I work very hard not to take out my frustrations with the airlines on the employees — those folks are usually just trying to do their jobs; just trying to get through to the end of the day like the rest of us. Others aren’t so considerate. Flying back from San Francisco last week, the guy next to me at the ticket counter asked the ticket agent at least a half-dozen times to “show me some love” after she told him she couldn’t upgrade his Chicago-London leg. I was impressed by her patience, keeping her cool long after I was ready to tell him to give it up.

However, the gang at Gadling has posted a video of a passenger who refuses to hold it in. Denied boarding on a Cathay Pacific Hong Kong-to-San Francisco flight because she arrived at the gate after the plane door had closed, she has no qualms about putting her dismay on full display.  Here’s the URL to the video on the YouTube site.

I don’t mean to pile on United Airlines, but they do bring it on themselves sometimes. The latest TravelCommons podcast talks about how the “friendly skies” of United Airlines have become a bit thread worn — duct tape holding together armrests, seat backs that can’t stay up (which was my experience again on my Monday flight from ORD to SFO). Not surprising since United is the only major US airline without any current orders placed for new aircraft.

Two new news stories illustrate United’s slide. Scanning the front page of yesterday’s Chicago Tribune while sitting forward in my auto-recline seat, I saw an article about a women whose luggage was burned by United.

As Shannon Tadel waited in the Syracuse, N.Y., airport for her flight back to Chicago on Dec. 1, a United Airlines employee approached her and asked if he could speak to her privately.

“He said, ‘Your luggage has been set on fire,’” Tadel recounted later. “I kind of chuckled at him because it was so unbelievable. I was like, ‘Um, OK.’”The employee explained that her bag, containing most of her wardrobe, had been placed too close to the exhaust of a belt loader used to deliver bags to the cargo hold. Someone turned on the equipment and, voila, luggage flambe.

A dumbfounded Tadel boarded the plane, not quite sure what to do. Moments later, the pilot summoned her to the cockpit.

“He said, ‘Do you see that over there? That’s your luggage,’” Tadel recalled.

She looked out the plane’s window and saw a man with a hose and a big plume of smoke.

Tadel says she filed a claim on December 4 and didn’t receive a check from United until last week — after she got the Tribune’s What’s Your Problem columnist involved.

And then comes the story of United’s announcement yesterday that they are closing their complaints call center, telling customers to send a letter or an e-mail instead. United said the reason for this move is to improve customer satisfaction — “We did a lot of research, we looked into it, and people who email or write us are more satisfied with our responses,” said United spokesperson Robin Urbanski. But this is also a cost-cutting move — managing written inquiries is easier and costs less than taking phone calls.

It’s also another push toward self-service — putting the burden of writing up the issue/complaint on the customer rather than having an United employee take if from a phone conversation. In TravelCommons #71, I said “The duct tape holding together the tatty skies are the employees,” that in spite of all the management mistakes, most of the United employees are doing a good job in serving their customers. Yet this latest move by United continues a trend of separating customers from employees — book your tickets on-line, use a kiosk to check in, and now send an e-mail if you have a problem. I can’t wait until they try to replace flight attendants with vending machines.

Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the “travel roulette” wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year’s travel courtesy of Dopplr’s Personal Annual Report; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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In past TravelCommons episodes, we’ve talked about how important it is for a frequent traveler to find good restaurants that welcome a single diner.  In spite of a former colleague’s advice to “never eat alone“, I often find myself with nothing but the USA Today as a dining partner.  Sure, I could dine in the hotel bar, but I can only eat just so many Cobb salads and watch just so many re-runs of ESPN SportsCenter.  Here are 4 recommendations to eating alone in your hotel room.

• Monk’s Cafe - 16th and Spruce Sts, Philadelphia - I traveled to Brussels on a regular basis in the early ’90’s and developed a taste/passion/weakness for Belgian beer.  Monk’s Cafe in Center City Philly has the best selection of Belgian beers I’ve seen anywhere.  Though I hear they have a great burger, I’ve never been able to get past the moules frites (mussels and fries), the national dish of Belgium.  The back bar has a bit more elbow room than the front bar, but I’ve always gotten friendly and knowledgeable service at both.
• Avec - 615 W Randolph, Chicago - No, I don’t eat alone in my home town.  But if I had to, I’d be a regular at this West Loop restaurant.  They have a good selection of Portuguese wines — not always an easy find — and “small plates” menu focused on Mediterranean flavors.  I like to sit about 2/3rd’s down the bar in front of the wood burning oven and watch the chefs do their thing — much more interesting than any ESPN-blaring plasma screen.  I get a large order of the salumi plate, a selection of 5 sausages cured in the fridge behind the bar, and then a vegetable dish to assuage my guilt.
• Sushi Sam’s - 281 E 3rd Ave, San Mateo, CA - Sushi restaurants seem to be second only to hotel sports bars as the default hangout for many travelers — trading high cholesterol for mercury poisoning.  However, when I’m in the Bay Area running up and down the 101, I always end up at the sushi bar ordering up the omakase sashimi — the chef’s choice.  It’s not cheap, but Sam serves up a selection of fish and preparations I rarely see at other sushi joints.
• Clyde Common - SW 10th and Stark, Portland -This recommendation may violate my rules — Clyde Common seems to be the restaurant for the Ace Hotel — but the great food and communal table seating wins it a recommendation for a dining-alone traveler.  The menu is probably the most adventurous of my four recommendations, but a good choice if you’re willing to color outside the lines a bit — grilled rabbit,  salt cod, ravioli with beef heart.

Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after finishing up my travel for the year. But there was a good bit of travel before the year-end, including one of the craziest/stupidest(?) itineraries I’ve done in a long time — Chicago-London-Denver in a little more than a day. Many of the subsequent Twitter comments I received asked that perpetual question — Why travel when you can video conference? Traveling to a business-formal office for the first time in 10 years causes me to investigate different methods in packing a suit. And the December storms that have snarled air traffic across the upper two-thirds of the US have me singing the praises of Flightstats. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of yet another busy travel month – Philadelphia, Portland, Denver, Northern Virginia – but am home this week, keeping to one of my cardinal rules of travel – stay out of any airport Thanksgiving week. In this episode, I talk about a successful experiment of going PC-less on a trip to Portland and give the conclusion to last episode’s story about my mother-in-law being stranded by LOT Airlines. We have listener stories on accelerated boarding on international Delta flights and some tidbits of British Airways gossip on the cause of the 777 crash last January and the havoc around the Heathrow Terminal 5 opening. I then give my review of TripChill, one of the new wave of web-based personal travel assistants, and share some travel tips sent in by listeners. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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Recorded in the Philadelphia Marriott after a hectic travel month with two trips to Europe and a bunch of travel up and down the US East Coast.  In this episode, I talk about a bit of multi-modal travel — some planes, trains, and automobile trips.  We have a trio of stories about playing “travel roulette” to avoid flight delays, and some listeners offer their favorite iPhone apps.  I then share some non-obvious, intermediate-skill travel tips — a sort of Road Warrior 201-level class and close with some thoughts about enjoying the fall colors from up above. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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Autumn is the only time I willingly book a window seat. Today’s approach into Newark had us flying over the Delaware Water Gap on a clear sunny day. The leaves are beginning to change — I saw dots of yellow and orange and red bursting out of a field of green. It made me reach back for into some old neurons for the word “pointillism“, which I learned on a grade-school field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago standing in front of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte“.

I don’t take the window on every Fall flight. It’s only a Northeast/Upper Midwest thing. You need maples for those vibrant colors. The oaks down South are more brown than bright. And the tree breaks that Plains farmers plant between their crop fields aren’t wide enough, aren’t broad enough to fill your field of view with color.

Even in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, not every airport serves up the colors. I’ll always take a window flying in and out of White Plains/Westchester County (HPN) and Detroit (DTW). However, the eastern approaches into Milwaukee and Chicago over Lake Michigan — usually among my favorites — don’t do anything for me in Autumn. It’s often said that Fall colors are Nature’s way of paying us for the dreariness of Winter. For those of us flying, perhaps it’s a way to pay us forward for the snow delays we know we’ll start living through after those leaves fall.

Mika Pyyhkala, a long time TravelCommons listener who works for the National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts, dropped me a note about a problem he recently had with some new technology installed in New York City cabs.

“I was in NYC last Sunday and I took a taxi from La Guardia airport to mid town Manhattan. I noticed that the credit card payment terminal is a touch screen visual-only interface. The taxi driver had to get into the back seat to read and operate the system for me — I could not tell what was on the screen. You cannot just swipe the card; you have to press the touch screen a number of times to initiate and complete the transaction, including pressing an area to select your tip amount. The driver told me the tip options were 20% or 25%, but I am sure it also has an option for 15%.”

There’s an uncomfortable situation — trusting your cab driver to select his own tip before he’s pulled your luggage from his trunk.  I’ve used these credit card terminals and they’re one of the worst payment interfaces I’ve experienced — a complete pain for someone with good eyesight. I’ve stayed with cash ever since. Mika’s note, however, suggests a challenge to the travel industry’s broader moves toward self-service. As airlines and hotels work to move more transactions to touch screen kiosks at the same time as an aging population’s eyesight dims, good accessibility design will become critical to the success of these self-service initiatives — a lot more important than a pleasing color palette.

Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a month of travel to and from the East Coast. In this episode, a spur-of-the-moment train trip bypasses a huge air traffic control problem.  A listener story gets us talking about theft after you entrust your luggage to the folks behind the curtain. I have fun saying the word schadenfreude — German for “taking pleasure in other’s misfortunes” — while talking about the need to use iPhones and BlackBerrys to check the status of delayed flights.  I also give my thoughs on the iPhone after traveling with it for a month.  Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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