVD players anymore. It's a good point.

Matt Gagnon 
It's a good point. That is a good point.

Craig Peterson
But you're right on there because the number one thing is: if the deal is too good to be true if you're seeing just the most fantastic deal being offered. That's really kind of the number one thing and it is the easiest to look for. But right now we've got these types of squatting domains. Those of us with fat fingers, domain names, be where, because there are about 110,000 typo-squatting domains. So that means if you type in something incorrectly like if you type out orifice instead of office when you're trying to go to the Microsoft site, there's 110,000 of those. There are four times as many fake domain cybersquatting domains as real retailers that are out there. So this is kind of hard to figure out what valid or not, and you cannot rely on that little lock up in the corner right there on the left of the URL bar, that lock, you cannot depend on that, meaning that this site is legitimate or really secure. So use some common sense if you're on a website, and you're on a big-box retailer or one of your favorite places to shop online. And you see ads on there from other sites. So let's just say you're on the Walmart site, and you're seeing ads from Amazon. Hey, it ain't the Walmart site. All right? So things like that there are these clues that go back and forth. But Matt, I would suggest you just double check your spelling type in the URL directly. Because I've also found that there is there's something called Google poisoning. And what that is, is the bad guys, go ahead and make it so that when you are typing something in the Google results that start coming up, are in fact, the fake sites that type of squatting sites on Google knows this. So they have people who are watching for that to happen this time of year. So bottom line, if you stick with the real big guys that are out there, the names we all know. And if you spell them right, even if you look them up in Google, you're probably going to be arriving at the right website. Now that doesn't mean the way that the data is absolutely Be safe, but you'll probably be on the right website. So you know, be careful of sites that are asking you to download their apps, a lot of sites have those nowadays. Bottom line, it doesn't matter, you're almost always better off just using the website as opposed to using their app in almost every case. Be careful of some of the bargains bait and switch is a big problem this time of year with some of the smaller retailers. bait and switch have also been a problem with some of these short term rental places like the Airbnb is out there, where they call you up the day before your booking for the house or the room and they say yeah, we had a flood, a water pipe broke, etc, etc. We've got another place for you, so don't worry about it. They do this the day before you're supposed to arrive. Also, be very careful of those discount cards. Be careful of that as well. But if you Want to find good discounts online, there's a plugin that I use when I'm shopping called Honey. If you use honey online, it's absolutely amazing. Honey is a coupon finder, and you can find that online as well. Obviously a join honey.com then when you visit a shopping site, it will automatically try, well you actually have to click on it, but it'll try a bunch of discount coupon codes that are known to work and they can save you a whole bunch of money online. Honey dot com is something else that you might want to look for. Bottom line, be cautious pay attention. And everybody have a great great Thanksgiving. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and airline Tuesday this week.

Ken Altschuler
Good. Our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738 have a great Turkey day we will see Talk to you next Wednesday, Craig.

Craig Peterson
All right, gentlemen, take care.

Matt Gagnon
Thank you, Craig. All right. So with that, we're going to take a quick break here. We're gonna go into the newsroom and get once again,

Craig Peterson
Hey, everybody, have a great Thanksgiving. And we will be back of course next week. I think Monday is when I'm hitting it again. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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