Posted by Seth on February 5, 2010 under Trip Reports, points | 
For a guy who doesn’t really love Hawai’i I seem to go there an awful lot. It is hard to complain too much when the airlines offer up a $250ish fare from the New York City area as it is a trip worth a bunch of miles, but I generally don’t really enjoy being there. Of course, I blame that on having stayed in Oahu, specifically in Waikiki Beach, when I get there. I know that there are supposed to be better bits to see and this time around I’m finally going to give that a try. I’m headed to the Big Island.
Today’s trip is a four flight affair, starting with a departure from Newark at 6am and finishing with a puddle-jumper flight from Honolulu to Hilo scheduled to arrive at 8:30pm tonight. Just enough time at each connection to hop into a lounge or two for a snack and then on to the next flight. Assuming everything connects OK (which seems pretty likely so far) I shouldn’t have any troubles other than the fact that it is about 20 hours in transit from my apartment to the bed at the other end.
Map from the totaly awesome Great Circle Mapper tool
Perhaps the best part about the first flight today (EWR-SFO) is that the plane is mostly empty. Normally when flying on United Airlines I’d perform some sort of “upgrade flirt” at the counter or in the lounge to try to get a seat in the Economy Plus section for free (I know it is coming soon enough with Continental OnePass reciprocity but I’m impatient) but this morning I didn’t even bother. The First Class cabin may be booked full on this A319 but the back is wide open. There are at least 10 half rows that have one or zero customers seated there. I traded my seat up near the exit row for 22E, a middle seat in the back.
Just after takeoff I was happily asleep in my lie-flat coach seat, trying to imagine if it would really work with a second passenger cuddled up next to me as Air New Zealand thinks they’ll be able to sell with their new SkyCouch seats. And I still don’t see it working, at least not for customers over 5’ 6” tall.
I awoke from my 3+ hour snooze to one of the more disgusting views I’ve seen on a plane. This:
Seriously, it isn’t your house. I know that it isn’t particularly crowded on board this morning but keep your feet down. Yuck!
Only 15 hours yet to go on this trip. Plenty more nap time and writing time to come.
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Posted by Seth on January 26, 2010 under News |
There has been quite a bit of reporting on the new Air New Zealand economy product that will be offered on their Boeing 777-300s and 787 Dreamliner planes that they will be taking delivery of starting later in 2010. The idea makes a lot of sense. Lie-flat seating is great but most folks cannot afford the cost of a business or first class seat. Buying (or hoping to get) multiple coach seats has often worked but even still the experience wasn’t incredibly comfortable. Air New Zealand is looking to both monetize that demand and also improve the quality of the experience.
The SkyCouch will work by having a leg-rest that rises up to a fully horizontal surface, effectively extending the seat cushion to completely fill the space between the seat-backs
In addition, they’ve designed the seats so that the armrests retract fully up into the seats rather than jutting out a bit like most current models do. Overall it should be a rather comfortable option.
As long as you aren’t all that tall.
With the layout of the cabin Air New Zealand cannot make the seats particularly wide. They will almost certainly be about the same width as the current 777 seats and possibly even narrower for the 787 seats. That means the average length of the couch is going to be about 66 inches. And figure about 30 inchs wide on the “couch” based on an average seat pitch of 32 inches and needing to account for the thickness of the seat back. That is bigger than many business class seats – definitely wider – but it also has some serious limits. There is a wall on one side and the aisle on the other. Folks who don’t curl up will end up with their legs sticking out into the aisle. And getting two people into a 30” wide bed is a lot more cozy than I recall of my experiences in a single bed (39” x 75”) freshman year in college.
Looking at the photo from the ANZ marketing group I have to wonder how tall those models are and just how much his neck would hurt after sleeping for any extended period of time in that position.
Don’t get me wrong – lie-flat coach is great. I got to experience it last night on a Seattle – Newark flight and I slept like a baby and was mostly functional upon arrival this morning. I’m just not sure that the premium that ANZ will be charging – estimated at an extra 50% for the extra space – is really going to make sense. Especially when folks keep sticking their legs out into the aisle and getting awakened as the carts or other passengers pass by.
Some additional coverage of the new product can be found here:
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Posted by Seth on December 4, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Yup, Virgin Atlantic seems to be keen on bringing about the apocalypse. They’re actually going to be removing a number of Upper Class seats from their 747-400 configuration and replacing them with coach seats. Even stranger, they’re doing so in the “exclusive” upper deck zone of the 747s. And so there it is – mixing the passengers in the same cabin area on an airplane with no real separation between the two. Even intra-Europe narrow-body planes usually have a curtain or something.
The forward part of the upper deck will still be designated as the snooze zone, reserved for folks who want a quieter ride so they can sleep on the flight rather than eat, drink or chat. But instead of another 10 passengers behind them upstairs there will now be 33 passengers. Sure, there is the small exit row space separating the groups but the only lavatory is in the front (Virgin says they’ll fix that but there doesn’t seem to be room) and tripling the number of passengers is always going to increase the noise level.
But they need to make money and if they aren’t getting it in the old config (left) then they don’t really have too much choice. I guess they could try dropping them down to Premium Economy seats instead. After all, that is supposedly the fasted growing segment of long-haul travel. But they’d probably only get about 16 PE seats in where they are getting 33 coach seats so the incremental gain wouldn’t pan out financially. On the main deck there isn’t much room to work with because of the way the cabin is laid out with the bar and the Premium Economy cabin. Maybe replacing the 14 seats in the nose with coach seats would have worked but that’s more seats lost and you still have the coach passengers mixing with the business class folks.
It turns out that Virgin Atlantic isn’t alone in this type of configuration. Air New Zealand has a similar arrangement on their 747s, though with Premium Economy upstairs, not regular economy. But those two seem to be the only ones.
I know that it doesn’t really matter: people are people and there are plenty of arrogant asshats in the business class seats just like in the coach section. But part of the appeal of buying up to the premium cabin – and especially the upper deck – is the exclusivity of it. And that is going away. Bummer.
Posted by Seth on March 1, 2008 under Uncategorized |
After adding restrictions on the double miles redemption options (unrestricted for most carriers), Delta has added another redemption option for a subset of their members. For starters, you have to have a Delta SkyMiles AmEx Gold or Platinum card to take advantage of the new program, so that excludes a ton of folks.
The bigger problem, however, is that the value is rather terrible.
The scheme is “Pay with Points.” The general idea is that you redeem points for dollars off a fare, rather than a set number of points for a ticket. There is a minimum number of points per flight, depending on the fare, but the scheme is relatively simple. The best one can hope to achieve with the redemption value is one cent per point. That’s the bare minimum that most frequent fliers will accept for redemption value, so really it isn’t a very good deal.
On top of that, the tickets purchased using these points are considered reward seats, not paid seats, so you don’t earn miles for flying on those tickets. While that isn’t unusual for regular reward tickets, since there is a decent chance that these flights will be paid for using cash, so getting no credit for the flights isn’t completely unusual. There are other carriers that offer similar cash + points redemptions, most notably bmi’s Diamond Club program, and those flights don’t earn points when you travel on them. Then again, the points amount on those redemptions isn’t tied to dollar value of the ticket, so it is a pretty different scenario.
There’s been a lot of discussion of the new program over the past couple days. Many are concerned with the value. At least one is actually happy (or at least not upset) to see the development. He is excited that the “increased flexibility, transparency, and convenience provided by Pay with Miles will be welcomed by many SkyMiles members and sets a new industry standard for award availability.” Sure it is transparent, but if we have to trade transparency for actual value of the points, I’m not so sure it is actually good for the consumers, regardless of what they might think.
Ultimately, the real question this raises is whether the industry is shifting towards a setup where the “value” of miles is a fixed level tied to the cost of earning them, rather than a variable rate that benefits those who are flexible and/or willing to work within the system to extract higher values from them (I’ve got a couple trips booked so far this year with 2-3 cents/mile value, way better than the 1 cent/mile value that this program maxes out at). There are other carriers working in this direction (Air New Zealand does for domestic flights), but so far no major carriers in the US or Europe, other than Delta. I hope the followers are few, because this would make the game a lot less fun.
