Raphael Stevens

Life Changes

Summer vacations could be upended this year. This time, blame inflation.
Rising prices may prompt vacation goers to take fewer trips and travel shorter distances.
If you still plan to go, there are ways you may look to save.

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Summer vacations plans could be in flux this year.
This time, it’s not because of Covid-19. Instead, high prices due to inflation may prompt prospective travel goers to switch up their plans.

In fact, 69% of adults who say they will take a vacation this summer anticipate changing their travel plans as prices have soared to record high levels, a survey from Bankrate.com finds.
In the battle between pent-up demand that has built up over the past couple of years and soaring costs, the desire to travel may still win out for many people, predicts Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.com.

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The top changes people indicated they may make include taking fewer trips and traveling shorter distances.
The most common destinations people are eyeing this summer include beaches, with 37% of respondents; staycations, 28%; and cities, 27%. Meanwhile, 21% plan to visit national parks, 17% plan to stay at campgrounds, 14% will visit amusement parks, 12% will travel internationally and 11% plan to take a cruise.
Still, not everyone is planning a summer escape.

Those more likely to plan a jaunt include adults with annual household incomes of $100,000 and up, with 75% of those respondents. In comparison, 56% of those earning less than $50,000 plan to take a trip.

Parents of children under 18 are also more likely to plan a vacation this summer, with 75%, versus 61% of parents with adult children at and 56% of non-parents.
Younger adults are also more likely to say they are very or somewhat likely to take a summer getaway, with 72% of Gen Zers ages 18 to 25 and 65% of millennials ages 26 to 41. Meanwhile, 61% of Gen Xers ages 42 through 57 and 58% of baby boomers ages 58 to 76 said the same.
To be sure, those plans could be subject to change as the summer season approaches. The online survey, which included 2,676 adults, was conducted between March 30 and April 1.
A CNBC + Acorns Invest in You survey, conducted by Momentive in March, found 40% of U.S. adults said they would cancel a vacation or trip if consumer prices continue to rise. 

If you are planning to hit the road, you may want to consider a few cost-saving moves, Rossman said.

Look for deals where possible

Prices everywhere are higher. Yet areas that are still seeing less foot traffic due to the pandemic may be more inclined to offer deals.
“If you’re not necessarily wedded to any particular destination, maybe let the flight and hotel deals guide you,” Rossman said.

Scout out credit card rewards perks

Getty Images

It’s never a good idea to take on high interest credit-card balances you cannot pay off immediately.
But if you have the financial flexibility and can afford to take on that debt responsibly, you may want to consider a new credit card with a signup bonus, airline miles or cash back, Rossman said.
“There are a lot of good deals out there right now,” Rossman said.

Don’t let work vacation days go to waste

Bankrate’s survey found 30% of workers with paid vacation time will use less than half of it this year.
“That’s a real missed opportunity,” Rossman said.
Instead of leaving paid vacation time on the table, find a trip within your budget and go, even if it is just a staycation, he suggested. More

Check out the companies making headlines in premarket trading.
PepsiCo – Shares of the food and beverage giant dipped in the premarket although the company reported a beat on the top and bottom lines in the recent quarter as consumers paid more for some of the company’s key brands.

General Electric – General Electric’s stock fell 3.5% despite topping estimates in its quarterly report. The company confirmed its previous full-year profit guidance range and said it sees challenges from inflation and supply chain issues.
United Parcel Services — Shares of the shipping and logistics giant gained 1.7% after beating analyst estimates on the top and bottom lines. UPS reported adjusted earnings per share of $3.05 on revenues of $24.38 billion while analysts expected $2.88 earnings per share on $23.79 billion in revenue.
3M – 3M shares were flat premarket after reporting quarterly earnings that topped estimates. The company saw revenues of $8.83 billion while analysts expected $8.74 billion in revenue.
D.R. Horton — The homebuilder stock rose 2.8% during premarket trading after beating analyst estimates in the previous quarter. D.R. Horton reported adjusted earnings of $4.03 a share on revenues of $8 billion. Analysts anticipated $3.37 adjusted earnings per share on $7.62 billion in revenue.
SeaWorld — The theme park and entertainment company’s stock surged 4.6% after Rosenblatt Securities initiated coverage with a buy and said despite pandemic headwinds the company has faired well under the vision of big investor Scott Ross.

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Nearly one in three travelers turn to social media for holiday inspiration, according to a new study.
The figures are even higher for younger travelers. Some 60% of Gen Zs and 40% of millennials use social media for travel purposes, according to an April 2022 report by the travel company Arrivia.

On TikTok alone, the hashtag “travel” boasts 74.4 billion views, while some 624 million Instagram posts are about travel too.
But there’s a darker side to social media’s flawless travel photos. Expectations may not match reality, with many photographs edited to look better than they actually are.
Disappointed travelers are now striking back, using the very mediums that led them astray. They are publishing their own videos that show what immaculate places on social media actually look like in real life.

A town from a Disney movie?

A TikTok video inspired 26-year-old Olivia Garcia, a graphic designer and YouTuber from South Florida, to take a one-hour detour from her road trip, she said.
Showing snowcapped mountains and a town seemingly ripped from the script of a Disney movie, the video captured the supposed beauty of Gastonia, a small city in North Carolina. Garcia said she needed no more convincing to visit.

The only problem? The imagery in the video was actually Switzerland.
It was part of a tongue-in-cheek video series on TikTok in which a user labeled some of the most beautiful and recognizable spots in Europe as places in North Carolina. One video named the soaring Milan Cathedral as the “the new Bass Pro shops at Concord Hills Mall, near Charlotte.”
“We get into town, and it was just a normal town,” said Garcia. “There were no mountains. It wasn’t like the video.”

Garcia made a humorous TikTok video documenting her visit to the city, showing a dirty gas station and rundown buildings, though she noted she did focus on the “not so nice” areas of Gastonia.
“You always think like, okay, you see this happen to other people, but it never happens to you — I’m smart enough to know when things are real and when things aren’t real,” she said.
Since her video went viral, Garcia has spoken to the mayor of Gastonia, who offered to take her on a tour of the town if she returns. She also appeared on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” to share her experience.
“Do your research … because you might end up somewhere you don’t want to be,” Garcia said. “[And] don’t believe everything you see on the internet.”

A ‘beautiful, hidden garden pool’

Thirty-year-old travel blogger Lena Tuck also fell victim to a glamourized TikTok video.
While driving from Brisbane to Melbourne, Tuck said, she made an impromptu decision to visit a “beautiful, hidden garden pool” that she had seen on TikTok — the Yarrangobilly Caves thermal pool walk.

“It looked like this out of world place where topless men would be feeding you grapes or something like that,” she said.
But on the drive there, her phone lost reception — which meant she had no directions to guide her — and she had to drive on a rough, unpaved road for 10 minutes before trekking nearly half a mile down a steep hill.
When she reached the pool, she was surprised to find it packed with families and screaming children, much like a public swimming pool, she said.
“All I can think about is how many people have peed in here,” she said in a TikTok video describing the experience.
“It’s … the absolute antithesis of an Instagram experience, and I feel like that’s why the whole experience was just so funny,” she told CNBC.
She said she thinks people should be spontaneous and open-minded, but cautioned travelers to “do more research than I probably did.”

Ethereal waters

Photos of Terme di Saturnia, a group of springs in the Tuscany region of Italy, show beautiful blue water with steam gently rising from it.
But this couldn’t be further from reality, said 28-year-old Ana Mihaljevic.

Her visit was “highly” influenced by social media posts that show an “almost idyllic” scene, the self-employed project manager and digital marketer said.
But the water was green, smelled like rotten eggs because of sulfur, and was filled with visitors posing for photos, presumably for social media, Mihaljevic said.
“It’s most certainly not a place to relax,” she added.
Markus Romischer, a 29-year-old travel filmmaker agreed that the springs looked different on social media. He made a video, tagged “Insta vs. Reality: Europe Edition,” that showed his disappointment in the Tuscan springs, as well as spots in Switzerland, Madeira and Rome.

Once he saw it in real life, he said he could tell online pictures had been heavily photoshopped. The springs are “warm, the color was special, but when you only see those social media pictures” the reality is “a little bit sad,” he said.
Early mornings are far less crowded, said Romischer. When he arrived at 6:00 a.m., there were few people — mostly “grannies” — but the afternoon was a different story, he said.
“At midday, so [many] buses came from everywhere, and it was so full,” he said.
Tourist attractions will always be crowded, said Romischer, who shared one tip for avoiding crowds: “Don’t Google ‘what to do in Tuscany’ and go to the first place on the list.”
Like the others who were duped by social media images, Mihaljevic advises travelers to do their research.
“If you want to travel without research, that’s ok but be prepared that not everything will be as you saw it online,” she said. “Some places will be even better, but some will disappoint.”

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Masdar says memorandums of understanding relate to facilities earmarked for the Mediterranean coast and Suez Canal Economic Zone.
Projects in Egypt are aiming for an electrolyzer capacity of 4 gigawatts by the year 2030.
Hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in sectors such as industry and transport.

Masdar says Egypt’s abundance of solar and wind will “allow generation of renewable power at a highly competitive cost – a key enabler for green hydrogen production.”
Ute Grabowsky | Photothek | Getty Images

The UAE’s Masdar and Egypt’s Hassan Allam Utilities have signed agreements with state-backed Egyptian organizations that will see the parties work together on the development of large-scale green hydrogen projects.
In an announcement Sunday, Masdar — which is owned by Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala — said the two agreements related to facilities earmarked for the Mediterranean coast and Suez Canal Economic Zone.

The projects in Egypt are aiming for an electrolyzer capacity of 4 gigawatts by the year 2030, with production of as much as 480,000 tons of green hydrogen annually.
Described by the International Energy Agency as a “versatile energy carrier,” hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in sectors such as industry and transport.
It can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen.
If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then some call it green or renewable hydrogen.
While there is excitement in some quarters about hydrogen’s potential, the vast majority of its generation is currently based on fossil fuels.

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“Masdar and Hassan Allam Utilities see Egypt as a hub for green hydrogen production, targeting the bunkering market, export to Europe, and boosting local industry,” Masdar said in a statement.
“Egypt enjoys abundant solar and wind resources that allow generation of renewable power at a highly competitive cost — a key enabler for green hydrogen production,” it added. “Egypt is also located within close proximity to markets where demand for green hydrogen is expected to grow the most, providing robust opportunity for export.”
Masdar’s mention of Europe is instructive and illustrates how the hydrogen sector could develop in the years ahead as major economies attempt to decarbonize.
In July 2021, the CEO of Italian firm Snam outlined a vision for the future of hydrogen, saying the “beauty” of it was that it could be easily stored and transported.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe,” Marco Alverà spoke about how current systems would be used to facilitate the delivery of hydrogen produced using renewable sources as well as biofuels.
“Right now, if you turn on your heater in Italy the gas is flowing from Russia, all the way from Siberia, in pipelines,” he said.
“Tomorrow, we will have hydrogen produced in North Africa, in the North Sea, with solar and wind resources,” Alverà said. “And that hydrogen can travel through the existing pipeline.”

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For its part, the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, has laid out plans to install 40 GW of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer capacity in the EU by the year 2030.
Alongside this goal, the commission’s plan also envisages an extra 40 GW “in Europe’s neighbourhood” that would “export to the EU.”
The past few years have seen a host of companies weigh in on the topic of hydrogen.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Michele DellaVigna, Goldman Sachs’ commodity equity business unit leader for the EMEA region, sought to highlight the important role he felt it would have going forward.
“If we want to go to net-zero we can’t do it just through renewable power,” he said.
“We need something that takes today’s role of natural gas, especially to manage seasonality and intermittency, and that is hydrogen,” DellaVigna argued, going on to describe hydrogen as “a very powerful molecule.”
The key, he said, was to “produce it without CO2 emissions. And that’s why we talk about green, we talk about blue hydrogen.”
Blue hydrogen refers to hydrogen produced using natural gas — a fossil fuel — with the CO2 emissions generated during the process captured and stored. There has been a charged debate around the role blue hydrogen can play in the decarbonization of society.
“Whether we do it with electrolysis or we do it with carbon capture, we need to generate hydrogen in a clean way,” DellaVigna said. “And once we have it, I think we have a solution that could become, one day, at least 15% of the global energy markets which means it will be … over a trillion dollar market per annum.” More

The Biden administration on Monday reversed a Trump administration plan that would have allowed the government to lease more than two-thirds of the country’s largest swath of public land to oil and gas drilling.
The Bureau of Land Management’s decision will shrink the amount of land available for lease in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a roughly 23 million acre region that’s home to wildlife like caribou and polar bears.
The reserve generated more than $56 million in oil and gas lease revenue in 2019, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

A polar bear sow and two cubs are seen on the Beaufort Sea coast within the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | Reuters

The Biden administration on Monday reversed a Trump administration plan that would have allowed the government to lease more than two-thirds of the country’s largest swath of public land to oil and gas drilling.
The Bureau of Land Management’s decision will shrink the amount of land available for lease in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a roughly 23 million acre region that’s home to wildlife like caribou and polar bears.

The decision returns to an Obama administration plan that allows fossil fuel extraction in up to 52% of the reserve, compared to the Trump administration’s effort to open up 82% of the land to drilling. It will also reinstate some environmental protections for designated areas of the reserve, including Teshekpuk Lake, a wetland complex that is uniquely rich with wildlife.
The move comes after the number of oil and gas permits approved by the Bureau of Land Management for drilling on public lands declined to its lowest number under the Biden administration earlier this year.

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In 1923, former President Warren G. Harding set aside the reserve as an emergency oil supply for the U.S. Navy. In 1976, the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act designated the area specifically for oil and gas production and moved it under the authority of the Bureau of Land Management.
The reserve generated more than $56 million in oil and gas lease revenue in 2019, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
Oil and gas production on the reserve has the potential to release over 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon released in the entire country in 2019, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the Biden administration’s reversal isn’t enough to address the climate crisis and end new fossil fuel extraction.
“More Arctic drilling also means more oil spills, more polluted communities and more harm to polar bears and other vulnerable wildlife,” Monsell said in a statement. “Biden officials can and must use their power to help us avoid disastrous climate change and support the transition to a just, renewable economy.” 

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It’s that time again! “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer rings the lightning round bell, which means he’s giving his answers to callers’ stock questions at rapid speed.

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Lithium Americas Corp: “These companies are making way too much money. … You have to sell that stock, because it won’t stay like that.”

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Informatica Inc: “It’s now come down so much that I think it’s actually a buy. … But it should not have come public again until things were better.”

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TechnipFMC PLC: “That’s a gutsy one if you think oil’s going to go back over to $100.”

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Canopy Growth Corp: “Until a federal law passes [legalizing cannabis], you can not own this stock.”

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