United will be offering each passenger in Economy Plus a complimentary alcoholic beverage between August 6 and 16. This is actually a brilliant marketing move, and I hope they’ll announce throughout the plane that Economy Plus passengers get a free alcoholic beverage on that flight. It’ll certainly encourage more people to buy-up in the future. And quite a few people will get lucky here, as they “upgrade” people from economy to Economy Plus all the time to accommodate them since normal coach is sold out.

It’ll be interesting to see whether United eventually turns Economy Plus into a “premium economy” of sorts, maybe bringing back pillows and blankets, offering a free drink, etc. While Economy Plus is mostly filled with elites, they could probably get quite a bit of extra revenue from people buying up, creating more competition for those seats.

Reader GoAmtrak posted a link to this a while back, and I just thought this would be a good time to share. Hotel unions have been quite active lately (there have been many “protests” lately, especially at San Francisco hotels), and at least you’ve gotta give this group some credit for protesting in a creative way…

USA Today has a really cool article today about Hyatt and what they’re doing to innovate the hotel industry. No doubt Hyatt deserves a ton of credit for their creativity as of late. I still love InterContinental and Priority Club, though I’ve made nearly 50 stays at Hyatt properties since March. They’re just incredibly customer friendly and have some really neat brands and great promotions. If only they had more locations.

There’s one part of the article that just makes absolutely no sense to me, quoting the union that represents many of the employees:

At Hyatt Place, housekeeping has changed for good.

The chain gives guests the option of declining daily room cleaning, which is the most costly option for a hotel owner. Guests can accept a lighter, faster cleaning, which includes having their trash removed, beds remade with the same sheets and bathroom towels hung back on racks.

Workers don’t like the changes because reduced services mean fewer hours on the job, says Annemarie Strassel, spokeswoman for Unite Here, the union that represents Hyatt workers in 17 states and last week organized protests against Hyatt hotels in 15 cities.

Housekeepers also say the practice is more work because they have to clean up a two- or three-day mess in the same amount of time.

“It’s created a double burden on workers by both eliminating jobs and creating conditions for housekeepers that are unsafe,” Strassel says.

So it means fewer hours yet more work? While hotels are no doubt trying to cut costs nowadays, I don’t think the level of effort exerted by housekeepers is all that variable. I think they perform at a consistent level regardless of how busy they are, and if they can’t finish everything in a day, the hotel is stuck giving out more hours to employees or hiring more people.

And this creates unsafe working conditions?!?

But a great article nonetheless…

Through a Super Bowl XLV promotion, American is offering a 10% off electronic certificate for voting for something I have absolutely no clue about. Just click “vote now” on the page, select five entries, and enter your information, and you’ll be emailed a 10% off electronic certificate. It’s good for travel booked and flown by September 7, and is good for travel from the US 48 to anywhere in the world for up to four people.

(Tip of the hat to Points Wizard)

It’s time for a reader photo. Thanks to Hendrik for sending in this one.

Correct Answer: Muscat Harbour, Oman
Winner: Iolaire McFadden

If you’d like your photo featured, please email it to me at onemileatatime@hotmail.com, along with the correct answer.

Air Berlin has reached a tentative agreement to join the Oneworld alliance. There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow to discuss the particulars, though either way it’s going to be well over a year before they formally join.

This is an interesting move for a few reasons. First of all, Air Berlin is a low cost carrier, and most of their flights are operated by one cabin aircraft. They have expanded like crazy lately, after taking over several smaller airlines, and are now the sixth largest airline in Europe. They do have a business class product on their longhaul flights, though it’s not fantastic. Check out this airliners.net trip report for an example of their business class product. And yes, they have some senior flight attendants (see this picture — yes, the lady on the left and guy on the right are flight attendants). But that’s neither here nor there.

Gary thinks this is an interesting acquisition though not a huge one. On one hand I agree with him. Like Gary, I like to use my miles for good premium cabin products, and Air Berlin doesn’t exactly have a world class premium product (let alone a first class product). And no doubt Oneworld has some great premium airlines, like Cathay Pacific, Qantas, JAL, and LAN.

On the other hand, Oneworld has virtually no service between the US and Germany. American is cutting their flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, meaning there’s exactly one Oneworld flight between the US and Germany — and that’s a flight from Dallas, which you can’t really connect to if you’re on the east coast. In theory British Airways is the other option through London, but if you want to accrue American miles, it’s not an option due to the anti-trust agreement. So this does open up a huge market, though not with the best of airlines.

Most importantly, though, Oneworld doesn’t “integrate” nearly as well as Star Alliance. What do I mean? Star Alliance flights connect much more easily to each other. If I fly Continental from Newark to Tokyo, I can pick up an ANA flight to Hong Kong, Asiana flight to Incheon, Air China flight to Beijing, Singapore flight to Singapore, Thai flight to Bangkok, United flight to Taipei, Air New Zealand flight to Auckland, etc. They just “hub” incredibly well. The same can’t be said for Oneworld, which is why an airline with good origin and destination options is important.

So color me (somewhat) excited. Besides, my cousin is a captain for them…

I know I often use this blog to whine about annoying seatmates, as I’ve had quite a few of them, from the lady that was trying to pimp out her daughter to the guy that crapped himself while sitting next to me. Not fun.

And I know I’ve mentioned time and again that I don’t start conversations on airplanes. I’m not anti-social or rude, I just know that some people want to be left alone, so I’ll let them start the conversation if they want to. Though if they’re going to brag to me about how they’re an elite and one of United’s most valued customers, after I see them on the red carpet for 30 minutes while jockeying the poll and their Bluetooth, I’ll likely end the conversation fairly quickly.

But last week I had a pretty awesome seatmate from Denver to Los Angeles. I saw him reading some airline journal, so towards the middle of the flight I couldn’t help but ask him if he was a pilot. As it turns out, he wasn’t just a pilot, but he was United’s former chief 747 training captain. After retiring he started flying for Citation, which he said is a nice supplements to his lost pension. This is the first time I got an exact number as to how much pension money pilots actually lost, and let me just say it’s shocking.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to talk to him. We discussed everything from Channel 9, to training Korean Air pilots at the United training facility, to the weekly Los Angeles to Sydney flight he took and how he dealt with jetlag. And surprisingly, he was overall quite optimistic about the industry.

As many of you may know, there are several airlines starting transpacific service to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, which is much more convenient than Narita when terminating your journey in Tokyo. There has certainly been one nice thing about the new Haneda service on my end: when the flights were loaded into the system, there were tons of award seats, even in business class around the holidays. It seems like most of those are gone now, though.

Over the past weeks I’ve spent tens of hours searching for award space in and out of Haneda for clients, and there’s a few things I’ve noticed. The first thing I noticed is that they sure as hell don’t want you to connect at Haneda. Fair enough since the airport is definitely intended for origin and destination traffic, though you’d think they wouldn’t want to take the risk of just targeting that market, given the newness of the concept of Haneda service. Given that they have flights from Los Angeles to Haneda, and then from Haneda to Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore, you’d think it would be a good back up. But they don’t time the flights in any way to connect. The shortest connection I’m finding is about 18 hours.

Second, I’ve noticed that basically every flight out of Haneda is a redeye. No, really. Virtually every flight operating out of Haneda is a redeye. I can only imagine what the airport looks like around midnight, because it seems the busiest hours are between 12AM and 6AM.

I understand that the concept of transpacific service to Haneda is targeting business travelers for the most part, but you have a whole plane to fill, and I doubt even half of the passengers on most of these flights are business travelers. But even if they were, what the hell is up with the flight times?!

Take the Los Angeles to Haneda flight, for example:

NH1005 departing Los Angeles at 12:55AM and arriving in Haneda at 5:00AM+1

That’s actually logical enough. Though truth be told, as a business traveler, I’d much rather take a “normal” flight to Tokyo, departing the US around noon and arriving in Tokyo the next afternoon. Get into the city, grab something to eat, and go to bed early enough, waking up refreshed the next morning. But arriving at 5AM just makes no sense to me. First of all, everyone’s going to be having a hard time checking into their hotel at that hour. Second, even though most passengers probably got a decent amount of sleep, most won’t be fully functional that day. And that’s especially true without an arrivals facility at Haneda to shower at, since once again, checking into a hotel at that hour is a challenge unless you booked a room for the night before.

The real pain comes with the return flight:

NH1006 departing Haneda at 12:05AM and arriving in Los Angeles at 5:55PM-1

Now the first cool thing is that the flight arrives a day before it leaves. What could be cooler than that?

But come on now, what’s up with those flight times? The 12:05AM departure is fine. You’re able to be productive all day, and get a solid night of sleep aboard, which is great. But then you arrive in Los Angeles wide awake when it’s almost time to sleep.

Anyway, I’m not meaning to nitpick, but rather I’m just trying to point out that these Haneda flights are killers when it comes to jetlag, whether you’re a business traveler or not. I know I’ll be sticking to the Narita flights when visiting Tokyo.

Gary posted about ITA’s new iPhone app today, and I downloaded it and gave it a try. For what it’s worth, I’m not very app savvy. I’ve had an iPhone for well over six months, and I’m pretty sure I’ve downloaded all of eight apps. But ITA has always been a very useful tool, so I figured I’d give this a shot too.

First of all, it’s free. What could be better than that? But it actually is quite useful. I haven’t played with it too much yet, but it’s easy to use, fast, and displays information in an easy to read way. As most of you probably know, you can’t actually book a flight through ITA Software, but it’s probably the best tool out there for comparing prices.

So while I won’t be using this as my primary tool to search for flights while on the road, I’ll most definitely be using it to quickly look up the price of a flight I’m looking at taking. The only thing I wish they had was the month-long calendar search.

Extremely well done, though, ITA!

It’s time for a reader photo. Thanks to Kai for sending in this one.

Correct Answer: Baltra Airport, Galapagos
Winner: CM

If you’d like your photo featured, please email it to me at onemileatatime@hotmail.com, along with the correct answer.