Posted by Seth on November 17, 2008 under Uncategorized | 
Many airlines have made some very unpopular decisions over the past few months. From selling bottled water in their lounges to charging elites for premium seats, the changes are enough to get many frequent fliers up in arms, or at least threatening to do so if any of the other programs out there weren’t similarly bad. It also seems in some ways that these changes are being set up as low-hanging fruit for the vocal frequent travelers to attack, distracting from substantive reductions in benefits that really do matter.
Delta decided that they wanted to adopt Northwest’s “Coach Choice” program, where some of the better seats were held back to be sold to any customer rather than being given to elites for free. That didn’t go over so well, so they backed off (effective 11.18; I just got the email alert). But they haven’t backed off from their three-tier reward structure, huge additional fees for itineraries that originate outside of North America, partner ticketing fees, getting rid of the Delta Shuttle fleet configuration and many other things that have substantively detract from the value of the program.
US Air has apparently decided not to sell bottled water any more (as reported yesterday), but just about everything else they’ve done to their airline has been another step in the rapid drive to the absolute bottom. They haven’t quite made it there yet, but removing in-flight entertainment systems, cutting bonus miles for elites and charging for drinks on the planes are all pretty ridiculous moves.
Continental announced on the same day that they would be removing the 500-mile minimum earned by folks flying on short flights that they would also be increasing the change fees on reward tickets from $35 to $150 in many cases, and that only their top tier elites would be exempt from such fees. The 500-mile minimum affects far fewer passengers, but they apparently drew enough pressure on that decision that they backed down, agreeing to reinstate the 500-mile minimum earning for folks who are already elite.
What is the common theme in all of these changes? The airlines are throwing out a bunch of bad things and then backing off on one or two less significant ones. They get to go on about how they are “listening to their best customers” and changing their minds because of the feedback. That’s actually exactly what tonight’s email from Delta said:
…[W]e’ve received substantial feedback from Medallion members like you, and your dissatisfaction was crystal clear …
Retaining your long-term loyalty is of paramount importance to us, and we’re not afraid to change course when we need to.
Yeah. So crystal clear that they’re willing to forego a tiny bit of incremental revenue to distract their customers from the emaciation of the program in other areas. Awesome. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad that there are some small give backs happening. But things still aren’t all rosy for the frequent flier. It is harder and harder to find value in the programs, but I’m still trying and mostly finding it, at least thus far.
Posted by Seth on November 17, 2008 under Uncategorized |
There is a drug company that has a drug that has been approved for treating a number of sleep disorders, including narcolepsy and helping folks stay awake working the graveyard shift. So now that company wants to use the same drug to “treat” jetlag. I say put the word treat in quotes because it really isn’t a medical condition, much like “erectile dysfunction” but the drug companies don’t really care about things like that as long as they get to sell their wares.
In order to be able to market the drug as effective against jetlag the company has to test it against jet lag. And that means human trials against people who actually are suffering from jetlag at that moment in time. To do so in a controlled manner they’ve set up a clinical trial that involves a sleep test in the United States followed by a flight to Europe to induce jet lag and more tests over a three day period in France.
So participants in the study get to fly in a private jet from New York to France (technically the plane lands in Switzerland but the Basel airport has exits on both sides of the border) and then undergo sleep testing in their facility there. The flights and everything associated with the stay in France are free, though apparently the food leaves something to be desired. And it pays $2500 for a few days’ efforts. Not a bad gig. I’ve enrolled in the study and am scheduled to fly in a couple weeks, assuming I pass the first sleep test in the NYC facilities. Apparently they’ve been having trouble getting enough people who can pass the initial sleep test in NYC (only something like 25% of folks have made it to the flight stage). I’m hopeful I make the cut.
If you want more info, check out their site here or read some of the discussion about the program here. Oh, and no frequent flier miles since it is a private jet and you don’t actually get to do anything but look out the window in France. Plus no alcohol or caffeine during the testing period. So clearly some drawbacks. But it makes for an interesting story.
Posted by Seth on November 16, 2008 under Uncategorized |
And a slightly scary one, too.
A US Express turboprop had its nose gear collapse while it was on the runway landed with no nose gear in Philadelphia this morning. I’m really not sure what else is going on, but I woke up on final approach and we were on a different approach path than normal. My seat mate mentioned that one runway was closed and then I saw this out the window. Yikes! Sorry that the pictures suck a bit, but its the best I could do under the circumstances.
Looks like the nose gear never deployed so the plane landed without it this morning. That certainly explains the crazy flight path map.
Posted by Seth on November 16, 2008 under TSA |
I’m off on another, albeit much more reasonable, trip this weekend just for the miles, heading out to Sacramento for about an hour tonight and turning around to head straight back home. This trip will be enough to qualify me for elite status for next year, so that’s nice, but it doesn’t really have the same excitement as last week’s 72 hour, 9,600 mile ordeal, so not much useful in writing about on that front. But there were some interesting happenings on the ground through the week that I thought I’d mention here.
First, on the refreshment front, announcements from Delta and US Air. Delta has decided to eliminate ginger ale, tomato juice and apple juice from their in flight beverage offerings. Apparently there are cost savings to be had in making such a change, though they must be on the logistics side of things as odds are they will be stocking just as many cans of soda on flights going forward so the total weight is the same. Perhaps this is a move to consolidate all beverages to being supplied by Coca Cola (Seagram’s Ginger Ale is a Pepsi product) but I really have no idea. US Air, continuing their efforts to charge for just about everything they can, has decided that bottled water in their lounges will now cost money as well. There is still free water available, so it isn’t completely the end of the world, but it is an interesting move nonetheless.
Next up, some bad news out of Washington, DC. Passengers yet again find themselves getting screwed by the federal government thanks to an impressive lobbying effort by the airline industry. There was some movement towards defining a set of standards under which passengers would receive benefits due to flight delays and other irregularities in their trips. This effort was stymied by a most ridiculous problem – the inability of those negotiating to agree on what a “long” delay meant. I certainly have my ideas on what the threshold could be set at but that’s not actually the point of such a rule. Pick a number. Any number. And give the passengers SOMETHING. Go back later and adjust the number if necessary. And in case anyone is curious what my number would be, I’d take the massive dataset that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has, find the average performance of all domestic flights over the past 12 months and then got out 1, 2 and 3 standard deviations on the delayed end of things to set the thresholds for levels of accommodation. At least I’d start there and see what the numbers were. It can’t be too much worse a plan than what anyone else has, and that’s about all I remember how to calculate from a stats class 12 years ago.
Some good news for passengers, too, with the announcement that US-bound passengers will now clear all immigration and customs checks in either Dublin or Shannon prior to departing for the USA. Such pre-clearance is already the norm for many airports in Canada as well as the Bahamas and Aruba. For at least the past 8 years passengers traveling from Ireland the the USA were able to clear immigration in Ireland but still had to pass through Customs inspection in the USA. For the vast majority of passengers this consists of walking past the Customs officials and saying hi, resulting in the passengers being left outside the terminal at their arrival airport. For passengers connecting onwards this meant re-checking any bags that were checked and, more annoyingly, re-clearing security with the TSA. Now passengers will arrive into a gate just like any other flight and if they are connecting onward to another flight they’ll be able to just head to the next gate. Actually, the pre-clearance was incredibly helpful in the case of a lost passport as it allowed us to get past the airline agents and know before setting out on a flight back to New York if we’d both actually be admitted upon arrival (and we were).
Finally, it is really, really cold in seat 14F on Continental’s 737-300. Sure, I’ve got virtually unlimited legroom thanks to no seat in front of me, but my toes are going numb thanks to the cold of the window exit plug I’m sitting next to. I’m putting on extra socks in hopes of warming them up. And this is the first flight in a long time that I haven’t been annoyed by the heat that my laptop gives off.
So there you have it….some odds and ends, some good and some bad.
Posted by Seth on November 15, 2008 under frequent flyer, News, points |
Earning all the miles is just the first part of the process in fulfilling the great dream of free air travel. Finding a flight that the airline will actually let you use the points on is a whole different mess, one that includes highly guarded algorithms and pricing structures in the revenue management offices of airlines the world over. There are services and companies that can (supposedly) help find such awards and now there is another player in the market: Yapata.com.
Yapta started off as a service that monitored fares and would send you an email if the fare on your particular flight went down. Since some airlines will give you a credit for such an event it was a pretty nice service to have available. Starting Tuesday Yapta will be adding notifications for reward seats to their program, alerting customers of such availability to help ease the booking process. They are launching the service with access to the inventory of five airlines, Alaska, Continental, Delta, United and US Airways and details for both reward tickets and upgrades.
This is a great service, assuming that it works. I’m particularly intrigued by the inclusion of Continental in the group of airlines that Yapta will have access to as Continental has historically exercised incredibly tight control over access to their reward inventory availability. Up until now there has not been access to the inventory via any public GDS system that I know of, and those GDSes are what this type of system is generally based on.
One limitation of this service is that it does not appear that it will be able to leverage the additional reward inventory that airlines make available to their most frequent fliers, those holding elite status in the programs.
The program also does not search the partners of the airlines that are covered. Each of the airlines in question has partners around the globe that can also be used to piece together a reward ticket. And foreign partners often seem to have more reward inventory available than their US counterparts, at least in my searches. This service will likely be more useful for domestic travel than international ones, while the best value from mileage redemption remains in long-haul, premium cabin international travel.
There is an interesting quote from one of the airlines in the article:
“The technology that Yapta brings to the table, whether award tracker or flight tracker, really provides what we view as purposeful innovation,” said Mark Guerette, director of e-commerce with Alaska Airlines. “It helps the customer look for the proverbial needle in the haystack.”
I agree that it is useful information. Clearly it is of value to the passengers. And yet the airlines continue to make it ridiculously difficult to find the seats. If they really think it is such a good idea why don’t they offer it to their customers directly? If they really wanted to encourage loyalty and help the customers in that way they could.
I also find it interesting that the idea of “loyalty” that Yapta’s CEO seems to think is important is spending on a credit card:
Alerting travelers to fresh award inventory, he added, can both help airlines alleviate some of their liability for unredeemed awards and encourage loyalty among travelers.“You are more likely to continue to use your airline credit card to earn more miles,” he said, if you’re able to redeem those miles.
That’s not a bad thing for the airlines, and they sell those points to the credit card companies in transactions valued in hundreds of millions of dollars. But that isn’t really the loyalty that the airlines want. They want people paying to fly.
I’m also completely confused by the reporting of this by the NYTimes.com article that I linked to above. They provide hyperlinks to some of the websites mentioned but not others, to some of the airlines but not others and sometimes link to their internal coverage and other times to third party sites. Very strange.
Posted by Seth on November 12, 2008 under Uncategorized |
It looks like unions might be coming to JetBlue, at least for their pilots. Up until now the carrier has had wonderful relations (for the most part) with their crew across pretty much their entire operation. Actually the pilots acknowledge that in their statement. Still, they are looking to unionize to protect themselves according to the letter sent to all pilots today.
Reading the notice sent is somewhat entertaining for the contradictions that seem to be included:
Consistent with our stated goal of setting a new standard for employee labor relations, these actions were taken prior to the final submission of our petition. It was imperative for our leaders to receive this important information directly from the source, rather than from the media or from any third party. We feel very strongly in this regard not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it indicates the type of relationship we have today and the relationship we wish to continue in the future.
and
Without support under the rule of law, providing for our pilots in a manner appropriate to their status as career employees often is not legally possible. This underscores our need to have a relationship based not on the benevolence of a leadership team that could transition at any time, but on a relationship where there exists a means to resolve our private discourses under the support of legal process. It is our processes that are flawed, not our people.
In other words, they really like the relationship they have and want to continue it, so they are pursuing a change in that relationship through the affiliation with a union. I’m also intrigued by the claims that “the rule of law” is necessary to ensure that the relationship continues. The suggestion that the relationship exists only because of a benevolent leader is entertaining to me.
Don’t get me wrong; I understand the value of unions and their ability to negotiate better than any single member can. I just question the timing and value of pursuing union affiliation at this point in time. The airline is one of the best out there in terms of keeping employees on the books (they have a strict “no furlough” policy), so even in the current economic climate the pilots are not really suffering too much. From my perspective the decision to unionize right now seems rather aggressive and antagonistic. The whole concept that they need this just in case seems more like an instigation than a protection.
I hope things work out OK for everyone involved, but this seems to be a very strange move at this particular point in time.
Posted by Seth on November 11, 2008 under Uncategorized |
OK, maybe calling it an alliance is a stretch, but Southwest is definitely making a push to add more options for their customers these days. First it was the WestJet partnership announced earlier this summer and now a similar deal has been signed with Mexico’s Volaris.
Volaris has their primary hub at Mexico City’s Toluca airport (TLC) rather than Benito Juárez (MEX) which is where most flights to the region operate out of. This would seem to be consistent with Southwest’s approach of operating out of smaller airports in major metropolitan areas (Oakland and Chicago-Midway come to mind).
The deal will depend on Volaris starting operations across the border into the United States, where they will be able to meet up with Southwest’s routes and passengers. It does not appear that Southwest has any intention of flying to Mexico, just like they will not be flying to Canada as part of the WestJet deal. Looking at the distances involved, it seems that getting from the current Volaris hub up to any city where Southwest has a decent feed would be a pretty long flight (2+ hours), much longer than what Volaris operates these days. That will add some interesting factors to the route planning and operational issues of such an arrangement. There’s also a chance that Volaris will open another hub closer to the USA from where they can link to more cities in the USA, but it is hard to know at this point.
One major issue the partnership faces is that they will need to operate from airports that offer immigration and customs facilities. Those are somewhat limited, particularly at airports that Southwest has high-frequency operations.
Volaris is expected to begin operations to the USA in Spring ‘09 with code-shares established in ‘10, so there is still plenty of time for everything to work out. In the mean time, I would expect to hear much more from Southwest as they continue to expand their reach and partnerships.
Posted by Seth on November 10, 2008 under Uncategorized |
One of the many, many things I love about flying is the view from above. It is hard not to enjoy scenes like these.
Posted by Seth on November 9, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Thanks to United’s liberal airplane swapping policy we ended up without our first class seats on our flights to and from Oklahoma City this weekend. The tickets we bought were instant upgrade seats that technically were coach fares, but we bought them for the first class cabin, not for coach. A bit of prodding this morning at the counter, along with explaining that we really did need to fly OKC – DEN – PDX – SFO – SNA instead of a more direct routing (“business” in Portland), resulted in getting a CR-1 upgrade voucher each. This is my first United upgrade voucher and I’m still not sure exactly how to use it, but I’m looking forward to trying.
The other freebie of the weekend came courtesy of National Car Rental. A few weeks back they loaded a coupon code into their systems that was supposed to be something like a free day – up to $50 – with a three day weekend rental. The problem is that they didn’t actually load the details correctly. The result was that it was just a $50 coupon with no minimums. Once they realized their mistake they went back and cancelled out a lot of the reservations that were made with the code that shouldn’t have been there. For some reason, however, my reservations never got tossed out.
When we showed up at the counter yesterday to pick up the car they guy actually thought it was a mistake and was trying to figure out what was broken in my reservation because it came up as a $0 rental. No taxes, no surcharges, no fees. Just $0. He saw that there was a coupon and eventually handed me the car keys, still somewhat in disbelief. Nineteen miles and about three hours later we returned the car and headed off to the hotel. And it was still $0 for the rental.
Posted by Seth on November 8, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Today was the first day of the truly ridiculous travel schedule. We were up at 5:15 and on our way not too long after that. United has tried to throw off our schedule a couple times so far, but they have yet to succeed.
Incident number one arose when the pilot announced that our arrival into San Francisco this morning would be into the international terminal. That’s great if you’re making an outbound international connection or terminating the trip in San Francisco, but for domestic connections it means a walk to the domestic terminal and going through security again. Not a big deal with a sufficiently padded schedule, but with a 33 minute connection things looked dicey. They didn’t get any better when the agent there decided that my wanting to watch my bag enter the x-ray machine deserved a thorough search of my bag. Still, we arrived in the gate area before they had started boarding so no troubles there.
Incident number two came as we were settling in on the plane. For some reason United decided that we both wanted to change our flights to a more direct routing. They actually came on to the plane to ask us why we were not still going to switch our flights. Suffice it to say that we stuck with the longer routing and are quite happy with that plan.
Flight number four was swapped out for a TED plane, which meant no first class seats. Not really a big deal, as I was pretty much ready to sleep anywhere. But we paid for first class on this trip and they didn’t deliver. Compensation will be coming soon. And it is the same flight tomorrow morning so we’ll have to deal with it again then.
The flying was all pretty good and it reminded me, once again, that earth really is best viewed from 35,000 feet.
We did get to see Oklahoma City a bit, thanks to a free rental car that should never have been. I saw the memorial for the bombing of the federal building. I can only hope that NYC manages something as classy and beautiful when they get around to building the one at the WTC site.
Food was a problem in Oklahoma City. We walked into a few places in the Bricktown district downtown and they all looked pretty bad. A bunch of places were closed, too, which doesn’t bode well for the area. Me eventually found somewhere to eat, but back out by the airport. We really tried, but it just wasn’t happening downtown.
A buffalo art thing in downtown Oklahoma City
