Posted by Seth on January 30, 2008 under Internet | 
Mixing two of my prime interests, a couple US-based airlines have announced Internet access on their planes this week. For American Airlines it will be a solution provided by Aircell, allowing access to a very broad collection of content, though they will attempt to restrict streaming content.
For Continental Airlines it will be an implementation of LiveTV, a service owned by JetBlue. Continental will be adding the 36 channels of live television (for $6/flight, unlike JetBlue where it is free) as well as access to the WiFi solution that is available as part of the service. This service is severely limited, enabling access only to BlackBerry and Yahoo! Mobile services, including email and IM hosted by Yahoo! and BlackBerry devices that support WiFi. That’s a pretty limited subset of the traveling public, but that hasn’t stopped them from touting “free internet” in the press release. This is the same service that I talked about last week, the one that is struggling performance-wise. The good news (??) is that the installation won’t start until January 2009 on the Continental fleet, so they still have some time to work out the details.
I’m incredibly frustrated by this move towards limited service access by the carrier. I understand that Yahoo and RIM are contributing cash to help finance the solution, but that doesn’t address the fact that 99% of travelers are not going to be able to check their email using this solution. It makes the access virtually useless. The only good coming out of the retrofit will be power outlets in the seats, so I can watch my own DVDs all flight long and not worry about battery life. So much potential, and such a poor path to follow 
Posted by Seth on January 30, 2008 under News |
Let’s just say you’re a geek and you have access to an airline pricing system. Your boss tells you they need a new gimmick for pricing the next sale. If you’re working at Spirit Airlines, this is what you’d come up with: a collection of seats on sale for $1, $2, $3, $5, $8, $13, $21, $34 and $55 per seat. Recognize the pattern? They call it the “Fibonacci Sale” for obvious reasons.
Sale expires tonight at midnight Eastern, but it sure was fun while it lasted.
Posted by Seth on January 30, 2008 under TSA |
And they’re doing a pretty bad job of it so far…
It is the little things, like having the person “posting” actually be the person writing the post (nope) and a rather onerous moderation policy for comments (only approved during “business hours” and must be in line with TSA “standards”), but at least they’re trying. Now it remains to be seen if there is actual content or if this is just another outlet for the typical rhetoric they spew.
Posted by Seth on January 29, 2008 under News |
And if you’ve taken anything else from your hotel room, there are a few people who would like to talk with you. Apparently 22% of respondents to a survey from TripAdvisor admitted to stealing things from a hotel room (guilty here), and some of the hotels have started trying to recover them. Most of the recovery is coming from the historical properties, like the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego and the Mayflower in Washington, DC, though Holiday Inn did a bit of PR looking for towels and any funny stories that might accompany them.
So if you’re the guy who took the two 1920s banquet chairs from the Mayflower, you might be saddened to learn that they’ve been returned, but I want to know how you did it.
Posted by Seth on January 29, 2008 under TSA |
Even though the whole No ID/No Fly rule doesn’t actually exist, the TSA seems hell-bent on enforcing it. So when a guy showed up and couldn’t find his out in California the other day things seemed particularly grim for him. Then he remembered that there was a magazine article about him and he had a copy. Apparently showing a copy of that was sufficient to get him on to the plane.
Anyone remember those cool “magazine covers” that you could get made at amusement parks where they’d put your face on a “real” magazine? I wonder if those would work, too. Probably not, but it’d fun to try.
Posted by Seth on January 24, 2008 under Internet |
Despite relatively overwhelming public opinion that no one wants to sit on an airplane where others can talk on their phones, airlines seem to be moving that direction. JetBlue has a single plane in service (“Beta Blue” – they give all their planes cute “blue” names) with access to Yahoo Mobile services and BlackBerry connectivity (with WiFi models). It is based on land-based towers for connectivity to the planes, so it won’t work on flights over oceans, and the functionality and performance have been less than stellar so far. At least JetBlue is limiting the access so voice traffic isn’t available. At the same time, general Internet usage is also limited, so it isn’t all good.
Looking to make progress on the other side of the Atlantic, Air France has also put a plane in service with similar functionality. Some differences on the Air France side include the connectivity going via satellite, so there is a chance that it will work over the oceans, and the reliance on GSM phone service instead of WiFi computer service for the connections. And despite the claims in the NY Times article linked above, Air France specifically claims that they are not going to be enabling voice services on the planes. Here’s hoping they hold to that.
Posted by Seth on January 22, 2008 under News |
Following the demise of MAXJet back at Christmas, there was a bit of conjecture about how the reduction of capacity in the market would actually be good for the other airlines in the space (SilverJet, EOS and L’Avion are the big three right now). Despite pundits claiming for months that these upstarts were going to take a bite out of the legacies (mostly American Airlines and British Airways, and Air France to a lesser extent), the legacies are still flying just fine on the routes, and British Airways has announced what seems to be a reasonable approach to the competition, OpenSkies, which will be mostly premium seats with a few coach seats, just in case. So the legacies are keeping their share of the market and responding appropriately, but the upstarts are still ok. Or are they.
Jarad Blank seems to think the answer is no, and he’s got some pretty impressive numbers to back up his reasoning. Basically, EOS has a burn rate of ~$50MM annually and they are likely going to struggle to decrease that number before they run out of money in their current funding cycle. They may find another cash infusion, but it doesn’t look promising.
It will be sad to see the premium carriers fall. That being said, I’m not likely to ever pay that much for a plane ticket, so I’d just be holding out for reward travel to show up, just like I was saving for a trip on the Concorde years ago. So I guess my vote doesn’t really count.
Posted by Seth on January 21, 2008 under News |
I posted a while ago about finding your way around NYC and how easy it can be, as long as you don’t mind standing around and looking lost until someone helps you out. Now it looks like Google is trying to help out, with the introduction of Google Transit.
Google Transit is based on a spec that Google has published, allowing any public transit operator to make their schedules and routes available in the Google interface, including their maps and all the other fun stuff that they have available. Sadly, it isn’t available for any of the cities I seem to frequent the mass transit systems of (New York, Washington, DC and Boston), but they do have a number of cities, including several international destinations, covered. It’d be nice if I could use place names (like names of the casinos instead of their addresses for the Las Vegas Monorail), but otherwise it is very, very cool. Oh, and an English option for the schedules/routes they have for all of Japan would be great as I’m headed over there soon and could use the help in my planning.
Posted by Seth on January 19, 2008 under Trip Reports |
Sure, there are parades in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Sydney and many other cities around the world, but why not celebrate in Hong Kong, considered by many to be the original parade celebration. Business travel drops off around that time, as no business gets done in the few weeks leading up to and following the celebration, so airfares drop. Continental offers up some pretty impressive sales on their BusinessFirst seats, as low as $2300 round trip. If that’s too rich for your blood (and it is for mine), there is always United’s sale on coach seats, with fares from about $600 r/t from JFK.
So I’m going. The price is right, and I’ll get there for the last day of the New Years markets and then for the parades. Should be fun.
Posted by Seth on January 19, 2008 under News |
Lets say you’re designing an airport terminal. It is going to be brand new and the showpiece for a major international airport. Hundreds of thousands of passengers are going to pass through each year. How many electrical outlets should you have so that the passengers can use a laptop or charge a mobile phone while they’re waiting?
If you answered lots and lots you’d be right, and you also wouldn’t be working for the company that designed the new Terminal 5 for London’s Heathrow airport. Apparently no electrical outlets is the new hotness for airline terminal design, despite the fact that more than ever people are traveling with electronics these days, and that airlines have more delays than ever meaning more time stuck in the terminals.
The one thing I’ve got going for me is that SkyTeam (my carriers of choice these days) are supposed to be using T4, not T5, though that is really only a small victory.
Posted by Seth on January 18, 2008 under News |
A couple years ago I found myself on a trip to India. It was a great trip, and I highly recommend everyone go there, to see the Taj Mahal and the rest of the country. But the “how” part of my being on the trip always seemed a bit strange to me – until now.
My wandering consort was truly enamored with the idea of visiting India. Much Bollywood was being watched, the cultures studied and tourism research performed. She actually had a great plan for making the trip happen, which was to convince her mother to go to India for work (something that was actually supposed to happen anyways) and then the two of them would travel together. I’ll admit that I was a little jealous when I heard the plans, as I wanted to go too, but I kept quiet and let the plan play out. A bit more research showed that women didn’t often travel alone, certainly not single women. So I got invited along as an escort as much as anything else. We weren’t married yet, so that probably raised just as many questions and protocol issues, but we were made to feel quite welcome everywhere we visited. Plus it turns out that my presence was quite helpful on a few occasions when the “two tall white women” became just as much of an attraction as whatever site we were at.
And now French President Nicolas Sarkozy is experiencing some of the same protocol issues, though at a much higher level. He divorced his wife last year and pretty much immediately started dating a supermodel; the two are rather inseparable. The problem is that formal Indian protocol doesn’t know how to deal with the presence of the “girlfriend” at a State event. Does she get to sit at the head table? A second hotel room? So many little things to think about, and only a few days to figure it all out before he shows up next week. And things aren’t being made much easier by the fact that no one has told the Indians if she is coming along on the trip or not, though their Visa program should have cleared that up by now I would think – they take time to get.
Nothing more than a reminder that cultures are all different and that you have to respect your hosts when you go somewhere, which is made much more difficult by the fact that the world keeps getting smaller.
