Recorded in the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott in scenic Newark, NJ. We cover a lot of ground in this episode — why business travel and Disney resorts don’t mix, some choices that can make our personal air travel a bit greener, my experience with Southwest Airline’s new Business Select program, and the reason I’ve finally given up on Hertz. We also talk about the atrophying of wired connections — the modem is gone; is Ethernet next? — and the importance of Starbucks to the frequent traveler’s work day. And finally, is bad airline service bringing back the need for traditional travel agents? Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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A spate of recent news articles point to the growing inevitability of a domino set of mergers — Northwest and Delta, immediately followed by United and Continental. The only thing that seems to be holding up the first domino is who gets to be CEO of the new DeltaNorWest.

While these deals may or may not be winners for the shareholders and the employees, they are typically disasters for customers, especially frequent travelers. Airlines are notoriously complex beasts. Merging fleets, union seniority lists, hubs, and reservation systems is an inexact science at best — as the recent USAir-America West and American-TWA mergers demonstrated.

There’s been a lot of arm-waving by the carriers, especially United, about the need to “rationalize domestic capacity” even though seat utilization — the number of seats filled with travelers — in 2007 was at an all-time high. The real driver behind these mergers is increased pricing power. An airplane seat is a commodity. A carrier can only raise prices if everyone else goes along. If just one airline doesn’t follow the rest in raising prices, everybody has to back down. Taking out two carriers — moving toward an oligopoly — makes it much easier to manage market pricing.
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