The Ponemon Institute claims that over 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports, two-thirds of which are never recovered.  In research sponsored by Dell Computer, which used the study’s findings as a key selling point for their new laptop tracking and recovery service, Ponemon surveyed airport officials at 106 major airports to come up with this headline-producing number.  LAX tops the list with 1,200 misplaced laptops a week; Miami is second with 1,000.  Extrapolating the study’s findings (12,255 laptops lost/week * 67% never recovered * 52 weeks/year) says that over 425,000 laptops are lost in US airports every year.  With these numbers, you’d think that someone would’ve noticed the growing stack of laptops a bit sooner.

The second phase of the study surveyed 864 business travelers in “the airport environment”.   Only 1% of these travelers had ever lost a laptop.  You’d think with 425,000 of them lost every year, the surveyors would have a better hit rate.  I’ve never lost a laptop and I don’t know anyone who has lost one in an airport.  I know people who’ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who’ve left them in a plane’s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.

One thing I have seen is people picking up the wrong laptop.  At the back end of security screening, it can be a race to grab your PC before it gets pushed off the conveyor and onto the floor by the constant stream of gray bins burping out the TSA’s x-ray machine.  More than a few times, I’ve seen someone grab a ThinkPad that doesn’t belong to them.  Personalizing that black matte finish with a business card or a sticker or even a large gouge can help prevent a mistaken adoption.  Of course, not having to pull your laptop out of your briefcase would be an even easier solution.  Of the 864 business traveler surveyed, only 12% of them agreed that “checking my laptop or notebook computer separately from other carry-on tems increases passenger safety and security”.

Today’s Chicago Tribune gave front page coverage to a US Department of Transportation consumer forum on air travel. The story’s title, You Are Now Free To Take A Flying Leap, says it all. The reporter’s conclusion is disheartening realistic — “airline passengers received an unapologetic warning at the forum that customer service will continue to diminish and consumers more than ever need to fend for themselves at the airport”. The airlines’ ever expanding set of nickel-and-diming fees are less about generating additional revenue and more about cost reduction — reducing the demand for services that aren’t directly associated with keeping a jet in the air. American Airlines’ $15 charge for the first checked bag is really all about reducing fuel costs — incenting passengers to bring less luggage, reducing fuel consumption through reduced load weight.

Comparing passenger jets to “flying buses” is not an exaggeration. The airlines are redefining themselves, shrinking the boundaries of their responsibilities. They no longer sell a travel experience; they sell transport. And they’re walking running away from any service that doesn’t directly involve transporting passengers through the air. Is this a business opportunity for another company — say, for one of the private airport operating companies? Hmmm, not sure the result will be any better if BAA’s stewardship of London Heathrow is any guide. The real question, though — are regular coach passengers willing to pay for anything more than being hauled from one city to another?

I’ve had first hand experience with a couple of the TSA’s recent attempts to provide an “overall increase in throughput” — the Registered Traveler program and the Diamond Lane Self-Select program. To save you the suspense, neither is going to create a sudden outpouring of love for the TSA.

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It wasn’t that bad a day — for LaGuardia. Some strong gusts of winds in the morning resulted in two-hour departure delays by the end of the day. I had snagged a rare first-class upgrade on the 7pm flight back to O’Hare, but when I got to LaGuardia at 6:15pm and found the 5pm flight still there, it was time to call an audible. I gave up a couple of free drinks and (more importantly) 7 inches of leg room — moving from seat 2B on the 7pm flight to seat 30F on the 5pm (but now 6:45pm) flight — to have a chance to see my kids before they went to bed. It really wasn’t that bad of a trade-off. I even arrived early — 20 minutes before my 7pm flight would’ve arrived (had it been on-time).

Life wasn’t so good for the guy sitting next to me in seat 30D. He laid his jacket on the middle seat, loosened his tie, rolled up his cuffs, dropped his head, and was asleep — sitting straight up — before we pushed back from the gate. When the drink cart rolled by, he bought two bottles of white wine to my one bottle of red. Halfway through my bottle, the plane hit some big turbulence. We were bouncing up and down, and my wine was sloshing just up to the rim of the little plastic cup. The guy saw this and moved his jacket over to his lap, saying a bit wearily, “That would just be the perfect end of a lousy day.” He was trying to get home to Omaha, was certain he had missed his connection, and wasn’t confident that he had many alternatives.

This guy came to mind when I watched The Delay, the first of three short films produced by Ritz-Carlton Hotels and American Express. The first few minutes of the film were spot-on — the downcast trudge through an empty airport when you finally get to your destination. The rest of it, though, pounds the product placement a bit hard — the one-second pause so we can fully visualize the Amex Gold card being handed over for payment, the empathetic Ritz-Carlton desk clerk mentioning the time the spa opens in the morning. It’s nowhere near as good as any of BMW’s The Hire films from 2001/2002, but the opening sequence perfectly captures the mood of a head-hanging day.

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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Every once in a while you read something that makes you say out loud “What was that person thinking”? Indeed, after reading more and more of these articles, I stopped commenting on them. Passenger stupidity was no longer novel. However, on my recent flight to Amsterdam, I did experience a novel level of stupidity — new to me and the entire flight crew.

It was a United Airlines 767 flying out of Chicago. The plane was full, but not jammed. I was getting settled into business class — collecting a glass of champagne from the flight attendant, finding a place to stash my pillow and blanket — when I felt and heard a bang. We hadn’t left the gate yet, so I wasn’t too worried — perhaps someone was a bit rough in hooking up the tug or closing a luggage door. However, when I heard the captain key the mike, I was less confident.

The captain had felt the same bang. He called down to the ground crew and asked them what in the heck they were doing. Only then did they tell him that one of the baggage loaders had decided to take a shortcut with his luggage cart and drive under the plane. Unfortunately, he was a poor judge of height and didn’t quite make it — hence the bang. The luggage cart hit the fuselage of the 767 hard. The captain called out Maintenance who didn’t take long to figure out that the resulting ding in the aluminum skin wasn’t going to stand up to a North Atlantic crossing. We packed up our belongings and shuffled back into O’Hare.

All the flight attendants were shaking their heads. None of them had ever had anything like this happen to them before. A few started a pool on how long it would take to fire the handler. It wasn’t a complete disaster, though — for me, that is. United ended up “re-deploying” a 767 bound for São Paulo to our flight. And, walking up to our new gate, I heard my name being called. I’d been upgraded to 1st Class to compensate for the inconvenience. So, 3 hours later, I was settling into my larger seat, collecting a better glass of champagne from the flight attendant, and listening to the captain say over the PA system “I don’t know what that guy was thinking…”

TravelCommons has moved to a new home – BoardingArea, a new portal for business travel blogs and podcasts from the people behind FlyerTalk, WebFlyer, and InsideFlyer. The move won’t change the tone or content of the podcast, nor have I signed away content ownership. For better or worse, it’s all still mine.

Instead, it’s an opportunity to increase inbound traffic and gain more subscribers by raising the profile of TravelCommons. TravelCommons has gotten completely lost in the morass that the iTunes podcast directory has become. Searching on “business travel” returns 150 results — a potpourri of language training, leisure travel and shopping podcasts, with only a handful that are really about business travel. BoardingArea answers that failing, providing a single site with 8 high-quality business travel blogs and 1 podcast. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m looking forward to expanding the audience for the conversations we’ve been having since May 2005.

I’m still shaking down the site with the BoardingArea team, so be a bit patient with me. However, as always, I appreciate any suggestions and feedback that you have — either leave a comment to this post or email me directly at comments@travelcommons.com. As as Bartles and Jaymes always said, thank you for your support.

Watching United Airlines cancel more than 600 flights at the beginning of Christmas week, I was glad that I was flying Frontier Airlines to Denver later in the week for a holiday ski vacation. The US Dept of Transportation’s latest Air Travel Consumer Report supported this feeling, showing Frontier with the lowest rate of canceled flights in November 2007. However, I was less thrilled when I found myself waiting almost an hour in Denver and O’Hare for Frontier’s luggage carousels to disgorge my family’s checked luggage.

As airlines grasp at profitability in the face of $100/barrel oil, they are tightly optimizing their cost structures. Their operations don’t have what project managers call “slack”. In this case, the spare capacity or resources to handle less-than-ideal circumstances.

United blames what they said was the worst December weather in company’s history for the incredible number of flight cancellations and delays during Christmas week. However, American and Southwest Airlines both managed to face the same weather issues at their Chicago hubs with only a handful of cancellations — United needed to cancel over 140 Chicago flights by Christmas Eve, while American dropped 11 flights and Southwest lost only 4. United’s airline pilots union says the problem wasn’t weather, it was lack of pilots. A union spokesman said, “They don’t have enough people. A little bit of a burp, and boom, they’re hammered.” United could have built in buffers — some slack — into their December crew schedules, but then would’ve lost money if the buffers weren’t needed. United gambled and it lost.
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Northwestern University Library just launched web access to their Transportation Library Menu Collection, which includes “more than 400 menus from 54 national and international airline carriers, cruise ships, and railroad companies, with coverage from 1929 to the present.” Most of the menus are from George Foster, a Northwestern alum, who appears to have mostly flown first class on his travels around the world for UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Each page of each menu has been scanned. The lunch menu for a March 1969 United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Detroit supports United’s “Red Carpet” theme with a bright red accent on each page. The beverage list asks passengers to “Please be our guest” and order the “United Airlines Special Very Dry Martini (Gin or Vodka)”. On the facing page, we can see Foster commenting that the “Poached Quenelle of Scallops, Nantua Sauce” were “Excellent”. He didn’t note whether he chose the “Broiled Filet Mignon, Bercy Sauce” or the “Baked Langostinos Thermador” for his entreé. A bit different from the turkey wrap and the cold chicken salad I was offered when upgraded United’s First Class a couple of weeks ago.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been wondering if it has been my bad luck with Hertz or the rental car industry trying to stretch their cars a bit farther. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal assuaged my paranoia. Though Hertz claims their fleet age hasn’t changed, the owners of National, Alamo, and Enterprise Rent A Car admit that they’re letting their fleets age an additional 2,000 miles. My personal experience — I’ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz’s Gold Club.

I don’t care as much about the mileage as I do the state of the car when I receive it. The last couple of cars I received from Hertz at San Francisco Airport made me pull a T-shirt out of my bag so I could sit on something clean. Stained seats, soda residue on the center console, ashes in a supposed non-smoking car — I could take an extra 2,000 miles if Hertz would just clean the insides of the car once in a while.
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