Posted by Seth on September 5, 2009 under Uncategorized | 
The Asian airlines have quite the reputation going for themselves. Phenomenal service is considered the norm, the minimum that one should expect while flying with them. The lounges are supposed to be better than those of the American carriers and the in-flight product is supposed to as well. As I am sitting on my fourth Korean Air flight of the week – two in coach and two in business, two long haul and two regional – I am seriously wondering where this reputation comes from. The entire experience has been most notable for its lack of anything exceptional. Maybe I’m being too judgmental. Maybe the expectations I had were unreasonable. But I don’t really think so.
The trip started with a 12:50am departure from New York City to Seoul. That is sufficiently late that I wasn’t really expecting to eat a full meal on the plane right at departure. I would be sleeping. I somewhat expected that their business class lounge at JFK airport would have some snacks or light finger foods of some sort. I was horribly overly optimistic. The selection of snacks rivaled that of Continental’s Presidents Clubs, hardly the standard bearer when it comes to munchies. And the alcohol selection was – while self service – miserably poor. There was Scotch, brandy and whiskey. And beer. No other liquors to be found. Top it all off with the fact that the lounge was impressively crowded and it all adds up to a lounge that I see no reason to visit again.
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| Mid-flight breakfast |
Back to the flight. With the early morning departure I was asleep within about 15 minutes from wheels up so I have no idea what the first meal option they served was. The second meal was served 6 hours into the flight – right in the middle – disrupting any chance of getting a full night’s sleep. I was roused by the sound of the carts rolling by and became coherent enough to grunt and nod yes when asked if I wanted breakfast. Sure, it is just airline food, and coach food at that for my outbound flights, but I’m not really sure that is was meant to be served at that point in the flight. That also meant that the following 6 hours were food-free, right up through the 4am arrival in Seoul, where there were no real food options to speak of available. Fortunately I had liberated a couple packets of Fig Newtons from the lounge at JFK.
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| The legroom destroyer |
The coach seats were fine as far as coach seating goes. Like most planes these days the in-flight entertainment system has some heavy-duty gear that sits under a seat at some point blocking leg room and Korean’s 747s are no exception. Fortunately for me that blockage is under the middle seat and I had a window so I was unencumbered. The entertainment system is decent, with a wide selection of music and movies, though none I really wanted to see. There are about 30 in English, mostly new releases. I did watch Back to the Future at some point, though I was still pretty much in a sleepy haze. At one point I wanted to watch the in-flight map and track our journey. Instead I found myself watching a rotating series of ads for hotels in Seoul, Los Angeles, Waikiki Beach and a few other places. There were also a number of ads for Korean Air, their Skypass frequent flier program, their AVOD system and SkyTeam. There was a notice that all flights are non-smoking and a cute teddy bear wearing a seat belt, reminding us to buckle up. Each display page was on the screen for about 15-20 seconds and the total loop was around 8 minutes long. Of that time about 3 minutes was actually the in-flight map. Rather pathetic, really. On the plus side, I now have a list of about 8 hotels that I won’t give my business to since they interfered with my in-flight map watching ability.
At least the sunrise (or sunset, I’m not entirely certain) I saw during the flight was rather pretty.
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| Sunrise (or sunset??) somewhere over the Pacific |
Transiting Seoul was pleasant for the decent shower I was able to get (though no toilet in the shower room; saves space but can present issues when trying to perform the three “S” of morning ablutions) but wholly unremarkable in every other way. The alcohol selection was similarly limited to that available in New York (no vodka for a bloody mary??) and the food options were arguably worse. This from their flagship lounge at their hub in their home city. At this point I grabbed another beer from the cooler and went from being relatively neutral on the whole thing to rather unimpressed. The food did get better for short stints at a couple points throughout the day but overall it was not what I would expect from an Asian carrier that presents itself as offering a premium product. It is certainly worthwhile to get out of the lounge and out of the airport if you have the time while transiting Seoul. Staying in the lounge for more than about 3 hours could lead to bouts of depression and general malaise. It is not recommended.
The flight from Seoul to Manila was uneventful though that likely comes from the fact that I slept the entire time. The flight attendants did stop by to mention that they tried to serve me dinner but I was asleep. Such is life. Two flights and three meals served and I had only actually seen one of them. And eaten zero.
At this point in the trip the good stuff happened. I was underwater for four full days of diving that could not have been better.
Read more in Part 2, coming soon.
Posted by Seth on June 15, 2009 under Uncategorized |
What to do on a lazy Sunday morning when there isn’t much else going on in New York City? Why not head out to JFK Airport and check out a few airline lounges and watch the planes flying? That’s exactly what I did with a couple friends, getting to talk about travel and schemes to maximize benefits as well as just hanging out and enjoying the lounges.
Our first stop was the Flagship Lounge operated by American Airlines. The lounge is reserved for their first class passengers traveling Internationally or on the Flagship transcon service and is much more similar to the lounges operated by international carriers than a typical Admirals Club. It was really quite nice inside – bright and wide open with nice windows looking down on the terminal and taxiways below. There were about as many employees in the lounge as there were passengers – 6 or so of each – so there were always folks around to help out if we needed anything. They had some food and drink options that were not particularly inspiring but they were better than nothing, I suppose. The Flagship Lounge also had some workstations available for use and free WiFi via TMobile if desired, both of which were nice. Apparently the bandwidth was sufficient for one of the other guys in the lounge to be streaming porn on his laptop so that is a good metric for the speed performance, I suppose. With the less than impressive “lunch” service out and not so nourishing we decided to head out of that lounge and make our way to the next stop, jetBlue’s T5 facility.
This was the first visit for either of my friends to the jetBlue terminal (but not mine) so it was quite enjoyable to see their reactions in person as we entered the facility. The walk over from the AirTrain station didn’t seem so bad this time and we very quickly found ourselves with boarding passes in hand and passing quickly through the TSA checkpoint. Once inside we were treated to the pleasure that is the bright and open terminal. They were quite impressed and we we wandered around a bit before making our way to the end of the center pier to watch planes for a while. They still have the issues of overlapping announcements from adjacent gates but that is something that I don’t think is going away. And they still have one of the best plane-spotting locations available. Sadly, the runway under construction at JFK is one of the two that crosses in front of the jetBlue terminal so the spotting was not as good as it was last time I visited, but there were still some good photo opportunities to be had. Oh, and the Asian food place is still really good.
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| One of three different *A liveried planes at the field on Sunday |
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| Lining up to head in to the gates |
All in all it was a great way to spend a few hours on a Sunday. Definitely better than being stuck in the chaos surrounding the Puerto Rico Day parade.
Posted by Seth on February 8, 2009 under Trip Reports |
Well, the weekend of partying with the folks at Continental has finally ended. I’m on a plane now on my last flight, from Austin to Newark, and the shift from indulgence and celebration to work. Yeah, that’s a buzz kill. But the good news is that the high I’m on is pretty ridiculous. The weekend was absolutely amazing from start to finish.
As I mentioned on Saturday, we got a tour of Texas on one of Continental’s 757-200 planes, with Vice Presidents and Managers working as flight attendants on the trip, serving up a bit of bubbly and shmoozing with the group. They had a good time, as did all the passengers/customers on the flight. All in all, a phenomenal event.
And then there was the party on Saturday night. An airplane hanger is ridiculously big. But when you move the planes out and bring in a catering crew, some tables and chairs, a live jazz band and set up a couple of stages for entertainment, it gets pretty cozy in a hurry. And last night was just that. When I wasn’t busy making new friends I was hanging out with old ones or enjoying the entertainment. Certainly one of the highlights was when the CEO of the company took the stage to play MC for the final round of a competition giving away 1,000,000 OnePass mile. That was pretty ridiculous, and the competition was actually intense, coming down to the very last question to decide the winner.
Oh, and there was the 737-900ER plane that they had available for us to visit. We pretty much had free reign, which may or may not have been a mistake on their part, but it certainly was fun. Many folks got to take photos in the cockpit, sitting in the engine or even in the overhead bins!
While the Friday night, Saturday morning and Saturday night parts of the event were all fun and games, there were also some serious bits to the event. The Saturday afternoon sessions gave the 500+ attendees a chance to interact directly with the managers of the various departments in the company. Have a question about the OnePass program, the web site, the in-flight catering or hub operations? They had the people on-site to answer those questions for you. Some of the sessions were better than others, as is always the case, but we certainly learned a few new things that were quite good to know. Some highlights include:
- One little nugget about the Star Alliance move. Continental Gold elites will be Star Gold. This has a significant impact on checked luggage allowances and international lounge access. In the case of the latter it is a significant improvement for gold elites.
An update on the plans to roll out LiveTV and in-flight Internet on the domestic fleet. The system is a bit delayed, but they were supposed to see “power on” of the system over the weekend. They expect it to start in commercial service by March 15 and to have all 220+ of their planes retrofit by mid-2010. The bad news is that the internet part of the service is not going to be coming at the same time. That service is expected to come online much later in the year, and that sucks. I was really looking forward to that. It was also mentioned that the in-flight internet as part of the LiveTV implementation is not necessarily the only option available. The current contract allows CO to put an additional internet service on the planes if they want to. So if something like Row44 or Aircell’s gogo service really takes off then they can always do that too. Oh, and they had a set of the seats on display during Saturday night’s session so we got to see what the system will look like. I am VERY impressed with it, though I still don’t really expect that I’ll spend much time watching TV on flights. 
There is a schedule for the deployment of the new business class seats (and we got to try them out). They are a full lie-flat seat and they are pretty nice. No, they are not perfect if you are 6’ 5”, and getting out over your neighbor from the window seat will remain an acrobatic event, but overall they are a great improvement, I think. I only spent a couple minutes in the seat, but it was comfortable both fully reclined and in the “lounge” mode. And the TV screens they have are just awesome. And they aren’t as good as the Singapore Air suites for getting two people into at the same time, but a couple folks proved that it could be done on the demo set that was set up, though it didn’t look particularly comfortable. As to the deployment schedule, they will start with the 777-200s in September 2009 and the 757-200s in December 2009. Each fleet type is expected to take about 14 months to complete. Yes, that is a long time, but it is better than them not upgrading the offering at all, and considering that even with recent cuts Continental is running their international fleet pretty much at full capacity, it isn’t particularly viable for them to do it any faster. The older 767-400s will start getting the new seats at some point in 2010 (and will likely be getting the AVOD at all seats at the same time) and the 787s will be delivered with the new seats already installed.- Speaking of the 787s, there is a date on the horizon for their delivery: Q2 2011. Yes, it really is that far away. They are running a full two years late from Boeing, which sucks. But then will be now soon enough, I suppose.
- Also on the lounge front, there was some further discussion on the reciprocal relationship between Continental and United that has started to roll out. It seems that we’re stalled a bit for now, but eventually they do expect that the relationship will be fully realized. There are apparently a lot of legal ramifications because of the existing SkyTeam relationship that have to be carefully navigated. In other words, don’t hold your breath on this unless you can survive without breathing until the end of October.
New gate display systems are coming. I had a private head’s up on this one but was sworn to secrecy until Saturday night when the system was finally on display. Continental is beginning the deployment of LCD TV gate display systems similar to the ones that Delta has at their gates. These systems show things like seat maps, in-flight entertainment and meal details and, most importantly to many, upgrade waitlist status. They also show a lot of ads if the demo we saw at the event is to be believed. The information is all the same stuff that has been available for almost a year now for folks with PDAs or other mobile devices that are connected online. And they rolled out the same information on the regular website just a couple months ago. When the gate displays go live I believe that Continental will be unrivaled in terms of transparency and access to the information that they are giving to their customers about the flights.
There were lots of other things that we did and talked about, but those are the biggest ones I can think of off the top of my head.
I want to again offer my public thanks to all the folks at Continental who work so hard at putting together these events. The events are equally as amazing as the folks who plan them. One last picture with me and a couple of the guys who work so hard on this stuff, Kerwin on the left and Scott on the right.
Tags: Boeing, Continental, Dreamliner, frequent flyer, IFE, internet, Lounge, Photos, points, Singapore Air, SkyTeam, United
Posted by Seth on August 27, 2008 under TSA |
I’m now somewhere over the Atlantic ocean at about 4:45 in the morning Amsterdam time. We left Newark a short 5 hours ago and are making great time on the flight, with a quick takeoff from Newark and a bit of a tailwind expected to have us in almost an hour early which will be great. Sadly, however, my plan to take just half an Ambien in hopes that I wouldn’t be too groggy upon arrival in Amsterdam seems to have worked a bit too well. The net result is that I’m awake rather than asleep when I really, really wish it was the other way around. The good news is that our connecting flight on to Amsterdam should give me an opportunity for another nap and help right my body clock just enough, assuming I can actually make that work out. Interestingly, there are a number of folks who seem to not be sleeping on the flight, more than I normally see on a redeye to Europe. Then again, I’m usually asleep and we normally don’t depart the USA at 5:30pm for a flight to Europe, so what do I know.
There was a bit of chaos on the plane at boarding as one passenger couldn’t locate her passport nor her boarding pass. That was only mildly alarming considering that the gate agents and the various DHS officials (not quite sure if they were Customs or TSA or something else) in the jet way as we boarded. Eventually the missing documents were located – apparently in her pants somewhere – and disaster was averted, but the crew was about 2 minutes away from deplaning her.
And we just finished up our breakfast service. The “croissant” was fine, particularly with a bit of jam on it, but the fruit salad was looking so sad that the diagnosis of "clinically depressed” seemed appropriate for it, both in the quantity and the look of the vegetables. I’ve seen mangoes make an appearance on some of the domestic fruit plates (albeit in First Class) and even pineapple or something else that would travel a bit better than the melons on this plate seem to have managed. So it goes.
Here’s hoping that the lounge in Amsterdam has a decent WiFi setup (I actually still have some work to finish up from earlier that I couldn’t get done before we had to board the plane thanks to the miserable performance of the free WiFi in the Newark Presidents Club) as well as some snacks. Heck, I might get lucky and have time for a shower, too, though I’m not holding my breath on that one.
