Posted by Seth on December 15, 2008 under Uncategorized | 
And they’re starting with the lounges.
Effective starting today members in United’s Red Carpet Club lounge program are now eligible to access Continental’s Presidents Club lounge in Las Vegas. No word on when future lounges will happen or other partnerships, but things are starting to move forward.
ETA: And just a couple hours later some reciprocal details came out. Continental Presidents Club members are now able to access lounges in Orange County, California and Phoenix, Arizona. Yippee!
Posted by Seth on December 14, 2008 under Uncategorized |
For silly animated holiday cards from just about everyone in the travel industry. I received a whole bunch this past week, mostly from airlines. I’m pretty sure that I don’t understand the value of such marketing emails, but I’ll go with it for now, as they are pretty easy to delete. Besides, sometimes they are actually slightly entertaining.
This year I’m declaring Delta the winner of the holiday card competition. Their card is similar to the others in terms of animation and whatnot but they also make it slightly relevant by focusing on some of their destinations and trying to remain topical. So in the competition for sharing messages of very little value, they win. Congratulations!
Posted by Seth on December 14, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Oh, those witty cartoonists at The New Yorker magazine.
Posted by Seth on December 13, 2008 under Uncategorized |
I’m a huge proponent of being a “regular” at a restaurant or bar. Finding a place that you’re comfortable spending time and happy to eat and drink at is a great thing. Plus, once you’ve established yourself as such, there are palpable benefits. Getting a table without a wait at 8pm on a Friday night or a couple rounds of drinks on the house are great things that come with such regular business.
There was a period of time where I was a regular at the bar of the Morton’s on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. I had a great run at the Embassy Suites in Minneapolis, too. These days, however, my “regular” status is confined to a couple of local establishments. First up is the bar across the street from my old office. I was there for happy hour on Thursday night and it was as if I was still there semi-monthly, even if I have dropped to a more quarterly schedule. The bartender and waitress still know me and we continue to get pretty good service from them, which is surprising considering the place. This week’s visit coincided with an all-hands meeting from my former company, so I got to see a lot of old friends and also introduced a couple new folks to the bar. It was rather entertaining at the end of the night to hear Paul (one of the new folks at the bar) express just how impressed he was that I could make beer show up quickly while he couldn’t ever even find the waitress to place an order. Apparently that’s what my frequent drinker membership rates there.
My other regular place is an Italian restaurant in my neighborhood. I’m a huge fan of Le Zie. The food is very good and very consistent. The staff pretty much all know me since I’ve been eating there for 7+ years now. And, best of all, every now and then I still manage to be surprised by something they’re serving there. Last night we had dinner there. The foie gras appetizer special is still delicious and I had a new pasta special that was also quite good. But the real surprise of the evening was the banana soufflé. I went so far as to reserve one with the bartender half way through dinner, just in case. And it was completely worth it. I also love that I can simply suggest to Paula (the bartender) that I am going to need a glass of rum to go with the dessert and she knows exactly what to pour to make that pairing work just right. Last night it was Zaya rum, a Guatemalan option that was off the charts delicious, and worked perfectly with the banana flavor of dessert. Sure, the “specials” aren’t all that special there all that often, but when one comes along that is, the surprisingly high quality makes it all that much better.
Posted by Seth on December 11, 2008 under Uncategorized |
It looks like the initial reductions on the Shuttle service to/from LaGuardia was not sufficient to really see the cost savings that Delta was looking for. The next step appears to be a wholesale halving of capacity on the Washington, DC route. Rather than cut it in half frequency-wise, however, they’re just going to be using smaller airplanes.
Of course, they don’t have any smaller mainline aircraft, so the service is going to be operated by the aptly named Shuttle America regional carrier. The service will be on Embrear E-175s which are nice enough, I suppose, but they have only 64 seats in coach which means that the early morning flights are going to be a bit harder to find a seat on, especially last minute. The service will be half and half of the existing planes and the new starting in January and fully E75s by the end of March.
There are a couple reasons to make such a move, namely a significant drop in demand or a desperate attempt to drive up fares by only having last-minute seats available. The thing about the Shuttle pricing is that it is almost always full-fare for day trips, albeit with most big companies having a decent discount rate. But with most fares being so high it is hard to make them much higher without being priced completely out of the market.
The other reason to do this is a significant drop in expected passenger loads. I guess they are seeing that coming down the pike, which isn’t all that surprising considering the current state of the economy, but the route has generally withstood those issues in the past to some extent.
I used to love the Shuttle service. Now I like it. I guess I will see in the spring if it is going to last as a true product or just fall back to another route that Delta operates flights on with a regional partner carrier. It used to be something special. That attitude/experience is long gone now.
Posted by Seth on December 10, 2008 under Uncategorized |
British carrier bmi has joined the ranks of airlines offering online connectivity in flight. They’re fitting one of their planes, set to operate on the London – Moscow route, with a GSM relay system provided by OnAir. This seems to be the approach that most European carriers are going for in-flight connectivity.
They are limiting it to data/SMS only, which is nice as it means no conversations. The bad news is that most folks have annoying ring tones set for their SMS notification, so that could be a problem. It will also allow for GPRS data connections for folks who have their laptops configured to operate that way.
I’m always a fan of more in-flight connectivity, as long as it is silent. Here’s hoping this one works and can be priced affordably.
Posted by Seth on December 9, 2008 under Uncategorized |
The European Open Skies coverage is spreading. It was announced today that Canada has reached an agreement with the EU to remove just about every restriction on flights between the two regions. While foreign carriers will still not be eligible to operate flights wholly on the other side of the pond, it seems that there will be no limits on foreign investment on either side of the deal. This could really change things in the industry.
Lufthansa has been on a ridiculous shopping spree of late, picking up carriers all over the place. They bought a piece of jetBlue earlier in the year. They just announced a deal to buy an additional 50% of bmi which will close in about a month. Austrian and Swiss are also now in the Lufthansa fold, and there are rumors of SAS, though I’m not sure how reliable those are. And Lufthansa has a pretty strong relationship with Air Canada thanks to their membership in the Star Alliance group and also thanks to some anti-trust immunity that they enjoy on trans-Atlantic flights. This deal opens up a chance for Lufthansa to buy part or all of Air Canada.
Even if Lufthansa doesn’t buy out part of Air Canada, the deal enables even tighter integration of their systems and route networks. A decade ago when the global alliances started up they were a necessity because no single carrier had enough coverage to provide service around the world. Recent moves by Lufthansa, the Delta/Northwest merger and rumors of a Qantas/British Airways link-up seem to be pushing the concept of these alliances towards a quaint historical reference. I don’t really think that they will go away, but a couple of behemoths are really trying to put their stamp on some of the most traveled routes to consolidate control.
Posted by Seth on December 8, 2008 under News |
The famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo is closing its inner sanctum to tourists after deciding that too many ill-behaved visitors were preventing them from actually conducting the business that the market is there to run. Right now it is just a one month trial, but my guess is that it will be extended permanently. The Japanese version of the headline is “Bad mannered foreigners force ban” focusing on the fact that tourists were poking the fish and taking flash photos, which is distracting to the buyers.
On the plus side, the rest of the retail market around the auction house – including all the restaurants where the sushi is only ~6 hours dead – is still open to the public. But the auction part isn’t any more. This was a key component of our planned trip to Japan earlier this year. The trip was scrapped so it looks like I missed this one. Bummer.
Posted by Seth on December 6, 2008 under Uncategorized |
I seem to find myself in positions where I get to hang out with folks from airlines recently. Last night I was invited as a guest of a guest to a party that Delta was having in NYC for some of their Medallion members. The event was held in the private lounge space at Celsius, the bar set up at The Pond ice skating rink in Bryant Park. The lounge area was very nice, except for the part where the bar was closed for the event itself. Still we had some hot chocolate and mini-dessert tarts and got to talk with a few other Delta frequent fliers and also a number of folks from the marketing group at Delta.
From Delta’s side the party was attended by the new Senior VP for New York as well as a few folks from the marketing department. We talked about a lot of things, some related to Delta, some related to travel and some completely random. I couldn’t convince them that I got a free status comp to Delta Silver Medallion at the beginning of the year, but hopefully they’ll realize that I was telling the truth when they look up my account.
We talked about the SkyMiles program and some of the recent changes with redemption levels. We talked about the segment qualification option coming back next year. We talked about a lot of the new routes to Africa and the high expectations they have for those destinations. We talked about mileage runs to make the next status level and even about fare mistakes and the revenue management group and how they deal with those.
Overall the event was a lot of fun. I don’t really expect I’ll be invited to the next one since I don’t fly Delta all that often, but, as always, it was great to hang out with the folks on the inside and talk shop with them.
Posted by Seth on December 4, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Yeah…easy to find, I know. There is a ton of good Greek food in NYC. Pretty much the entire neighborhood of Astoria can meet that requirement. But as we wandered across the Flatiron neighborhood last night towards what we thought was an Indian restaurant, we certainly weren’t expecting to find the level of dining that we happened upon.
Periyali sits on 20th Street between 5th & 6th Avenues and is a couple steps down from the street level. The bar area is nice and I was rather amazed at just how large the restaurant is without appearing too big. It is split into a few small rooms and just keeps going back into the building. Somewhat amazingly, all the way in the back there is actually a skylight without buildings blocking the view straight up. But enough about the view – on to the food!
When we walked in my wife asked if they had haloumi available. “Not tonight, but we have saginaki; very similar.” And, just like last time, asking for the haloumi served us very well. The saginaki was very good and reasonably similar to haloumi, but the star of the course was the Oktapodi Sharas – charcoal grilled octopus that had been marinated in red wine. It was phenomenal and has taken over as my top choice for octopus in NYC, besting that served by Le Zie.
For our main course we had a lamb shank stewed in red wine until it was fall-off-the-bone deliciously tender and served over orzo. We also had the collection of dips – taramosalata, melitzanosalata and tzatziki – and some other fried things as part of the dinner and each of the three were incredibly well done.
The meal was a bit on the expensive side and certainly not in my everyday spend budget, but the food was phenomenal and it is now on my list as a great place worth going back to.
