View from the Wing

Sony Pictures is apparently going forward with Road House 2… without Patrick Swayze. Christina Applegate’s husband may star instead.

This just seems very, very wrong.

Up next… Point Break 2 without Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, or Gary Busey?

Northwest is offering double miles (which also count towards status) on Northwest and KLM through October 9th. Registration is required.

They say the offer is intended to match a similar one from United, which leads me to ask what double miles offer from United?

I haven’t seen one. I can’t find one on the United website. And as far as I can tell it hasn’t been mentioned on Flyertalk.com, which is as close as one can come to saying it doesn’t exist.

Maybe their corporate espionage folks knew about one coming down the pike? Here’s hoping…

If you need to accompany a passenger to their gate but aren’t traveling that day, airlines have differing rules in place for issuing passes to get past security checkpoints.

If you run into trouble, though, just buy a fully refundable ticket then check in and go through security… and refund the ticket. You can do this to go airside any time you want.

It’s never been clear to me how prohiting non-traveling passengers airside helps with security, terrorists can certainly buy tickets. I’ve always assumed it was to reduce TSA workload by reducing the number of people going through checkpoints. It’s an instance where customers are inconvenienced rather than addressing poor TSA procedures and staffing issues.

I’ve seen 15,000 bonus miles with first purchase and annual fee waived for the first year. And I’ve seen 20,000 miles with first purchase but there’s an annual fee right away.

This is the first time I’ve seen 20,000 bonus miles with first purchase and fee waived the first year.

In general I haven’t seen too many problems getting the signup bonus credited or having the fee waived — but it’s still a good idea to print the offer page (which mentions the bonus miles) and print the terms and conditions page (which mentions no fee the first year) just in case there’s any confusion later.

Each of the three major credit reporting agencies are obligated to provide you with a free copy of your credit report once a year. This has been phased in, with the East Coast not scheduled to go live at annualcreditreport.com until September 1. It’s live a few days early.

Unless you’re buying a house or doing major credit repair work — in other words, if you’re just monitoring — the best strategy is to request one report each every 4 months rather than requesting all 3 at once.

Details are available from the Federal Trade Commission.

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The nineteen alleged CIA offers with arrest warrants in Italy apparently prefer Diners Club for charging up the high life.

Still, what seemed most striking about the group was not their names but their credit cards, on which they charged over $150,000 for fancy meals and rooms at some of Milan’s finest ristoranti and hotels. Among them, the U.S. spies held a total of 10 Visa cards (no surprise there) but no MasterCards and, strangely, six Diners Club cards. Although Diners Club boasts of being the original charge card (its debut, with much fanfare, was way back in 1950), the ailing brand now claims less than 1 percent of the U.S. market.
So why do the CIA’ s spooks prefer Diners Club? Do they get bonus points? Free eavesdropping gear? The CIA and Diners Club aren’t commenting, but CIA veterans, past and present, say it’s just a coincidence. “No one pushes Diners Club for official cover,” discloses one former top spy. Maybe it’s the company’s motto: “Do you have the key that opens doors around the world?”

One area of aviation that I’m not too familiar with is the process of airline catering. In light of the catering strike at Heathrow that crippled British Airways, Lynne Kiesling asks why airlines don’t hire multiple caterers.

If the pricing/reliability benefits outweigh the economies of scale, they should be willing to hire different caterers. They can have them specialize in different terminals, or hire one caterer to do meals for flights to Asia, one for Middle East, one for Europe and US, etc.



Then, even if you are still facing a duopoly, at least you contract with both of them and you increase your probability of getting a Bertrand outcome.



Either I’m missing something, or they’re not thinking very strategically. Which is it?

Maybe someone who knows more about airline catering than I do can explain dominant behavior of contracting with a single caterer?

The Army National Guard is giving away iTunes downloads. But if you give them a real phone number they might call you.

Will Hickory, North Carolina’s airport go the way of MidAmerica Airport, St. Louis’ supposed second airport?

Not if the Hickory City Council has their way, they’re starting up an email campaign and visiting businesses trying to get them to use their local airport. Delta’s regional partner Atlantic Southeast services Hickory and load factors have hovered around just 40%. Delta is considering pulling service.

The City Council thinks people just need to realize how great the airport is — free parking, short checkin lines, and close to home for Hickory residents. Sure it’s a little more expensive, but generally not more than $100 than flying out of Charlotte. Residents just need to understand the benefits of their home airport, of course, so the city is going to try a metaphorical “grand re-opening.”

[Sarcasm]Naturally, it’s the consumers who must be wrong here.[/Sarcasm]

Could the problem be, perhaps that Charlotte is worth driving to not just for lower fares but also for non-stop flights, given the substantial nationwide service that USAirways offers there? Could a secondary problem be that Atlantic Southeast Airlines is the worst domestic U.S. regional carrier, at least in my own limited experience (also born out by the experiences of other frequent flyers)?

A more expensive, inferior service that requires connections doesn’t generate as much traffic as hoped. And the City Council thinks email is going to solve their problems?

Ripped from Flyertalk, not yet on FareAlert:

Several nights can be booked at $9/night (double occupancy) at www.ramada.com at the following hotel:



Ramada Inn New Carrollton/DC Area

8500 Annapolis Road

New Carrollton, Maryland 20784



Not valid for all dates, but you will find the $9 rate mostly for weekdays. Seems to be valid from now until August 2006.

This hotel is a decent distance outside of DC but appears to offer a shuttle to the metro. It’s a Ramada but looks quite decent as a basic hotel room.

Great service is anticipatory, your needs are met before you realize you have them so that a dining experience seems effortless with staff unobtrusive.

Furthermore, good service means accomodating guests’ preferences and requests rather than sticking to and enforcing the restaurant’s routines on patrons.

The best example I can think of for this is the Inn at Little Washington. Customers often report not even having to identify themselves by name upon entering, somehow the restaurant knows who you are (easy to do if expecting a few guests at a particular time, and you know that there are several 50 year anniversaries, you deduce the names of the 30-year old couple from among those not celebrating an anniversary). But once you identify yourselves there, everyone in the restaurant knows who you are.

The Inn provides all guests with personalized menus. After ordering, the menus are taken away. On my way out the door in December I was asked if I wanted my menu back. I did, and they gave it to me. I didn’t even realize until the next day that I wasn’t asked my name. The woman handing me my menu just knew — though I hadn’t met her earlier in the evening.

Now, not every restaurant is the Inn at Little Washington, and I don’t expect that kind of service all the time. But if you’re managing the front of the house at a ‘nice’ restaurant you should visit such places often and seek to emulate as much as possible.

This morning I went to Poste for brunch. It’s the restaurant at the Hotel Monaco in DC. I hadn’t been there before, and they begin brunch service early — I didn’t feel like waiting until 11am for most other options to open.

The food was good, the service was not. Nobody was roof or aloof, everyone was just consistently clueless.

• A bread basket and butter was presented to the table, but no butter knife or bread plates were provided. I asked for bread plates. Using a steak knife on butter is a small sacrifice, but actually pretty difficult if you’re trying to spread something evenly.
  

• It’s good that I asked for the bread plates, because I was sharing an appetizer and no separate plates were brought to the table to facilitate the sharing.
  

• After the first course, my waitress helpfully removed my silverware. Unfortunately she didn’t bring replacements.
  

• I also had to ask her to remove the dirty juice glasses that were set on the table when I arrived. (One of the three jams on the table was open and partially used, but I didn’t mention this or the scratched coffee mugs.)
  

• My water was never refilled, towards the very end of the meal I finally asked for more.
  

• On and off during the meal the bartender could be seen climbing on the bar to reach bottles in order to clean and polish them. Couldn’t that be done before or after service?
  

• Once we had finished our entrees, the waitress brought our check. We asked whether they offered dessert? And she took away our check and brought new menus. No, she wasn’t trying to get rid of us. I wasn’t commenting on all of these deficiencies during our meal, we were more than pleasant! It just never occurred to her that at 11:45 am we might want dessert after brunch. Bad for the restaurant (it reduces average bill amounts) and bad for patrons (it’s hardly anticipatory service, and if she’s unsure if we’ll want something she might do better to ask).
  

• For a ‘nice’ restaurant, it was a little odd to have the dessert dishes stamped “Crate and Barrel” …

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the floor manager was wearing a tank top…

JudysBook.com is a site with reviews of restaurants and hotels, but also local auto mechanics and real estate agents. It’s new and they’re offering $5 Starbucks cards for every 5 reviews you write by September 30 (up to $50 total).

It’s a little late to take advantage of this, but they’re also offering a free iPod Shuffle for writing 50 reviews and referring 10 friends, and up to 50 iTunes if the friends you refer write reviews themselves. Problem is that this needs to be completed by Sunday. I just got around to checking out the site today, already posted 10 reviews, and may just go for the iPod — but there are lots of terms and conditions to iPod offer (which don’t apply to the Starbucks offer), such as

No more than 10 of your reviews can be for restaurants, coffee shops, bars or clubs

Four years ago bad hotel stays got spread via email (such as this famous complaint).

Now they’re posted at TripAdvisor and on Flyertalk for millions to read. And people post them on their blogs, which are nicely indexed by Google, so that a search for the airport Holiday Inn in Buffalo would likely yield this entry. A power outage, bad beds, rude staff, and a failure of the pillow man to deliver pillows is just the start.

Jeneane Sessum should really just say

Yours is a very bad hotel.

I have a feeling that anyone doing due diligence online before booking the airport Holiday Inn in Buffalo will have second thoughts.

By way of contrast, while I sympathize with this review of the Crowne Plaza Rochester (and wouldn’t want to stay there!), the Buffalo review puts the lie to author Rachel’s claim that the Crowne Plaza is “a Holiday Inn with interior corridors.”

Alas, not every hotel can be the Ritz-Carlton Central Park South (or the Pen in New York or Hong Kong, for that matter).

When all the Hampton Inns in Manhattan price over $300, the end times are near.

If you have an Alaska Airlines Visa Signature, you can refer friends to the card and earn 1000 Alaska miles when they’re approved for it.

The Alaska Airlines Visa Signature is one of the cards that I recommend as one of the Best Mileage Earning Credit Cards (in limited circumstances, primarily if you can make use of the companion travel certificate that comes with the card). So if you’re going to get the card, consider letting someone who already has it refer you so they can get a free 1000 miles.

(Via Free Frequent Flyer Miles.)

As posted on Flyertalk, Thailand’s Members of Parliament fly free domestically and earn miles for doing so. Thai Airways tried to stop awarding miles on these free tickets, and got called to the carpet. Furthermore,

He said the House committee also asked THAI to allow MPs to fly business class instead of economy class. Phaichit said the House panel would also ask the Finance Ministry to consider allowing MPs to fly international flights for free on both THAI and other airlines.

As Mel Brooks would say, “It’s good to be the king.”

With the demise of the eBay Anything Points program, it looks like the best kickback deal on Priceline purchases is now Ebates which offers a 3% cash rebate.

They’ll give you $5 for signing up, too, though they won’t cash out the $5 until you’ve earned an additional $5.01 through purchases.

They also give $5 to you for each person you refer (so if you use my link above, we each get $5) but again you can’t cash this out until you’ve earned $5.01 in shopping rebates. Not hard at all, a single Priceline purchase of $167 gets you there for instance.

Ebates is not the only way to earn something for Priceline purchases, to be sure, it just looks to me to be the best remaining deal.

• AirMilesMart gives 1 point for every 2 dollars spent, equivalent in my mind to a 0.75% rebate.
  

• MyPoints gives 2 points per dollar spent, which can then be redeemed 2:1 into United miles — so you’re earning 1 United mile per dollar, but you can’t convert until you’ve earned 5000 MyPoints.
  

• Upromise offers a 2% rebate.

If you have thoughts on a return better than EBates 3%, please let me know and I’ll post about it here. But I’ve looked around and haven’t found anything better yet… Thanks!

In September and October 2005 Delta is offering double miles on flights booked at Delta.com and paid for with an American Express. Registration required.

Via HotelChatter, Tara Reid really digs the Hotel Grande Bretagne.

Tara’s description of the property?



Absolutely incredible.

This hotel’s on my list, probably for summer 2006 on the way to Crete or Sardinia.