Joe Sharkey At Large

I wasn’t kidding yesterday about the sad spectacle underway in central Florida, as the booster- media pretend that this year’s Super Bowl festivities are rockin’ and rollin’ just like other years. Which they manifestly ain’t.

Some game tickets — which come mostly from a vast pool of tickets made available exclusively to teams, NFL bigshots and their corporate pals, politicians and other grandees (who then re-sell them to scalpers who call themselves the “secondary market”) — were available today for $1,000. That’s two-thirds off the usual going rate for the day before the Super Bowl.

Hotel rooms are still available in the Tampa area. Bustout-level room rates are sharply down from a week ago.

Many of the usual corporate and other promotional parties have been canceled or cut way back. Even many people who actually still have the dough to charter a private jet for the weekend bacchanal don’t have the nerve, given the lynch-mob public mentality afoot toward the public display of wretched corporate excess.

So I found it very amusing today to check out the online news site of the St. Petersburg Times, a local paper.

“Feel the Glow? It’s Those Stars” declares the breathless main headline, on a story about the swell Super Bowl party that lasted into the morning hours — can you imagine? A party lasting into the morning hours! — at the local Hard Rock hotel. Among the “stars” providing that palpable glow, sez the St. Pete Times, were “Host Kevin Dillon … Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Playmate Colleen Shannon … Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl…”

Wha? They couldn’t at least get Rod Blagojevich? I hear he suddenly has the weekend free.

On the other hand, this collapse of the usual Super Bowl corporate-party vulgarity and the general toning-down of the excess might mean one good thing. Maybe we can just watch a football game tomorrow.

By the way, Stephen Colbert had a very funny segment on the other night in his continuing drive to bring attention to the Great Buffalo Wing Shortage that threatens to adversely impact the really honest and worthwhile Super Bowl parties — the ones in people’s homes and in local bars.

Colbert had on the spokesman for the National Chicken Council, one Richard Lobb (“Lobb on the job,” the spokesman explained by way of clearing up how to pronounce his name).

Lobb-on-the-Job explained the chicken-wing shortage (created by the growing nationwide popularity of Buffalo wings) with impeccable logic. “It’s a simple matter of supply and demand,” he said. “Every chicken has only two wings, and its really not worth it to produce a chicken just to get the wings.”

Yes! An abstruse economic principle made invincibly clear by Lobb on the Job, who really ought to have a column.

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You ask me, there is a ton of steaming baloney being dished up this week from Tampa, site of Sunday’s Super Bowl, where more than 4,000 credentialed media are humping out pointless stories that can be done (and are being done, and definitely will be done come Sunday), far, far better by the usual sources on television.

Face it, sports fans and editors: Sports (and football especially) is a story that television staked out a big claim on a long time ago — and now totally owns. If television has real competition on this score, it’s from online media, which often are being employed in conjunction with the flat-screen TV and Surroundsound.
[On the other hand, there is this trenchant point made by Charles P. Pierce in Slate about not only the feckless Arizona Cardinals, but also about the platitudinous shills who provide broadcast coverage of the game for the NFL. But hey, it is just a game.]

Anyway, speaking of online media, this site has an angle on the weekend’s proceedings that seems unique: A real-time feed from air-traffic control monitoring the air space over Tampa. I was just listening to it, and an air traffic controller was giving hell to a media aircraft for hogging the space taking photos over the empty stadium.

Last year, this kind of thing was fascinating, because more than 500 corporate and private jets filled the skies over Phoenix, creating traffic jams before and after the game.

This year, the grandees are cooling their jets. It’s too early to say precisely, but it appears that the number of private jets that will arrive for the Super Bowl is down very sharply.

Big corporate parties are also being canceled or severely curtailed. This ain’t no party; this ain’t no disco; with this crummy economy and everybody’s spending mood soured, this ain’t no foolin’ around, to invoke the ghosts of the Talking Heads.

Given that one of the Super Bowl teams is from Phoenix, a place with tepid football enthusiasm but loaded with boosterism, and given the desperation of the central Florida and national media to pump up this slimmed-down, economy-bummed Super Bowl, here’s my prediction of what we’re going to see over Tampa this weekend:

A lot of hot air.

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Online ratings sites featuring critiques from customers have revolutionized the hotel-reviews business and taken a lot of wind out of the sails (and sales) of the traditional travel media and their traditionally determined objective evaluations.

By and large, the sites – TripAdvisor.com is the most prominent — do a fairly good job of weeding out obvious ringers, that is, they try to flag glowing reviews that seem suspiciously like they may have come from the desktop in a hotel front office, or horrible ones that seem to have come from a hotel’s competitor.

So by and large, the sites have real value. I often consult one before booking at an unknown hotel.

Anyway, here is TripAdvisor’s annual list of hotels that have managed to attract the attention for being:

“Top 10 Filthiest U.S. Hotels Identified Based on Traveler Cleanliness Ratings

NEWTON, Mass., Jan. 27, 2009 – TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel community, today announced the top 10 dirtiest hotels in America based on TripAdvisor traveler ratings for cleanliness. True to TripAdvisor’s promise to deliver the whole truth about travel-the good, the bad, and the ugly-TripAdvisor has identified the 10 dirtiest hotels in the U.S. for the fourth year running.

–Hotel Carter, New York

–Continental Bayside Hotel, Miami Beach

–New York Inn, New York

–Eden Roc Motel, Wildwood, New Jersey

–Days Inn Cleveland Airport, Brook Park, Ohio

–Days Inn Airport/ Stadium Tampa, Tampa, Florida

–Travelodge Bangor, Bangor, Maine

–Velda Rose Resort Hotel, Hot Springs, Arkansas

–Ramada Plaza Hotel JFK International Airport, Jamaica, New York

–Days Inn & Suites Gatlinburg, Gatlinburg, Tennessee

(This is the fourth year that the Hotel Carter, just off Times Square, has made the TripAdvisor list, “and its third year of having the dubious distinction of topping it,” says the travel site.}

Here are some choice comments from recent TripAdvisor traveler reviews on various hotels on the list:

–”I think it would have been cleaner to sleep on the street.”

–”Rooms were filthy; walls were smeared with unknown substance, furniture was broken and damaged…”

–”I’d rather sleep in my car”

–”One bed had blood on the sheets, other body fluids smeared on the windows, exposed wires, extremely poor service.”

–”Roaches everywhere! One so big he could have helped me bring my suitcase upstairs”

–”The room we checked in smelled like cat urine and the air conditioner didn’t work.”

–”My blanket had cigarette holes in it. The sheets were too small for the bed and barely fit around the bed corners…”

–”The bathroom was unsuitable for bathing. I asked for a cloth to clean the bathroom myself … and was denied any cleaning cloth or soap to do so.”

–”With growing horror I peeled back each layer and found more and more bugs on the sheets, on the mattress pad and on the mattress itself.”
–”It was one of those places where you sleep with one eye open.”

–”If you are reading the previous reviews thinking ‘it can’t be that bad’ – it is.”

–”…no towels to take showers.”

–”The bugs had a better meal at this place than we did.”

–”The first room we were given literally smelled like raw sewage.”

–”I felt like I needed another shower after using the one in our room.”

–”We woke up the next morning to visitors. Our room was infested with ants… I mean they were all over the place. It was awful. We even brought a bunch back home in our suitcase.”

[My note: Careful, they can charge you for taking the ants home.]

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I wish I had paid closer attention back when I worked for the Wall Street Journal, and then maybe I would understand what the hell Mesa Air Group, the parent of greatly troubled Mesa Airlines, is talking about in this statement today, which says:

“Mesa Air Group Inc. said that the number of shares of its common stock issuable on January 31, 2009 in exchange for each $1,000 principal amount at maturity of its Senior Convertible Notes due 2023 (“2023 Notes”) is 2,525 shares. This number is based upon the average closing price of the Company’s common stock for the five trading days ended January 28, 2009.

“Only those holders of 2023 Notes that entered into forbearance agreements with the Company have the put rights referred to above. In addition, as disclosed in the Company’s press release issued on January 22, 2009, certain of the holders that entered into forbearance agreements have elected to enter into new agreements with the Company with respect to their 2023 Notes, pursuant to which these holders have agreed not to require the Company to repurchase their 2023 Notes on January 31, 2009.”

Man, is that good or bad news for the people who fly Mesa?

All’s I know is that Mesa shares closed today at, ahhhh, 18 cents, and its market capitalization is $5 million.

From Mesa’s boilerplate:

“Mesa operates 159 aircraft with approximately 800 daily system departures to 124 cities, 38 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, and Mexico. Mesa operates as Delta Connection, US Airways Express and United Express under contractual agreements with Delta Air Lines, US Airways and United Airlines, respectively, and independently as Mesa Airlines and go!. In June 2006 Mesa launched inter-island Hawaiian service as go!. This operation links Honolulu to the neighbor island airports of Hilo, Kahului, Kona and Lihue. The Company, founded by Larry and Janie Risley in New Mexico in 1982, has approximately 4,100 employees …”

[Update: Good thing I don’t still work for the Wall Street Journal. As has been pointed out to me re the headline (now fixed) on this post, 18 cents time 100 equals $18, not $1.80. As Bernie Madoff probably said, damn those decimal points).

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The business jet industry, after several years of great prosperity, is in trouble. But the industry apparently just doesn’t comprehend the extent and cause of the public backlash that whipped it, starting when those three Detroit auto executives swanned into Washington in November in their heavy-metal corporate jets to beg for a federal bailout.

Instead, the industry continues to blame the press for its travails.

Business jets definitely have their place as productivity tools, especially in these days when what used to be a one-day business trip is now often a two-day trip, thanks to cutbacks in airline capacity and routes. (But this is not true for the simple Detriot-Washington routes, by the way.)

Anyway,  a rational case for business aviation has been made in the media — including, incidentally, by me.

But sometimes, as I have said here repeatedly (and with good and sufficient extra irony, considering my experience in the Amazon two years ago), a ride on a business jet is simply not a good idea.

The most recent example of corporate tone-deafness was when Citicorp, with $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money in its well-tailored pockets, tried to plunge ahead on an order to buy a $50 million Falcon corporate jet. Citicorp backed down this week amid a political outcry and a rather sharp nudge from the Obama White House.

I am not in the business of giving advice. But this particular industry does not seem to understand that those Detroit knuckleheads “set corporate aviation back 25 years,” as Bill Garvey quoted a flight department executive in Business & Commercial Aviation last week. Bill Garvey, one of the most respected aviation trade journalists, is the editor of Business & Commercial Aviation.

Nor does the industry seem to understand that taxpayer outrage is an entirely appropriate response to a company so indifferent to public perception that it tries to buy a new heavy-metal jet soon after it begged for and got emergency taxpayer bailout money.

It couldn’t wait a year?

In a letter to members of the National Business Aviation Association, its president, Ed Bolen, writes:

“As everyone in our industry knows, the business aviation community is facing severe turbulence on several fronts. Our industry is being stereotyped and pilloried by the press, and the people and businesses in general aviation are weathering one of the worst economic storms anyone has ever seen.

“The challenges coming out of Washington appear no less daunting: In the three weeks since the 111th Congress was sworn in, business aviation has repeatedly been in focus for lawmakers. A troubling pattern seems to be emerging in which some policymakers are discouraging and disparaging the use of general aviation for business purposes – a pattern in evidence as recently as this week.”

The industry dodged a bullet this month, by the way, when it managed to get removed from the bill authorizing the second phase of the bailout language that would have required any company that receives bailout money to get rid of its corporate jets.

But government is still bearing down on the industry with threats of requiring corporate jets to be subject to stricter passenger security (corporate jet passengers don’t go through TSA checkpoints). Also possibly looming are a slew of potential new fees, taxes and other onerous burdens on corporate aviation — much to the glee of the commercial aviation industry, the arch-enemy of business jets.

The case for business aviation has been made, and made well in recent years. But people have stopped listening, and Congress is hopping mad — and the industry is blaming the media?

The troubles the industry has are fundamentally economic — but they’re also partly atmospheric. In an era of massive layoffs and home-foreclosures, at a time when people are profoundly worried about the economic future, and cutting back on everything feasible and then some, three auto-company CEOs thought it was a good idea to take three big corporate jets on the 90-minute flight from Detroit to Washington to demand bailouts for their companies.

Naturally, the media made note of it. Labeling that “stereotyping” is quite a bit like the case of the young man who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because, alas, he was an orphan.

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After several years of robust occupancy and sky-high room rates, New York City hotels really hit the skids this month.

New data out today from Smith Travel Research show that hotels in New York had a drop of 24.6 percent in average occupancy and a drop of 18.1 percent in average daily room rates for the week ending Jan 24, as compared with the similar week last January.

Revenue per available room (RevPAR) plunged a whopping 38.3 percent for the week.

“While it could be argued that levels of performance in New York probably had the furthest to fall, the luxury stigma and sheer panic-based perceptions surrounding the U.S. economy have done the greatest harm to that market,” said Brad Garner, vice president of operations/client services at Smith Travel, the leading hotel research company.

By “luxury stigma,” he was referring to fact, as reported here last year, that hoteliers are seeing some customers who would otherwise book rooms (or conferences) back away because of the public perception problem attached to spending on higher-cost goods and services. That’s only a part of the problem, of course. The bigger part is that people (and companies) simply don’t have the dough.

In the U.S. hotel business as a whole, occupancy fell 13.6 percent; average daily room rates fell 2.7 percent and revenue per available room, the standard metric for hotel performance, fell 16 percent.

You heard it here first, starting last year: The U.S. hotel business is in huge trouble.

It’s sad and, if you’re a hotel owner, manager or employee, it’s frightening. Many hotel property owners — as opposed to the big chains who own the brand names and manage the hotels — have never experienced a downturn in the business and are not prepared for the trouble they’re seeing, or the trouble that lies ahead, as revenue drops to a point where the mortgage(s) can’t be paid.

Foreclosures lie ahead for some. On Monday, PKF Hospitality Research reported that “the number of full-service U.S. hotels lacking the cash flow needed to pay their debt will increase by 25 percent in 2009.”

Right now, there is a free-for-all, especially among higher-level hotels, to institute flat-out discounts on rates, or to otherwise bake discounts (“credits” for food and other things; stay-two-nights, get-one-free deals) into the stay.

Layoffs of staff are mounting.

Smith Travel’s Garner said that 19 of the top 25 U.S. hotel markets reported “double-digit declines in occupancy, and continued softness” in average daily rates for the week ended Jan. 24.

Besides New York City, four of the Top 25 markets experienced year-over-year occupancy declines of more than 20 percent: Atlanta (-23.3 percent); Detroit (-22.8 percent); Minneapolis-St. Paul (-20.2 percent); and Chicago (-20.1 percent).

Besides New York, 13 of the the Top 25 markets reported RevPAR declines of more than 20 percent. And in Atlanta, the RevPAR drop was 31.2 percent.

Smith Travel classifies chain hotels in seven price/service segments. As has been the case for months, the luxury segment was hardest hit in the week, with occupancy down 19.8 percent and RevPAR down 22 percent.

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Not everybody in the airlines is cutting back routes. JetBlue said today it will begin flying out of Los Angeles International Airport June 18, adding LAX to Burbank and Long Beach as the airports it flies out of in the Los Angeles area.

JetBlue new service, using A320s, will be from Terminal 6 at LAX, two daily nonstop flights to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and two daily flights to Boston’s Logan International Airport, adding more competition to important Los Angeles, East Coast markets.

JetBlue had plans to start flying out of LAX last summer, but they were put on hold because of record high fuel prices, which have now come down sharply. AMong JetBlue’s competitors on the LAX-JFK route will be Virgin America, the scrappy startup that also, like JetBlue, offers higher-end cabin service in coach than most of the majors.

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Reacting to pressure from the White House, Citicorp (the Citibank holding company) has decided it isn’t such a good idea after all to buy that new $50 million corporate jet. Citicorp, of course, has about $45 billion in taxpayer-supplied federal bailout money in its pocket.

ABC News has the story today.

And by the way, every time a corporation pulls a stunt like this, it sets the business-aviation industry back years. Best prior example: the three big Detroit auto makers who swanned into Washington in their private jets in November to ask Congress for federal bailout money.

I pointed out immediately that this was a truly outrageous and invincibly dumb thing to do, and that it was almost as dumb for the business-aviation industry to get all defensive about the perfectly understandable public outcry.

Last week, Bill Garvey, the editor of the respected trade publication Business & Commercial Aviation, wrote about the “symbolic bone-headedness” of the Detroit worthies’ trips to beg for bailouts in their Gulfstreams, and called the ferocity of the public and political backlash “breathtaking.”

He also quoted a corporate flight manager saying of the Detroit debacle: “That single day set corporate aviation back 25 years.”

Add another couple of years to that, thanks to the Citibank stunt.

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The hotel business has hit a wall. For months, industry forecasters have been scrambling to keep up with rapidly accelerating downward trends. For months, the bad news has galloped ahead of analysts’ ability to evaluate it.Today, PricewaterhouseCoopers issued a revised 2009 forecast, predicting that there will be a decrease of 11.2 percent this year in the key metric for measuring hotel performance, revenue per available room, which is called RevPAR.

“Marked declines” in occupancy rates and average daily room rates are driving the trend, the research company said.

Till late last year, the domestic hotel industry had stalwartly (and unwisely, in my opinion) resisted lowering room rates — until it finally sank in to them that the decline in demand that first was evident in late summer, and became obvious by December, was more than a passing phase.

I’ll report more later on the situation, which has left many hotel owners (as opposed to the big hotel companies that manage the properties and franchise the brand names) in desperate condition as debts come due and the necessary revenue simply isn’t there to pay the bills.

One look at the Las Vegas Strip — with huge discounts abounding and major projects physically abandoned — tells much of the story. And don’t even ask about Hawaii.

The U.S. hotel industry — which drives local tourism economies and accounts for hundreds of thousands of jobs — is in a depression, and no one knows where or when it will end.
[Update -- Here's another grim forecast, this from PKF Consulting in a report released yesterday:

PKF Hospitality Research in a new report finds that "the number of full-service hotels lacking the cash flow needed to pay their debt will increase by 25 percent in 2009, and property values will likely decrease another 20.1 percent, after a 14/1 percent decrease in 2008."

My note, those numbers add up to a looming debacle for many hotel properties, and before long we're going to start seeing some vacant hotels -- meaning the buildings, not just a bunch of rooms -- will be unoccupied.]

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…Citicorp is buying a new $50 million private jet, it says here. Maybe they can fly it to the airport in London that they’re bidding to buy, now that all those billions in taxpayer bailout money are burning a hole in their pockets.

… A good word here for Amtrak customer service: I recently booked a trip from New York to Orlando on the Silver Meteor train, in a sleeper compartment, but had to cancel a day before departure time. An Amtrak rep named Mary Lou cheerfully handled the cancellation in about 15 seconds, and my American Express card was credited with a full $588 refund the next day. Don’t try that with an airline.

… The news media keep wingeing about rising costs of covering the news, but how come there are 4,000 registered media for next week’s Super Bowl — a story that is entirely, exhaustively, thoroughly covered by television? What exactly is the rationale?

…And since I’m grousing about the news media: I’m sad to see these reporters who just love paraphrases unwittingly but repeatedly distort the facts about that bozo Holocaust-denying, crypto-fascist bishop who’s being reinstated into the fold by the Pope. I keep reading that Bishop Richard Williamson’s sin was that he denied that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Which suggests that the bishop might believe that merely, say, 4 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. But Williamson actually said that NO Jews were murdered in Nazi gas chambers, and that the few hundred thousand whom he concedes did die in the camps were merely victims of neglect.

Here is what he actually said in a television interview in Germany two months ago:

“I believe there were no gas chambers… I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers. There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.”

This goofball, I mean His Reinstated Eminence, also thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy cooked up by the United States.

[Update, clarification: Williamson made his asinine claims during an interview recorded by Swedish television at a meeting in Germany of the ultra-conservative traditionalist Catholic movement, Society of Saint Pius X.   His statements ignited a furor in Germany, where the interview was disseminated on the Internet. In Germany, where neo-Nazi movements are not tolerated, it is illegal to make public statements denying the Holocaust.]

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