Posted by Seth on March 31, 2008 under News | 
Part of the fun for me is just the joy of travel. I like sitting on an airplane (even in coach!) or on a train or in a car or bus, just for the sake of travel. But in addition to that, there is something to be said for getting the better of the “man” and taking advantage of the opportunities that the travel industry offers when they make mistakes.
Not every cheap deal is a mistake. Indeed, $200 transcontinental routings still exist, though they are much less common these days, and the carriers seem to want you to book them. Every now and then, however, a fare comes along that is the result of a data entry issue. Maybe the fare is supposed to be CDN$3900 and it gets loaded as CDN$39.00. Maybe the fare was supposed to be $5531 each way and it gets loaded as $531 each way. Or maybe the fare was supposed to be $171 r/t and it gets loaded as $71 r/t or a $1200 fare that was $120. In some cases the fare actually gets loaded as $0 plus tax, though such instances are incredibly rare. I’ve booked a couple of these deals (the first two and the last one noted above) and had some great vacations as a result. It wasn’t that I necessarily knew that I wanted to go to Cyprus or New Zealand the past two New Years, but that’s where the airlines seemed to suggest that I go; I just bought the tickets they offer and figured out the details later. There’s a whole subculture dedicated to these fares on FlyerTalk, and a few of the folks there take it more seriously than others.
One of the more serious players is the FrugalTravelGuy. He manages to keep track of a dozen or so airlines and the various deals that are always swirling about. And he was featured in his local paper this past weekend. I’m not sure if it was to identify him as a member of the crazy travel obsessed clan or something else, but it is a pretty decent article. Anyways, click the link above and check out his collection of posts; there are some good ones there worth checking out.
Posted by Seth on March 31, 2008 under News |
FlyBE, a British discount airline has an interesting contract with the Norwich airport. Apparently they have to hit certain target numbers of passengers or they pay more for their landing slots and other services in Norwich. In fact, they need to serve 15,000 passengers from each of three cities to get a GBP280,000 (~US$560,000) credit – or avoid a similar charge. And they need to hit that target by today. They’d already well surpassed 15K passengers on two routes, and they had 14,828 on the route between Norwich and Dublin. With 172 passengers needed to make up the difference they did what any reasonable person would do – they paid them. The airline went out and offered to pay a bunch of folks to fly back and forth, for about 30-40 Pounds each, in order to get their passenger numbers over the threshold. On top of being paid to fly back and forth, the “passengers” are being offered open bar on the flight. That should end well.
Of course the folks at the Norwich airport authority are unhappy about the prospect of not getting the money back, and they are now claiming that the paid passengers should be considered as employees and therefore not count towards the 15K target. I tend to agree with the airport in this case.
With a little bit of foresight from the revenue management group it wouldn’t have been too hard to offer up a 1 Euro fare and get a bunch of people to bite. But with the short time frame that FlyBE had to deal with, that was no longer viable. If they end up losing the 280K GBP over this it is going to be one very expensive mistake.
Posted by Seth on March 30, 2008 under News |
After declaring bankruptcy a couple weeks back and 61 years of operations, Aloha Airlines is ceasing passenger service, with their final flights operating tomorrow, March 31, 2008.
It is indeed sad to see this happen for a few reasons. First, most other American carriers have managed to continue operations through their bankruptcies, most recently Delta and Northwest did it. Second, they are shutting down because they had to compete for too long with go!, a Mesa subsidiary that was dumping fares on the market below costs and losing buckets of money as well. Apparently they were more diversified and able to support the losses better. No word yet as to whether they’ve raised their prices now that the competition is reduced. Oh, and go! was also found guilty (though it is appealing the verdict) of using proprietary insider information that it gathered while considering an investment in Aloha to enter the Hawaiian market and drive them out of business. Nicely done, fellas.
A sad day for aviation, especially because the failings were brought on in such an underhanded way.
Posted by Seth on March 30, 2008 under News |
Despite announcements to the contrary, it doesn’t seem like things are getting any better at Heathrow’s T5. There are 15,000 bags still stranded, and BA has brought in 400 employees as “volunteers” to manually clear the backlog since the computer systems aren’t working 100%. At the same time, BA’s CEO, Willie Walsh, is saying that the system is “generally working well.” BA has already cancelled 54 flights form the terminal for Monday, and more are planned for Tuesday.
First off, why isn’t BA paying the employees who they’ve got in cleaning up the mess? Asking them to volunteer their service is an insult to the little man, especially when they didn’t design the busted baggage handling system.
And beyond that, why is it taking so long to troubleshoot the baggage handling system? I guess getting the code fixed takes time, but it is hard to believe that the system is so fubar’d that the fixes take this long to develop and implement. Anyone remember the fiasco in Denver with their new airport’s baggage handling system? Apparently BA didn’t, and now they are paying the price.
And what is causing the cancellation and delay of the flights? Is it just that they cannot get luggage to them? Start flying luggage-free, like they did six weeks ago. That would at least let them get the flights off the ground. Plus it would lower the crowds, as people who know they cannot check bags won’t bother showing up anyways. Of course, it doesn’t give them thousands of passengers to test their systems on, so maybe that’s the reason they aren’t going forward with that plan.
Yeah…BA and Heathrow are pretty low on my list of good companies/places right now.
Posted by Seth on March 30, 2008 under News |
The first flights operating under the recently negotiated Open Skies treaty between the EEC and the United States landed in England this morning, including a Continental 777-200 from Newark, the first flight to land under the agreement.
Many observers are predicting that the agreement will result in a ton of new flights being offered by a lot of different carriers. But since the treaty was signed only one route has been announced, other than flights to London’s Heathrow. American carriers – including US Air, Continental and Northwest – along with British Airways and Air France have all announced additional service for Heathrow to the USA. In addition, BA has announced the launch of their new subsidiary, OpenSkies, to fly from Paris to New York. So this revolutionary new treaty has resulted in basically a flooding of one airport with new service. Yeah, Heathrow is the center of the travel universe, even more so than New York’s JFK or Tokyo’s Narita, but I still am waiting to see more benefits from this treaty other than more flights to London. And considering how much the US-based airlines are paying for the slots at Heathrow (CO reportedly paid $209MM for their 4 pairs), it is hard to believe that they can really drive profit from the slots; it’ll take a LOT of paid traffic in the pointy end of the plane to make up that much of an investment.
On the plus side, this should make things super-cheap for folks in London to fly over to the USA and take advantage of the incredibly weak dollar, though they still have to pay GBP40-80 in departure taxes (~$80-160) at a minimum, the flights are just not cheap no matter what.
Tags: Air France, American Airlines, Boeing, British Airways, Continental, London, New York, NorthWest, OpenSkies, Paris, US Air
Posted by Seth on March 30, 2008 under News |
Since the merger efforts with Northwest seem to be mired in pilot union seniority bickering, Delta is making motions to raise revenue and cut costs as a standalone airline. First was the fee for a second checked bag, then the trimming of the workforce and domestic flight schedules, and now more fees. While not publicly confirmed (neither is the 2nd bag fee, btw), a number of Delta insiders seem to be indicating that the new fees will be in effect starting on Tuesday, 4/1. Included in the new fees:
- CRC one-visit pass to go from $25 to $30
- Unaccompanied Minor fee to go from $50 nonstop/$100 connecting to $100 for all
- Pets in cabin fee from $75 to $100
- Pets as checked luggage to go from $150 to $200
- Curbside checked bags as per other threads ($3 vs. free, exemptions include medallions, premium cabin, etc.)
- Oversize bag fee from $100 to $150
- Direct Ticketing Charge goes from $20 to $25
- “ASC” for reissues, etc of non-refundable tix goes from $75 to $100 (only for tickets originally issued after 4/1)
- Award ticket re-issues and redeposits go from $75 to $100, with PM waiver still in place
- “Handling charge” for any award that includes a segment on another airline: $25
Some of these make a bit of sense and are reasonable. Some are just ridiculous. The most interesting one, to me, is the last one. The airline advertises the hundreds upon hundreds of destinations that one can get to using SkyMiles, and then goes and adds a surcharge to do so if Delta doesn’t fly there with their own airplanes. Yeah, they have to pay the partner for the seat, but the $25 isn’t covering that. I’m guessing that they can claim that the additional time required to build such an itinerary with their call center staff justifies it (oh, on top of the $20 call center ticketing fee), but if they’d bother to build a web site that allowed for the ticketing directly people wouldn’t be forced to pay the fee just to talk to someone in a call center who doesn’t seem that interested in doing the work that I am now going to be charged extra for.
As airlines continue to devalue their FF programs and otherwise unbundle ticket prices they are going to find themselves sliding down a very slippery slope. Of course, the flip side may be that they’d go out of business, so I guess it isn’t all bad. Then again, we’ve been hearing for months about over capacity in the domestic airline industry. Maybe one of them shutting down wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Posted by Seth on March 28, 2008 under News |
The new Heathrow T5 was opened for real yesterday with promises of efficiency. In reality, however, it was more of the same for BA’s passengers.
With the soft opening last week and the many trials that had been conducted, there was hope that queues would be shorter, baggage would appear quickly and security screening would be prompt. Instead there were terrible lines, baggage still took 45 minutes or more to show up for some flights and BA had to cancel 20% of their flights from the terminal. Oopsie.
The baggage failure, as explained in the linked BBC article above, apparently was caused by the handlers not removing it quickly enough from the conveyor belts as it was routed towards its destination.
Image from BBC
Computer issues also resulted in some flights departing with no checked baggage. At one point passengers were not permitted to check any bags, reminiscent of issues a while back in the old terminal. Oh, and the escalators and elevators were broken at one point.
At least the carrier’s CEO was honest and blunt about the situation, stating that, “British Airways has not delivered and we need to deliver. I am accepting responsibility, the buck stops with me.” Of course that is of little comfort to the passengers who slept on the floor of the new terminal thanks to the snafus.
Posted by Seth on March 27, 2008 under News |
As previously speculated, JetBlue founder David Neelman officially announced his new Brazilian airline today. The yet to be named carrier will start flying in “early 2009″ with 3 Embrear E195 planes and grow from there, with 36 more on order and options on another 20. In addition, Neelman is looking to step down from his role of Chairman at JetBlue, stating that “My attention needs to be here,” referring to Sao Paulo, where the new airline will be headquartered.
Also being covered here and discussed here and here.
Posted by Seth on March 27, 2008 under TSA |
The Government Printing Office (GPO) is responsible for printing most things that various government agencies require. This includes blank passport books, including the new super-fancy/hackable ones with the RFID chips in them. And the agency is charged with producing its goods for the agencies at cost – no need to drive a profit when all your customers are part of the same government, right? Well, apparently someone decided that the whole operating at break-even thing was silly, and that there weren’t really any reasons to worry about the security of the facility that prints blank passports. And so here we are…
The production of blank passports has been outsourced to a printer in Thailand. That isn’t so terrible, but it gets worse. The print shop is known to have previously been involved in espionage cases with other governments. So there is a higher chance that the blanks may not all be getting delivered to the State Department.
And, as an added bonus, the GPO is selling the blanks to State at a 100% markup, taking the profits and returning them to executives in the form of bonuses and luxury vacations. My favorite line in the second article is this one:
The bonuses are part of a 2005 plan by GPO, which is a monopoly printer for the U.S. government, to generate greater revenues under the assumption that a private-sector business model is more efficient, GPO documents show.
In other words, we’re going to run a for-profit department of the federal government by changing the operating process to behave as though it were in the free-market economy, and the only income is derived from other federal agencies, which means the money all comes from tax revenue or other fees. But it is a legislated monopoly, so there are no other options.
So the fancy new e-Passports may have chain of custody issues, and we’re paying too much for them anyways. Awesome.
Posted by Seth on March 27, 2008 under News |
A slightly surreal experience yesterday evening reminded me just how important it is to remember that we are really all in a global community now, not insular and isolated. And I didn’t even have to leave the island of Manhattan for this “trip.”
Standing in a deli on 68th & Broadway, waiting for my sandwich to be heated up, I overheard an older woman (typical stereotype – hunched over on the cane, barely able to speak loud enough to be heard, etc.) try to order a bit of provolone cheese to go. She didn’t want a sandwich or anything, just some cheese. The guy behind the counter wasn’t sure how much to charge, so he asked another guy, who asked another. None of them knew. Eventually one of them called out to the boss to ask what the price should be. The boss answered and all was well, or so I thought. See, the entirety of that conversation happened in Spanish, and the woman ordering her salad at the station between the boss and me was NOT happy about it.
This woman starts to lecture the boss about how he needed to speak English because the employees needed to learn English and how no one ever spoke to her immigrant parents in Croatian when they came over. She carried on for a couple minutes, while the boss was rather amused and kept brushing her off. He finished the conversation with a comment about freedom of speech and walked away from her, back behind the counter. I was still waiting on my sandwich and he saw me standing there and asked if I needed anything. I replied that I was all set and that I appreciated the free entertainment while I was waiting, to which we shared a calming smile.
All of the guys working there speak English. They all clearly knew what was going on, and they were rather shocked that this lady was so arrogant about the issue. I, too, was shocked that she was so caught up in the issue. I was tempted to offer to hail a cab for her to get her back to the airport to go somewhere she’d be more comfortable, but for some reason discretion seemed more appropriate at that point (which is strange for me) and I just let it go.
Looking back on it, I think of the various trips I’ve taken where language was an issue. There was the driver in Ecuador who spoke almost no English, and I speak almost no Spanish (at least not correctly) and yet we still managed to get by for an hour or so talking about his family and mine and our vacation and the things we’d seen and the plans for the rest of the trip. There was my trip to Hong Kong where there was plenty of English spoken, but this guy at the butcher shop didn’t speak any and I have no Mandarin or Cantonese (and couldn’t begin to guess which one he was speaking), but we managed to negotiate an arrangement that had me pay for taking some pictures of him and him not attack me with his large knife.
Moral of the story is that there are a lot of people out there who aren’t the same as you. And they probably don’t want to be the same as you. That’s what makes travelling to experience their cultures so enjoyable. Remember that when you’re on the road, and life will flow much more smoothly. Or you can be the obnoxious woman in the deli that no one wants to deal with.
Posted by Seth on March 27, 2008 under News |
Following on AA’s need to ground and inspect their MD80s yesterday, Delta announced that they were performing a similar set of checks, and similarly taking a number of planes out of service in order to do so. The Delta action affects about 130 planes and there were a number of cancelled flights as a result. All these inspections are apparently to verify that the cable ties holding some wires in place are correctly spaced. Who knew that cable tie spacing was so important??
Particularly interesting to me are the Delta Shuttle flights between New York’s LaGuardia and Wasington’s National and Boston’s Logan airports. These flights are cash cows for Delta, with fares often higher than a dollar and a half per mile for a walk-up ticket. And these flights are operated with a dedicated sub-fleet of MD-88 airplanes, the type included in the grounding. Somewhat amazingly, Delta has managed to control the damage on this route, cancelling only a couple of the flights so far, while keeping the vast majority of them flying (2 cancelled to DCA and 3 to BOS, out of 16-18 for each city). Other routes are not so lucky, but at least Delta’s keeping the money route operating.
UPDATE (5:11pm EDT): Apparently Delta can’t even keep the money route going full speed – they cancelled four more DCA flights and three more BOS flights. Not a good day to be flying on Delta or AA, though Amtrak is probably doing brisk business on their Acela routes between NYC and Boston/Washington.
