Joe Sharkey At Large

Air New Zealand is the latest to offer expanded space and amenities in its economy-plus cabins.

The main reason for the growing popularity of economy-plus, or premium coach or whatever it’s called (“business-lite” is one of the current marketing favorites) is the crackdown by corporate travel departments on the use of first-class and business-class fares.

The premium coach fares, even though they’re considerably higher than coach, get around the problem because they’re technically coded as coach. Where there’s a will there’s a way. And as I always say, companies absolutely owe it to employees to provide a degree of comfort on long-haul flights. It isn’t a perk, it’s a corporate responsibility.

One of the good things is that some airlines are really providing reasonably business-class-like service for premium coach passengers.

Here’s the Air New Zealand announcement:

“Air New Zealand is doubling the number of Pacific Premium Economy seats available on its 777-200ER fleet, with the first of eight aircraft re-entering service … All aircraft will be completed mid-June, with the number of seats in the cabin increasing from 18 to 36 …

Says Air New Zealand’s long-haul manager Ed Sims, “`Air New Zealand flies further [sic] than any other airline in the world. Despite the challenging economic environment, long-haul customers clearly value the experience and are happy to pay more for the superior legroom, personal space and business class-style service.`”

In the newly configured cabins, seat pitch for premium coach will increase to 41 inches from the current 38 inches, and there will be a new self-service bar area.

By comparison, coach seats have 32 inches of legroom.

It is the third Pacific Premium Economy capacity increase in two years, with Air New Zealand twice increasing the number of seats available on its Boeing 747-400 aircraft, now up to 39 Pacific Premium Economy seats. Air New Zealand introduced the 777-200ER into its fleet nearly four years ago. The aircraft operates long haul routes from Auckland including Hong Kong-London, San Francisco, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing and on selected Los Angles services.

The new 777-200ER seating configuration on Pacific routes will be: Business Premier 26, Premium Economy 36 and coach, 242 (currently 269).

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Robert L. Crandall has shut down Pogo, his ambitious start-up venture in the air-taxi business,according to Aviation Week magazine. (Here’s the link to the story).

The plan for Pogo to launch in the first quarter of this year was obviously in big trouble when the company canceled an initial public offering in February. As envisioned by Crandall and his investors, Pogo would have started service using Eclipse 500 very-light jets on regional routes within 600 miles of New York City.

Pogo follows DayJet, another air-taxi business based on a fleet of Eclipse 500s, into oblivion after the Eclipse jet failed to live up to expectations at the same time that credit markets dried up. DayJet, which had taken delivery of 28 Eclipse 500s and was already operating in Florida and adjacent states, shut down last September after it had been unable to obtain new financing.

Crandall, who built the modern American Airlines in the years after de-regulation and led the carrier from 1980 to 1998, told Aviation Week that Pogo was “just one of those ideas that didn’t work out.” He blamed the sub-par performance of the plane, as well as the credit crunch, for the failure of Pogo. “The airplane failed,” he told Aviation Week.

Pogo had planned to have 25 Eclipse 500s flying by the end of this year, but the manufacturer, Eclipse Aviation, halted production of the small jets last year and was liquidated in February after producing about 260 planes.

Pogo had orders to buy its Eclipse 500s for about $1.9 million each. The company planned to be flying about 100 very light jets, not necessarily all Eclipses, by the end of 2011.

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Before we go any further in this flap about airlines requiring that people too wide to fit into an airplane seat have to buy a second ticket for the overflow, it would be useful to get out a yardstick and have a look at how much space 17 inches is. And then remember, most coach seats are 17 inches wide (some are a half inch and in some cases a full inch wider).

United Airlines is the latest of a bunch of carriers to generate heat, and not much useful dialogue so far, in setting a policy that fatter people have to buy two seats if they can’t fit into one with the armrest down. The media are all flapping around about it today after some giddy, half-baked stories yesterday implied that United was breaking new ground here. It wasn’t. That’s the policy at at least eight other airlines and has been for some time.

When I’ve written about this issue in the past (and it’s been around for years), I’ve been surprised by some of the virulent reaction. I’m here to tell you, folks, there are a lot of fellow citizens out there who hate fat people. And I use the word “hate” precisely. The depth of the animosity is profound; it is uncivilized and foul.

If we had a decent air-travel system that respected human dignity, this would not be so much of an issue. If I may slide into the pulpit here for a minute, let me say that it is in the airlines’ gross interests to pit us against us, lest it become — as it should — us against them. Because, pace Walt Kelly, we have seen the enemy and it is not us, it is they.

The main reason we are annoyed by our fellow passengers’ physical intrusions is that the airlines don’t give us enough room for normal occupation of a physical space for long periods of time. A United 747 (United runs them with a whopping 347 seats) has 172 coach seats, 10 across with two aisles, that are 17 inches wide, with 31 inches of legroom. I myself would sooner take a brick upside the head than spend seven or eight hours (or longer) wedged into that kind of space, trapped between also-suffering fellow passengers. Add some dripping water from the overhead and you have a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Incidentally, the airlines are all proudly describing their next-generation strategic plans for prosperity to stock-market analysts in the hopes that the stock-market analysts will do what stock-market analysts really and truly do, which is shill shares. The plan is simple: Shrink the air-travel system to the point where fewer planes are flying more passengers. That is, they are actively planning for a smaller, constricted system in which all of us remain packed in the tightest possible spaces on airplanes on which every cramped seat is occupied.

So this problem of personal space only gets worse, unless we decide that the airlines, and not our fellow passengers, need to be held responsible for providing basic human needs on an airplane. We literally would not allow cattle to be transported in interstate commerce with so little space between them. It’s time to ask why we let the airlines carry people of any size that way.

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[Click to enlarge chart]

Hotel room rates dropped an average of 17.4 percent in the first quarter of this year in 30 major world cities, Ovation Travel Group said. The comparison is to the first quarter of 2008.

The travel management company looked at rates for over 92,000 room nights in three- four- and five-star hotels in those 30 cities. The only cities showing rate increases were Abu Dhabi (33.7%), Dublin (6.2%), Milan (5.1%), and Tokyo (3.2%).

Delhi, Dubai, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Singapore and Toronto showed the greatest rate decreases, all over 20%.

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Good news for everyone who has tons of miles piled up: Those amazing award-travel deals are going to continue for a while.

All of those international front-of-the-plane fare sales have not had the effect of arresting the plunge in premium overseas travel. The number of passengers traveling on first-class and business-class fares dropped 21.1 percent in February, following a 16.7 percent drop in January, according to figures out today from the International Air Transport Association.

Nor did those amazing fare sales in coach have the desired affect for airlines, at least in the winter off-season. Travel on coach tickets was down 8.3 percent in February, following a decline of 4.7 percent in January. Those numbers may even be misleading for gauging the weak leisure travel market as “there is evidence that business passengers continue to trade down to cheaper seats at the back of the aircraft,” the IATA says.

(The comparisons are all to the previous month in 2008).

Pacific markets showed the biggest decline in premium travel in February, off 27.3 percent. This is not good news for Delta Air Lines, which has bet heavily on international premium traffic and which acquired a vast new network of Pacific routes when it bought Northwest Airlines last year.

Premium traffic on the North Atlantic routes was off 22.5 percent in February.

The good news for passengers, of course, is that the airlines still have to fly all of those seats they slammed onto the international routes, until they find more efficient ways to reduce capacity. So those fare sales will continue.

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Thanks to Reuters, which has straightened out those half-baked stories other news outlets have bounced around all day about United Airlines’s policy toward obese passengers who can’t fit into a coach seat. (And let’s remember, people, that a typical coach seat is only seventeen inches wide.)

Here’s the sensibly reported Reuters story.

Turns out, United is merely doing the same thing that other airlines already do.

I am shameless, forgive me, but it does bring to mind the joke about someone being so fat that when they have to haul ass it takes two trips.

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Hooo, as if the business jet industry doesn’t have enough image problems to battle, here comes Suze Orman, the self-described “internationally acclaimed personal finance expert” sounding all late-stage Versailles in an interview in this month’s Business Jet Traveler magazine.

“What does flying privately do for you?” the magazine asked her.

The internationally acclaimed personal finance expert explained, reasonably, that private jets provide efficiency. But then her second reason, weirdly: “Health.”

Suze sez that “the chances are very great [on an airliner] that some kid’s gonna sneeze on me and then I get sick. If I am, it’s millions of dollars on some level somewhere.”

Note to Citizen Robespierre: Sieze this woman!

Seriously, the business aviation industry, struggling mightily to regain some footing after the image and economic disasters of the last six months, can do without this kind of defense.

Speaking of business aviation, the numbers continue on the grim march downward.

ARG/US, which measures these things, says that business-aircraft flights dropped 26.2 percent in March, compared with March of 2008. The biggest drop was in flights of large cabin jets, which were off 44 percent.

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AMR Corp., whose principal business is operating American Airlines, reports a $375 million loss in the first quarter today, and tries to spin it positively.

“Thanks in large part to the efforts of our employees we also continued to improve our customer dependability,” said the company’s proud CEO, Gerard Arpey, who seems to believe that the rest of the planet understands whatever that is supposed to mean.

The loss comes even though oil prices are down sharply. “While lower fuel prices have provided a significant buffer against falling demand in 2009, the struggling economy and capital markets remain significant challenges for American and the rest of the industry,” said Arpey, in the no-shit-Sherlock observation of the day (so far).

Let’s look at the numbers to see the real “challenge:”

In March, American’s revenue passenger miles were down about 10.8 percent over March 2008. Like its competitors, American has been frantically trying to shrink its system, and reduced capacity 8.2 percent domestically and 1.1 percent internationally. But the cuts in capacity were exceeded by a plunge in demand. In March, 9.9 percent fewer people boarded American flights. For the first three months of this year, American’s revenue passenger miles were off over over 12 percent, and the number of passegners boarded was down 11.8 percent.

This occurred despite generally lower fares across the board.

Here’s my own quarterly report for most major network carriers:

You are not looking at “challenges.” You are looking at a verdict. The economy is obviously a huge factor, er, I mean “challenge.” But you are also looking at a conclusion by a great many Americans that air travel, with the arrogance of the airlines and the indignities of the airport-security ordeals, is no longer worth the hassle, at least not to the extent that it has been for 25 years.

These desperate fare sales, and the lack of strong public response to them, are the herald of the day of reckoning for many carriers. Airlines, you have made people hate you. The good times will not roll again, even when the good times roll again elsewhere.

An era is ending.

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Uh-oh, USA Today. Bill Marriott, the chairman of Marriott International and a man who pays close attention to every detail in his hotels, is onto you. Not only is business travel off, meaning you’re giving away 100,000 fewer papers a day, but Bill Marriott noticed what a lot of business travelers have been noticing: Increasingly, hotel guests aren’t even bothering to drag those free USA Todays into the room from the hallways in the morning. They just sit out there in the halls like little tiny forgotten room-service carts.

In a body blow to USA Today, Marriott International said that rather than dropping off all those free newspapers at guest rooms, starting June 1 it is switching to a new system to “streamline” delivery of newspapers at its 2,600 properties in the U.S. (sorry, Al Neuharth: USA). This means hotels will offer — in the lobbies, or by delivery to rooms upon request — not just USA Today (which is far too often the only choice for those of us who still want to read a printed newspaper every day), but also the Wall Street Journal and whatever the local paper is.

“We want to give guests the choice of whether they want a newspaper or not,” Bill Marriott said. “I visit more than 250 hotels a year, and more often than not, I’m stepping over unclaimed newspapers as I walk down the hallway. This new program is more guest-focused.”

Ouch, Al Neuharth. I feel your pain, man.

Marriott projects that newspaper distribution will be reduced by about 50,000 papers daily or 18 million papers annually, thereby avoiding 10,350 tons of carbon emissions (calculated by Conservation International assuming an estimate of .5 pounds per paper). Cost-savings, if any, will vary based on consumption at individual hotels.

More than 25 years ago, in a partnership with Gannett and its flagship paper USA Today, Marriott was the first major hotel company to feature broad newspaper delivery to its hotel rooms in the U.S. (oops, sorry: “USA”).

USA Today pasted one of its nice smiley faces on the dire news. “USA Today was founded on the idea that one newspaper could reflect the shared interests of Americans across the country. Our ability to connect readers with what is important to them makes us the most-read newspaper in the country and the number one choice of travelers,” Susan Lavington, the marketing chief, said in a statement. “As the needs of news consumers continue to shift, USA TODAY has innovated to provide valued content in any platform consumers choose. We look forward to extending that choice to Marriott’s valued guests through print, online, mobile devices or on a GoBoard in their hotel lobby.”

The Wall Street Journal also put a smiley face on the Marriott announcement, but if you ask me it seemed to have a Cheshire-cat grin. The print Journal now has an opening that had been blocked by all those piled-up free USA Todays. “More individuals choose to buy the Wall Street Journal than any other newspaper in America. We applaud Marriott for now extending this choice to their guests.” said Paul Bascobert, marketing chief at Dow Jones Consumer Media Group. Note the word “buy.”

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—Breathless headline and AP lede here says “Passenger Lands Plane After Pilot Dies.” But, uh, I read the story and shouldn’t that be “Pilot Lands Plane After Pilot Dies?”

—Please, Alaska. Could you all please just shut the hell up for a while? We’re busy down here.

—From the scoreboard: Navy 3, Pirates 0

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