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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Finally recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott in New York after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to Amsterdam, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the “travel bubble” that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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Gearing up for the 3rd anniversary of TravelCommons next month, here’s a link to the first “greatest hits” episode — the Best of TravelCommons 2005. Listening to it again after a couple of years, the medley of hotel bathrooms is a chuckle, but the the travel story excerpts is what makes this episode worth listening to again. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a week of skiing in Colorado. In this episode, we talk about some of the difficulties faced by today’s frequent travelers. A listener gives a blow-by-blow account of the myriad of lines he faced trying to get home from Newark. Another listener relates about the challenges of attending a business conference in a hotel full of 50+ year-old women. We talk about how lengthy delays on the New York-to-Chicago route are giving regular travelers a dazed look that might be called the “733-Mile Stare”. And I have to comment on a couple of recent TSA incidents. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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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.

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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Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago on a rare full week in town after trips to Amsterdam and Kansas City. In this episode, an unusual flight delay makes us think about embracing the delay rather than fighting it, and snatching a couple hour vacation in Amsterdam allows us to explore some high and low culture. Listener comments include suggestions on easy-to-pack workout shoes and a question on how to make air travel greener. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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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.