Friendship 7 with John Glenn on board takes to the skies from Launch Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral, 20 February 1962

On 20 February 1962, and after three previously failed launch attempts, John Glenn became the first American to fly into space – a five hour flight in a Mercury space capsule named Friendship 7 that had him carrying out three orbits around the earth before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.

He was not the first man to leave the confines of the earth’s atmosphere – that credit fell to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin who completed a shorter 1 hr 48 minute single orbit of the earth in April 1961, and a second Russian (Gherman Titov) spent just over 25 hours in space in August 1961.

Note also that rumors exist of possibly earlier Russian space flights that were unsuccessful and so never reported.

Two earlier Americans also experienced brief sub-orbital flights prior to John Glenn’s mission – Alan Shepard with a 15 minute flight in May 1961 and Gus Grissom with a similar flight in July 1961.

But John Glenn was the first American to get into orbital space.  Little more than seven years later, not only had we so solidly won the ‘space race’ such that the Russians had abandoned their ongoing attempts at getting a man to the moon, we had made good on Presidents Kennedy’s objective to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

In the three years that followed, six more moon missions were completed (and a seventh – Apollo 13 – narrowly escaped disaster), with the last moon mission occurring in December 1972.

In the forty years since then, no-one has left the earth’s orbital plane.  And, at present, America no longer has any manned space flight capability at all and could not even recreate John Glenn’s flight.  Instead, we now rely on the Russians – a humbled nation since the fall of the Soviet Union but now a leader in space technology – to shuttle our few people to and from the International Space Station, which is, itself, a creation of dubious purpose, achievement, and future.

Well, it does have a purpose.  Oh yes indeed.  It was earlier considered as a laboratory, observatory and factory in space.  It was also planned to provide transportation, maintenance, and act as a staging base for possible future missions to the Moon, Mars and asteroids.

As achieving these objectives became increasingly far fetched, in 2010 we in the US released a revised National Space Policy, which gave additional roles to the International Space Station.  It is now also expected to vaguely serve commercial, diplomatic, and educational purposes (whatever these may actually be).

Progress is a funny thing, isn’t it.  John Glenn is still alive, and one wonders what he really thinks about the current state of our close to non-existent space program, where the major force seems to be British gadfly Sir Richard Branson and his promised series of very expensive sub-orbital flights to individual joyriders, while nations with purposes and policies not necessarily congruent with those of the US devote more resource to ‘real’ space flight development.

Actually, here is a brief video clip of Glenn (now a spry 90) struggling to be politically correct about the present situation.

The Ansco Autoset aka Minolta Hi-Matic

And, a bit of trivia regarding the Friendship 7 flight that foretold another technological evolution that few people would have guessed at in 1962.

The camera that John Glenn took on board with him to take some color pictures from space was an American brand Ansco Autoset 35 mm camera.

But Ansco primarily built low grade inexpensive cameras itself, its better cameras were merely rebadged models from other manufacturers in other countries, and in this case, the Autoset was actually a Minolta Hi-Matic.

Ansco ceased business in the early 1980s.  Minolta still exists.  There might be some sort of a lesson in that, but I’ll simply repeat myself – progress is a funny thing, isn’t it.

Qantas announces some disappointing cutbacks that seem to harm it more than help it

Good morning

There are a couple of great additional articles this week; one where I gratuitously point out not just one but two ways that new airlines could be formed and viably operated, and the other where I bemoan this administration’s eagerness to disarm our pilots due to air travel now being sufficiently safe as to make armed pilots no longer needed as the ultimate last ditch defense (or so they say).

Other than that, it has been a very sad week, with my favorite airline, Qantas, discontinuing service from the US to New Zealand.  This means only one airline now offers nonstop service between NZ and the US – Air New Zealand.  That’s a surprising move on Qantas’ part, making it very difficult for people to efficiently travel to both NZ and Australia on a Qantas/Oneworld itinerary, while leaving it as very easy on a NZ/UA Star Alliance ticket.

In other words, Qantas is now showing itself to be the latest airline that fails to realize that the overall impact (call it profit if you wish) of a single city pair within their route network extends to much more than just the city pair being considered.  In this case, it doesn’t only lose its LAX-AKL business, but it will lose much of the business that formerly comprised travel US-Australia-NZ-US (or vice versa) too.  And if it is no longer the international carrier into Australia, it has less of a chance of picking up any domestic flights within Australia (eg to Ayers Rock/Alice Springs or Cairns) too.

This also means that Qantas now has to operate a much more costly and almost certainly oversized 747-400 for its daily feeder/distributor flight from LAX to JFK and back as well.

If one is willing to add another half dozen hours or so of travel time, Air Pacific (with a stop in Fiji) becomes an option, and if one is willing to nearly double the travel time and go via Australia, then a couple more airlines appear as options too.  But to simply get on a plane in Auckland and off again in Los Angeles or vice versa, the only choice now is Air New Zealand.

Airline competition?  Not at all on the route between New Zealand and the US, unfortunately.

Oh – and the under $1000 fares that have been so common in the last few years or so.  Unsurprisingly, they are all gone, even in low season.

Progress is a funny thing, isn’t it.  Anyway, on with the newsletter, including :

• Reader Survey – What Do You Do on a Flight
• The Best Place to Buy International Travel?
• PeoplExpress ver 2.0
• The World’s Best Airports
• Tripadvisor Censorship Silence
• Las Vegas Booming Once More
• Tripadvisor Reviewers, Beware
• Altruistic?  Or Self-indulgent?
• Keeping Us Saferer
• Not a Reader Survey – Favorite Activity when Cruising

Reader Survey – What Do You Do on a Flight

I was reading an article earlier this week about the growing use of eBook readers on flights, and that made me wonder how most of us pass the time while flying.  It seems like an interesting topic for a Travel Insider reader survey, and so please would you share with the rest of us how you spend your time on a flight.

I’ve come up with eleven different activities that people sometimes indulge in on flights, and I’ve put them in three categories (similar to the hotel amenity survey a couple of weeks ago) – one for a list of activities that you regularly/typically do on flights, one for activities you occasionally do, and one for a list of activities that you seldom or never do.  You can decide how to define ‘regularly’, ‘occasionally’ and ‘seldom’.

So, if you don’t mind, would you please click one response per line for as many as possible of the eleven line items, which will cause me to receive eleven different emails from you (!) with the answers to hopefully all eleven activities.

I’ll count them all up and report back to you on the results next week.

The Best Place to Buy International Travel?

Longer time readers know that I consistently continue to sing the praises of good old fashioned travel agents.  Now it is true that in some respects, online travel agencies have a lot to offer, and in some areas a regular travel agent no longer adds much more value.

But, in areas where they can truly assist, they can do so massively much better than anything on the internet.  One such example is cruising – if you find an agent perhaps with an MCC rating (“Master Cruise Counselor”) you’ll find someone who really truly knows the differences between different cruise lines and their ships and can give you invaluable assistance when choosing a cruise, based on their own personal experiences.

Another example is with international air fares.  On some routes – I guess we could call them ‘ethnic’ routes – ie routes with a lot of ex-pats going back home to visit – the national airlines from those destinations, and therefore other competing airlines too, will very often have unpublished airfares that are way below their official fares, which they make available only to specialty travel agencies that specialize in travel to those destinations, or to specialty wholesalers who will only sell through travel agencies.  By keeping such rates semi-secret, and for sure, by keeping them off the internet, the airlines preserve their ability to sell most of their tickets at much higher rates to less savvy travelers, people who might be as misguided as to think that an airline’s website is the best source of lowest fares.

Any time you’re traveling somewhere internationally, other than perhaps to a major European capital, you need to track down a good travel agent and see if they can beat the best online published fares.  You could save 10%, 20%, or even 30%+ in such a case.

Here’s an interesting story in the NY Times about how one of their reporters compared the prices through agencies and online to a number of international destinations.  Every time, the travel agency quoted price was the lowest.

PeoplExpress ver 2.0

I write subsequently about two new business models that might allow startup airlines to become successful.  And here’s a third approach, planned for a new PeoplExpress Airlines, to be based at the Newport News/Williamsburg Airport, and hoping to start offering flights around the East coast from this summer.  The airline plans to initially serve Pittsburgh, Newark, and West Palm Beach.

The original Peoplexpress airline was headquartered at Newark and operated from 1981 – 1987 before being bought by Continental.  It pioneered the concept of low cost air travel, with simple fares and no frills service, before growing too fast, and becoming more fuzzy in its corporate goals (eg by adding business class to its former all coach class cabins).  At the same time, the dinosaur airlines slowly started to respond and to offer competitive fares, and Peoplexpress suddenly found itself being squeezed on price while no longer being so low-cost.

As an interesting aside, the original Peoplexpress airline introduced the first ever checked bag fee ($3 per bag) and sold soft drinks (50c a can).

The proposed new Peoplexpress – apparently still waiting on both government approval and, ahem, funding, says it plans to offer service to niche markets that are underserved by other airlines, and will operate a fleet of all-coach class older generation 737-400s.  It says it will have an IPO to raise $50 million sometime in the spring, which makes for an extremely tight schedule between now and summer if it is to start operations sometime in the summer.

The airline says it will make flying fun again.  Really.  And unlike its namesake, it says it plans to avoid the myriad of fees charged by most other airlines.

$50 million is not a lot of money to start an airline these days.  I wish it well, but……

More details here.

The World’s Best Airports

Airports Council International has published its latest annual Airport Service Quality Awards.  The best airport in the world is Incheon (Seoul), which picks up the title for the seventh year in a row.

Changi (Singapore) and Beijing Capital Intl came second and third, with Hong Kong and Nagoya getting fourth and fifth places.

The best North American airport was Ottawa, followed by Indianapolis and then Halifax.  The best European airport was Malta, followed by Edinburgh then Porto, while the best Middle East airport saw Dubai edge ahead of arch-competitor Abu Dhabi, and Tel Aviv coming third.

Some surprises in these lists, for sure, and some disappointments too – for just about every airport in the US in particular.  More details here.

Also announced this week by Flightstats is a list of the top ten airports worldwide as measured by ontime departures thus far in 2012.  Tokyo Haneda came top, followed by Charlotte, Orlando, Frankfurt, Atlanta, Los Angeles (LAX), JFK, then Jakarta, DFW, and lastly Munich.  A bizarre collection of airports, including some big surprises.

Tripadvisor Censorship Silence

I wrote last week about how Tripadvisor is refusing to publish a review of mine that was critical of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.

More to the point, not only are they refusing to publish the review, but they are also refusing to respond to my requests for clarification as to what and how my review may have transgressed any guidelines they have.

One has to wonder how many other reviews are quietly being censored, and one has to doubly wonder why they are now refusing to explain the reason for their censorship.

Does their capricious censoring add to the overall value and quality of their reviews?  Or does it apply a moderating editorial filter that encourages positive reviews while discouraging negative ones?  I think we deserve to know.  They apparently feel we don’t deserve to know anything at all about their opaque censoring process.

Las Vegas Booming Once More

Maybe due to the help from filtered reviews on Tripadvisor, and maybe (more likely!) not; whatever the reason may be, Las Vegas reported its second best year ever in 2011, with 38.9 million visitors, a 4.3% increase from 2010, and almost as many as its best year ever (39.2 million in 2007).  Of course, there were several thousand fewer rooms in 2007, so while total visitor numbers are up almost to record levels, occupancy levels are not quite as good, with a city-wide average of 84%, up 3.4% from last year.

And, as the people return to Vegas, guess what?  Yes, room rates are up, too, with an average 11% increase in room rates last year to $105.11/night.

Projections suggest 40 million visitors this year.  No word on what that will do to room rates, but clearly the amazing bargains of the last few years are fading away.

Tripadvisor Reviewers, Beware

In addition to potential censorship, there is a new danger to people who write less than glowing reviews on Tripadvisor.  British hotel operators in particular have been particularly negative about Tripadvisor for some years – perhaps because, on the one hand, many more British hotels/motels/B&Bs are small owner operated properties, and on the other hand, because some percentage of these are deserving of negative commentaries which until Tripadvisor, have been unavailable as cautionary tales for other intending guests.

A new service has now started for hotel owners that coyly hints at one of its many services it will offer to member hoteliers.  It is the ability to black-list previous guests for up to 2-3 years (or even longer in ‘exceptional services’) and to share the details of such blacklisted guests to other members.

The concept is that before accepting a booking, a participating hotel will first check the blacklist to see if the guest is on the blacklist as a result of problems any other hotelier had with them.  If the guest appears on the blacklist, the hotel can decide if it wishes to accept or refuse the booking request.  The guest will never know they are on the blacklist, they’ll just be told ‘sorry, we have no rooms available’ or some other polite fiction like that instead.  Maybe blacklisted guests will still be offered rooms, but at higher than normal rates.

Specific reasons for blacklisting include fraud, nonpayment of bills, and damaging hotel property.  And then there are other vaguer suggestions such as being a ‘nightmare’ guest, and the really big one – ‘malicious Internet reporting’.

In other words, if you post a bad review of your hotel experience, the hotel you write about may blacklist you for 2 – 3 years, maybe longer, such that you may find that no other hotels that participate in the service will accept your bookings during that period.

This is a terrible system.  It seems participating hotels can capriciously deem a guest to be a nightmare guest, or can decide that a bad review was ‘malicious’, and then blacklist the person, causing them potentially great inconvenience for years into the future.  There is no formal review or appeal process, no chance for the guest to put their side of the story, and also, no opportunity for identity confusion either.  At least Tripadvisor allows hotels to post responses to reviews.

What happens if you were traveling with a friend, and the booking was in your name, but it was your friend who was the ‘nightmare guest’ or the ‘malicious reviewer’?  The hotel only knows your name and details, and probably doesn’t even know which of you broke the desk lamp and stole the towels, so who will they blacklist?  You, of course, even if it was your friend.  So when you next hope to travel, alone or with someone else, you find everywhere strangely unavailable, while your friend, traveling with someone else this time, has no problems at all.

The moral standards of this service can be further ascertained by how they take an oblique and vague snippet of commentary by the UK Minister of Tourism and label it ‘as recommended by the Minister of Tourism’.

So heads you lose (Tripadvisor doesn’t publish your review) and tails, you don’t win (your negative review gets you blacklisted).

Altruistic?  Or Self-indulgent?

I regularly get emails from publicists seeking publicity for their globe trotting clients.  The challenge that the travelers and their publicists have is to come up with a new twist as to why and how their personal ‘trip of a lifetime’ could possibly be of any interest to anyone else.

A further challenge that some of these people attempt to resolve is ‘how can I get someone else to pay for my travels?’, with one approach being to come up with the ubiquitous Facebook or Blog/Twitter account chronicling their generally massively mundane experiences.  These people cling to an unlikely hope that their site will ‘go viral’, that they’ll get millions of page views and make money from on-page advertising, and/or attract sponsors for their ongoing indulgences.

Generally I delete these emails within a second or two of scanning the first couple of lines.  But once in a while I find myself drawn into something that seems so eye-rollingly awful that I can’t help myself but to read further.

An example of this came in earlier in the week.  An empty nester pair of retirees are going on a 424 day world tour, based on a series of Princess cruises, which they’ve managed to get for free from Princess (well done!) and supplemented by various extended ground stops between cruises.  Their claimed purpose for doing this :  To raise geo-literacy for K-12 school children.  They are quoted as saying :

Our dream is to educate children about geography and world cultures so we’ve planned the ultimate trek around the world to do just that.

And, not to forget the de rigeur political correctness that suffuses such stuff :

We wanted to use cruise ships as part of our travel method during the trek because they offer an efficient way to reach all the different stops on our voyage while minimizing our global footprint.

One could actually debate just how efficient a cruise ship is to travel internationally (it doesn’t use a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but think of all the days of time and food and drink and entertainment and all the man hours/days of time it costs for each passenger journey), but that’s not really the point, is it.  And one could also wonder whether this nondescript couple’s 14 month world tour is actually the best way to bring a better appreciation of geography to (using their words) ‘as many young people as possible’.  But, realistically, that too isn’t really the point, is it.

As I said, eyeball-rolling stuff.

Keeping Us Saferer

Mr Abdifateh Ahmed Mohamed, who is actually Swedish, wanted to fly from Oslo to Mexico City for a vacation.  But because there is an Egyptian terrorist, Ahmed Mohammed Hamed Ali wanted by the US authorities, they (the US authorities) did not allow Mr Mohamed to fly to Mexico from Norway.

What’s that, you say?  A Swedish man with a similar but far from identical name to that of an Egyptian terrorist is banned from flying to Mexico from Norway by the US authorities.

Well, the flight would have overflown the US on part of its journey, so the US asserts the right to selectively allow or refuse passengers onto the flight, even though the airline is not American and the plane does not stop in the US on the way.

As to why a Swedish man with a different name is refused travel due to the existence of an Egyptian terrorist with a different name, that’s something none of us could ever hope to comprehend.

I guess we should all be thankful there are no terrorists with names similar to Smith, Jones, or Robinson.

Not a Reader Survey – Favorite Activity when Cruising

Lastly this week, here is an interesting article listing people’s favorite things they enjoy doing while on a cruise.  I thought briefly of asking Travel Insiders for your preferences too, but decided against it for a reason that may become obvious.

Shopping, nightlife options, and sitting by the pool are the numbers four, three and two most favorite activities.  But to learn the most favorite activity, you’ll need to click the link to the article.

Until next week, please enjoy safe travels (and wonderful cruises)

David.

In actual fact, armed pilots are limited to only a .40 cal semi-auto pistol, not a huge caliber rifle such as shown here, but their pistol would be more than enough to defend the cockpit from most types of terrorist attack.

Something in excess of half a trillion dollars has been spent on airport and airplane security since the TSA was created in 2002.

What was formerly a quick and convenient stroll through a metal detector has now become a massively inconvenient process of taking laptops out of bags, removing one’s shoes and jackets, extremely intimate body searches, and more recently, taking everything out of every pocket as well – even a handkerchief is now enough to cause an alarm with the new whole body imaging scanners (scanners which were initially described as being able to reduce the amount of hassle involved with taking outer layers of clothing off, but which in reality now require us to get even more undressed than ever before).

And, talking about the whole body imaging scanners, while they are good at detecting handkerchiefs, most security experts in most other countries view them as useless for detecting ‘artfully concealed’ explosives.  One other thing that some of them are also good at, unfortunately, is dosing us with what many radiation experts view as a potentially harmful dose of X-rays each time we subject ourselves to being radiated by such a machine.

No matter how much inconvenience is foisted upon us, one thing has remained pretty much unchanged since before the creation of the TSA – the percentage of banned items that make it through the security screening process.  While the TSA seeks to suppress data about its ongoing failure to detect rates, it seems they continue to be in the order of 20% – 25%.  Yes, one in every four or five guns or bombs typically go through the screening process undetected.

When asked about this, the TSA says that it doesn’t matter if they miss a gun or two here or there, because they have ‘multiple layers’ of security – I guess they’re referring to their farcical ‘behavior detection officers’ that roam around the airports looking for people displaying signs of anxiety or nervousness, and detaining them when found.

It seems these BDOs (I think there are more than a thousand of them) have never found a single terrorist, and the occasional press releases from the TSA lauding the ‘success’ of this project and indicating plans to expand it still further manage only to point to apprehending people with outstanding parking tickets and other types of non-aviation security related things, and at levels that are statistically similar to what you’d get from random samples of the population as a whole.  They can’t point to one single terrorist apprehended, all that we’ve done is give up our Fourth Amendment right while inside an airport.

It does seem that the TSA and its Homeland Security parent organization are unstoppably growing like some malignant cancer on our free society.  Indeed, next year, the budget for the Department of Homeland Security comes to a massive $39.5 billion.

But, there’s an exception to everything, and the exception to the unstoppable growth of DHS and TSA has now been uncovered.  The White House seeks to cut funding for the Federal Flight Deck Officer program – the program that allows for armed pilots on planes – reducing it down from $25 million this year to $12 million next year.  (Note that with ongoing fixed costs, halving the budget will massively more than halve the number of FFDOs capable of being supported.)

The White House said, in justifying the cut

The voluntary FFDO program was created as a “last defense” layer of security at a time when comprehensive aviation screening and other physical security measures were not fully developed or deployed on a system-wide basis. Since 2001, however, there have been a number of enhancements to aviation security. TSA now conducts 100 percent screening of all passengers and their carryon items, has overseen installation of reinforced and locking cockpit doors on aircraft that operate in U.S. airspace, and has increased passenger and flight crew awareness to address security risks. Combined, these improvements have greatly lowered the chances of unauthorized cockpit access and represent a comprehensive and redundant risk-mitigation strategy that begins well before passengers board the aircraft.

Much of what it says is nonsense, however.  In particular, passengers and their carry-ons have always been 100% screened (and even now the TSA doesn’t do 100% of the screening, because all airports that can have opted out of using the TSA, preferring to use private contractors), and as for the ‘comprehensive and redundant risk-mitigation strategy’ claim, that is sixteen syllables of jargon that refers to next to nothing in reality, other than the porous TSA screening process and the ridiculous BDOs.

While we ourselves have advocated more resource be shifted to detecting terrorists well before they reach the airport (and we’re unaware of any increased attention to this) we’ve never ever said that pilots should be disarmed.  Last ditch defenses are actually very effective and very essential, because no matter how effective the TSA may or may not be, there still remain plenty of vulnerabilities that determined terrorists could exploit to get themselves and weapons onto a plane.

If we accept at face value the ridiculous claim that our aviation security is now so rigorous that we can start dismantling some parts of it, let’s think which would be the best part to dismantle – would it be one of the vague and largely mythical ‘comprehensive and redundant risk-mitigation strategies’ somewhere in the airport, or would it be the ultimate desperate last ditch defense on the plane?

What makes you feel safer?  A Behavior Detection Officer apprehending scofflaws in the terminal building while being careful not to show any prejudicial greater than normal interest in Muslims, or an armed pilot in the cockpit?

Tactically speaking, any defensive strategy would be prepared to accept a compromise in one of its middle layers of defense, but no-one would ever give up the last ditch defense.

We all know that someway, somehow, terrorists could still sneak on a plane – I could scribble out half a dozen vulnerabilities right now, but would prefer not to.  Indeed, according to this article, there have been over 25,000 security breaches at US airports since 2001.  And here’s an excellent article written in December 2011 about how the writer got through security with a fake boarding pass – a vulnerability that was supposed to have ended years ago.

But as long as there’s an armed pilot in the cockpit, how will they take over the plane?  Sure, they might be able to cause the plane to explode in mid air, but how will they manage to take over the cockpit and then fly the plane into a building?  An armed pilot, while far from a 100% certain defense, massively tilts the odds back in our favor and discourages terrorists from even considering plans including the commandeering of planes and using them as guided missiles against buildings.

It is true that armed pilots, to date, have never needed to use their personal side-arms to defeat a terrorist attack on the cockpit.  But if that is the standard for now largely defunding the program, what standard applies to the ten or more likely one hundred times as costly Federal Air Marshal program?  They too have never needed to defend a plane against terrorist attack, although they did shoot and kill a mentally deranged person who was running away from a plane at the time.

If ‘never catching a terrorist’ is the standard, how about the thousands of BDOs – again at a cost many times greater than the FFDO program?  Indeed, how about almost every aspect of TSA!  How much of the $39.5 billion overall DHS budget would also crumble if we are to test them against past successes, and to view previously multiply-redundant systems as now no longer needing so much redundancy?

I’ve never needed to use the spare tire in my car, but I still travel with one.  Most of us have never had a total loss of our house to claim insurance on, but we all keep full replacement cost insurance on our houses.  And so on and so on.

The FFDO program is actually one of the best value parts of the overall DHS budget.  Most of the costs of the program are covered by the individual volunteer pilots, who have to train on their own time, be tested on their own time, and accept ridiculous restrictions on the transportation of their firearms to and from planes.  Notwithstanding the inconveniences and the costs, and the insulting psychological evaluation that seems designed to filter out people with a typical set of ‘can do/take charge/having initiative’ personality characteristics that are usually the attributes sought in good pilots, it seems that perhaps 15% or more of all pilots have now joined the FFDO program (about 15,000 out of about 90,000 pilots in total in the US).  Reports suggest the number would be even higher if it wasn’t for a bottleneck in training, with only one class each week in one location (New Mexico), and all classes are always full (pilots have to requalify every five years too).

The FFDO program was controversial since its inception, with the TSA ‘going slow’ as much as possible in implementing the congressionally mandated program.  Predictable outcries foretold of pilots getting into shootouts in the airplane cabin with all sorts of passengers for all sorts of reasons, and of untold further innocent passengers being fatally wounded in the cross-fire.  Such scare-claims were of course all utter nonsense, as has been seen by the fact that no pilots have needed to use their weapons in any situations to date, and indeed, they’re not allowed to take them into the passenger cabin or to leave the cockpit in an emergency – their mission is to stay in the cockpit and shoot the bad guys at point blank range as they burst in through the (inadequately strengthened) cockpit door.

There was one accidental discharge of a pistol in a cockpit, but the government overseers went very quiet about that when it turned out that it was due to the poor design of the ridiculous padlocked holster they require the pistol to be placed in.

If we trust a pilot with the command/control of the plane (and with the fire-axe in the cockpit) surely we should welcome them going to considerable personal inconvenience to undergo training and certification to carry a pistol with them while on duty.

So why single out a $13 million saving from the FFDO program in a $39.5 billion budget?  That’s not even one tenth of one percent of the DHS budget.  Is it because our government is prudently saving money everywhere it can?  Or is it because our government hates anything that involves private citizens accepting responsibility and taking charge of their lives and destinies, preferring to make us more and more dependent on big government instead?

The FFDO program is one of the few parts of the total TSA ‘multiple levels of security’ that actually makes sense and which is remarkably great value.  It should be protected and extended, not cut back.

A Delta flight, operated by Atlantic Southeast Airlines, itself a subsidiary of Skywest, a company that also operates planes for United. Confused yet?

The pendulum has swung to the other extreme.  Regional airlines – once the only part of the airline industry that made good profits – have now become the least profitable part of the industry.  The earlier careless approach by major airlines to negotiating contracts with the regional carrier partners has been replaced with a ruthlessness that echoes their similar ruthlessness with their own staff and with their passenger services and fees, and now we see generally profitable major airlines and generally lossmaking regional carriers.

But every cloud has a silver lining, right?  And, after all, the nation’s largest and most profitable airline started off as a tiny regional airline – and even now, shows its roots in some aspects of its route network and business model.

In my new article ‘Are Regional Carriers the Source of a New Airline Business Model‘ I first explain the history and evolution of the relationship between major carriers and their regional services, and then point out two different approaches the regional airlines could adopt to build a new business model that would work well for them and for us as traveling passengers.

Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee this week marked 60 years on the throne, making her the second longest serving monarch in Britain's history (Queen Victoria being the longest).

Good morning

Our September North Korea tour continues to go from strength to strength, with yet another couple deciding this literally was a once of a lifetime chance of a unique travel experience and sending in a deposit this week.

In light of the steady increase in participants, I’ve persuaded the tour operator to double the number of guides we’ll have with us.

This is going up from two to four, so even though the group size is now in the mid 30s, we’ll have lots of guides to ensure everyone gets good personal attention and lots of chances to ask questions and to hear/see the things they want on what promises to be an amazing tour.

This week has been hotel focused.  You’ll see, following and on the website, the main creative results, about how to best negotiate hotel rates.  A couple more hotel related things also :

Tripadvisor now censoring Travel Insider reviews?

There’s another thing that’s quietly working its way through the system as well, and it is a rather surprising story.

I regularly write about the problems Tripadvisor has with the dubious quality of its reviews, and the legal constraints that now, in the UK and possibly elsewhere too, forbid it from continuing to make its doubtful claim ‘World’s most trusted travel advice’.

When I last wrote about this, a couple of weeks ago, it had seemed that Tripadvisor was doing little to respond further to the criticisms about its reviews being sprinkled with fraudulent ratings.

I occasionally send reviews in to Tripadvisor myself, indeed, they call me one of their ‘Senior Contributors’.  I sent a review in to them about my disappointing stay at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas last month, and I realized, after some time had past, that it had not been published.

I asked why not, and they said they weren’t publishing it because it failed to meet their guidelines for reviews.  I’m asking them to please explain what guideline I violated, because I thought the review to be fair, honest, reasonably well written and appropriate.  I’ve asked them twice, and have received no further response.

So clearly Tripadvisor is now censoring some reviews.  But the reviews it censors seem to be bona fide honest reviews that just happen to be negative/critical of a hotel – a slightly ironic response in light of the fact that the largest part of Tripadvisor’s credibility gap is not so much a problem with negative reviews (although that too does exist) but rather a problem with reviews that are too positive.

It is also particularly strange that they’d take a person who has contributed 30 different pieces, on all sorts of different travel products, all around the world, over the course of three years, and suddenly start censoring those reviews now.

Typically fraudulent reviews are from a person who has not submitted any other reviews, or who appears, writes a few ‘throwaway’ reviews then slips in one or two or three fraudulent reviews, then disappears again.

There is nothing in my account profile and review writing history to suggest I’m anything other than a real honest person.  I’ve written reviews across the spectrum from positively enthusiastic to mildly neutral to strongly negative, the same as I do here.  There was nothing in this particular review to trigger any fraudulent activity flags either (as best I can tell).

I’m continuing to press Tripadvisor to explain their actions, and will keep you updated.  For now, it is relevant to keep in mind that for peculiar reasons, Tripadvisor is capriciously censoring the reviews it chooses to publish.

Reader Survey Results on Hotel Amenities

I asked readers last week what hotel amenities they rated as most important and which were least important.  I also said that if you couldn’t choose just one absolutely most (and absolutely least) important amenity from the list of 14, it was okay to pick two or even three.

Well.  Some readers ended up choosing all fourteen!  And several readers complained that free internet access wasn’t offered as a choice.  There was a reason for this.  My guess is that free internet access would probably score as the most desirable amenity of all, and by such a margin as to obliterate the relative importance of other amenities, hence I tried to level the playing field a bit by deliberately specifying internet access as something you’d pay for (although I kept the amount one would pay vague).

Here are the results

As you can see, there were five clear winners in the ‘Most Important’ category, being, in order of votes received :

• Breakfast Included
• Shuttle Service to Airports/Attractions
• Late checkout/Early checkin
• Guest Loyalty Points
• Internet Access

The five least important amenities were

• Pets Allowed
• Turndown Service
• Spa
• Free Phone Calls
• Tour Desk

There are two more categories we could consider.  The first is what I’ll call the most controversial – amenities getting similar counts of votes for both most important and least important.

The most controversial amenity would be a gym, with slightly more people rating it as least important than as most important, but similar numbers for each (although note that very few people expressed an opinion about a gym either which way – so by that dimension, it is simultaneously the most controversial and also the least controversial).

Most other amenities had a clear split one way or the other, with the next most controversial amenity being room service, and even so, room service had just over twice as many people rating it important as unimportant.

One more category could be ‘least interesting’ amenities – ones which people had no opinion on, one way or the other.  Scoring the lowest number of votes, either for or against, was an onsite restaurant, followed by a tour desk and then room service and, surprisingly, room upgrades.

The two amenities that most people expressed an opinion on were pets allowed, followed by breakfast included and then turndown service.

Overall, we had 1364 votes for ‘most important’ amenities and 1128 votes for ‘least important’ amenities.

This has been a rather short and monothematic newsletter this week, so I’ll close with a couple of miscellaneous items.

First, anniversaries.  May I most respectfully wish a very happy anniversary to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith; who this week celebrated sixty years on the throne.

Her reign has been an extraordinary one, and she has proven herself to be an extraordinary woman, and the entire world, not just Britain, is very much the better for her ‘behind the scenes’ role in helping shape British and Commonwealth policy.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, this week also saw the fiftieth anniversary of the US’ imposition of its trade embargo with Cuba.  What good has it done to either country?  It has certainly harmed the Cuban economy and the Cuban people, but has it modified their policies in any way?  Only in a rather self fulfilling prophecy form of making the Cuban government hate us more, and thereby making our government hate Cuba more, too.

Surely it is well past time for this ill-advised embargo to be lifted.

As an interesting aside, one of the criticisms of North Korea is that ‘obviously’ their form of government is an abject failure due to the appalling poverty of its people.  Well, maybe.  But have you ever wondered how much of the poverty suffered by North Korea is due to the trade embargoes placed on that country by much of the rest of the world?  Is the poverty in North Korea the fault of their government, or is it possibly the fault of our government?

I’m certainly not an apologist for communism, for Cuba, or for North Korea, but we need to be able to see both sides of these issues to make our own informed decisions.

Lastly, it is Valentine’s Day next week, and being as how you are a Travel Insider – better educated, better informed, and more likely to travel more often than the average person; so if you are a lady, you’ll probably already be aware of this piece of essential travel advice – advice which is apparently widely adopted among the fairer sex in the UK.

Until next week, please enjoy safe travels

David.

Use the strategies we explain so you don't pay over the odds for your hotel room

If I’m staying at a hotel I’ve stayed at before and like, I’ll generally call the hotel directly to make the booking rather than go through an online site.  I do this for two reasons – first in the hope of finding some sort of special discount direct from the property, and secondly to save them money.

If a hotel is selling its rooms through any online travel agency, it is paying probably somewhere between 10% and 20% commission to the online travel agency, and possibly other fees and commissions to whatever franchise system it belongs to for going through their central booking system too.

But – and here’s the stupid thing.  As often than not, when I call a hotel directly, they quote me a rate higher than that available online.  I tell them that and their response is invariably ‘Oh yes sometimes there are online specials that we are not allowed to match – you should go and book the hotel through the website you saw the rate on’.

Isn’t this crazy stupid?  At the very least, why not simply match the online rate?  I’ve just finished calling two hotels – one was asking $124 instead of $112 online, the other $80 instead of $64 online.  I also indicated, to the first hotel, I was a Platinum level member of their frequent guest program, and if they could give me some comfort about the possibility of an upgraded room, I’d be willing to pay twice the cost of their competitor, just a couple of doors down the street, with the $64 online rate, but not only would they not budge from the $124 direct rate, they wouldn’t consider any upfront upgrading either.

Of course, the reality is that in both cases, I was talking to a generic receptionist/reservationist front desk person; probably one of the most junior people in the hotel’s hierarchy, and a person with little or no interest in helping the hotel she works for win extra business.  She also probably has little or no authority to override the rates she sees in her computer, and if she possibly has one or two guests standing in front of her at the counter, at the same time, she just wants to get you off the phone as quickly as she can.

So what should I do – and what should you do in such cases?  I thought about this and realized that I’d earlier written a four part series all about how to negotiate the best hotel rates, and that I’d never added an intended fifth part to the series, which was intended to be all about these types of scenarios.

So, no sooner said that done (well, almost).  I put pen to paper (metaphorically) and the result is now the long awaited part five to this series – Negotiating the Lowest Hotel Rates – Who to Speak With and What to Say.

I also have a related four part series about How to Save Money with Priceline.

So, whether you simply read the new part five to my how to negotiate hotel rate series, or if you read all five parts of the series – and possibly the Priceline series too (which I’m particularly proud of), you should find plenty on the topic to use next time you go booking a hotel.

Citibank? Or perhaps better described as Shitibank. See two items below.

Good morning

Travel has understandably been on my mind this week.  Our September North Korea tour had three more people join – at this rate it will soon be that one in every 50 foreigners visiting North Korea in 2012 will be Travel Insiders.  Amazing.

Shall we try to make it one in every 40?  One in every 30?

I’ve also written a new piece to add to the growing collection of material about travel to New Zealand, seizing on the current focus the country is getting due to the news of director James Cameron moving there.  He bought such a large piece of prime real estate that it required the special approval of the Overseas Investment Commission – approval which was duly given, needless to say.

More on that in one of the other items in tonight’s newsletter compendium.

And now, the items in this first part of tonights compendium comprise :

• Reader Survey – Hotel Amenities
• American Airlines Hopes to Grow Its Way Out of Difficulties
• EU Airline Anti-Trust Investigation – Off Again, On Again.  What, Confused?  Not Them!
• Citibank Drops Us Right In It
• Citibank Ugliness Part 2
• The World’s Best Cities for….
• TripAdvisor’s Problems Continue
• Costa Concordia Update
• More Thoughts on This Week’s DHS Outrage
• Answer to The World’s Best Cities

Reader Survey – Hotel Amenities

A recent survey was held of travelers by a third company polling company to see what hotel amenities were most valued by travelers.  I thought it would be interesting to see what Travel Insiders value the most in a hotel, and so as not to bias your answers, I’ll not disclose the results of the other survey.

Below is a list of fourteen features often found in hotels.  I know it is hard to choose, but please click a link for the feature that is most important/valuable to you when choosing a hotel and please click a link for the feature that you care the least about.

If you really can’t choose between two (or even three) different features as being the most important and/or as being the least important, you may vote multiple times by clicking as many links as you wish.

Each link click should create an empty email with your selection coded into the subject line of the email that you simply send on its way to me.  I’ll count them all up and present the answers next week.

Thank you for participating in this survey – ‘the collective wisdom of crowds’ is always evident in the results of Travel Insider surveys.

American Airlines Hopes to Grow Its Way Out of Difficulties

Here’s a stunning piece of news.  Unlike almost every other airline that has gone through Chapter 11, and even some that haven’t (yet?), AA has announced plans for returning to profitability that include ambitious growth rather than shrinking.

Most airlines talk about cutting back on marginal routes (and not replacing them with growth on profitable routes), about ‘rightsizing’ (or plain simple downsizing) and about reducing ‘excess capacity’ in the market.  The whole concept of ‘excess capacity’ is a nonsense concept that is rebutted by the ‘Southwest Effect’ – the proven situation where if extra flights and lower fares are added between any two cities, rather than being ‘excess’ capacity, more people start flying and fill the extra capacity that has been added.

For sure, AA is also talking about walking away from some pension scheme obligations, reducing staff by 13,000 employees (about 15% of its total workforce), and generally rejiggering operating costs down to a level 20% below what they are at present.

But they’re also talking not about deferring new plane purchases (as has been standard elsewhere), but instead about seeking to have the youngest jet fleet in the country by 2017, and of course, the 20% growth in departures (with an emphasis on international routes) also within five years.

There’s a potential bit of fudging about this 20% growth – I wonder if some of it will be by redefining the AA share of some of their alliance/code share partners’ traffic.

But never mind the churlish questions for now.  It is great to see an airline that plans to grow its way back to profit.  That’s almost like – ummm – mainstream marketing and management thinking.  Wow.  Let’s wish AA the best of good fortune with such positive plans, and hope they don’t get swallowed up by a shrinking dinosaur instead.

But I do hope – again for their sake – they’ll quickly get their act sorted together.  The airline announced, earlier this week, that it lost a net $904 million in December (its first month operating in Chapter 11).

Yes, folks, that’s little change out of a billion dollars down, in a single month.  All of a sudden AA’s $4 billion in cash reserves and short term investments doesn’t seem like quite so much money – it would barely finance four more months with whopper losses like those (and the first quarter of the year is seldom the best quarter for most airlines).

EU Airline Anti-Trust Investigation – Off Again, On Again.  What, Confused?  Not Them!

We know that the US Departments of Justice and Transportation between them seem to seldom encounter an airline tie-up they don’t approve of.  In a wonderful bit of circular logic, first they would say ‘Well, if these two airlines start operating together, it doesn’t really matter because there are still so many others’.  Then the logic evolved to ‘Well, we did it for airlines A and B, so it is only fair that we now do it for airlines C and D’.  Then the final stage of their logic became ‘Now that there are mainly mega-alliances operating on this route, these remaining individual airlines can no longer survive on their own so we must allow them to ally together too’.

That’s brilliant logic, isn’t it.  Each step makes sense in and of itself (sort of) but in combination we’ve gone from dozens of airlines competing against each other, to the situation now where we have three mega alliances that seem more to cooperate warily with and shadow each other than compete at all.

Anyway, the bottom line is plain.  If we’re to seek any assertive assistance on breaking up the airline alliances and restoring competition, we need to look somewhere other than the US.

Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope?  The EU announced this week that it is investigating whether pricing and capacity pacts between Air France-KLM, Alitalia and Delta on routes between Europe and North America are bad for passengers.

But on the basis that as one door opens, another closes, the EU also said it was abandoning antitrust proceedings against other members of the SkyTeam airlines alliance: AeroMexico, Air France and KLM, Alitalia, Czech Airlines, Delta, Korean Air Lines and the former Continental Airlines.

Oh – wait!  So it is abandoning an investigation into AF/KL, DL and AZ, but simultaneously starting one?  Wow.  With logic like that, let’s not expect for great things to result.

Citibank Drops Us Right In It

Thanks for nothing, Citibank.  People are receiving 1099 forms from Citibank, in which the banking giant has reported what it considers to be the taxable value of frequent flier miles it has been giving to people as incentives to open new banking accounts.

This marks a new development, which apparently Citibank took on its own initiative, gratuitously deciding to have us incur tax liabilities on the free miles it has been so ‘generously’ awarding people who open new accounts with them.

Adding insult to injury is their valuation of the miles.  Citibank says that for tax purposes, each mile has a 2.5 cent value.  While the issue of how much miles are worth is a very complex and contentious one, the simple fact is that many airlines will sell you miles for less than 2.5 cents each, and for sure Citibank bought the millions/billions of miles it has given away at a bulk rate massively below 2.5 cents.

Answer me this :  How has Citibank profited from causing us to incur tax liabilities on the inflated value of ‘free’ miles it was ‘giving’ to us?  Why is it doing this?  Is this part of some quiet quid pro quo with the IRS that has helped them resolve some other dispute with the IRS?

The big problem is that by doing so, Citibank has forced the IRS to take official notice of the topic of how much miles are worth and if they should be taxed or not.  Until now both the IRS and we have all tried to ignore the issue, but with the sudden unexpected gift of who knows how much extra revenue from Citibank’s tax assessments of the miles we’ve all received, the IRS now finds itself in the position of needing to protect the income it now stands to receive – income that now has a definite certain value put alongside it by an apparently neutral third party – Citibank (rather than an interested party such as ourselves or the airlines).

The LA Times has been leading the coverage of this matter.  Here’s their first breaking news story and here’s a follow up.

Please keep this in mind next time you are wondering which credit card to cancel, or which credit card offer to accept.

Citibank Ugliness Part 2

If you should need another reason to hate Citibank, here it is.  Citibank imposed a ‘foreign transaction fee’ (a substantial 3% fee) on a ticket purchase made by a US resident, buying a ticket in US dollars (for flights to and from Singapore on Singapore Airlines).

None of us like, but most of us accept, a small foreign transaction fee (my Visa card issued by Bank of America charges 1%) if we’re buying something out of the country and paying in local currency for it.  But to buy an airline ticket in the US, albeit with a foreign airline, and to pay for it in US currency – where does the justification for a foreign transaction fee come from for that?  Nowhere is the answer.  There are no currency conversions for Citibank to incur any costs on at all.

Consumer advocate and travel writer Chris Elliott approached Citibank on behalf of the lady who incurred the $55 fee, pointing out the unfairness of it.  Citibank refused to reverse the charge.  More details here.

Please keep this too in mind next time you are wondering which credit card to cancel, or which credit card offer to accept.

The World’s Best Cities for….

Here’s an interesting conjunction of things that some people might not expect to be conjoined.  The city in the world that is ranked by Gaycities.com and American Airlines as being the world’s best gay travel destination is in the same country as the (different) city that is ranked as the best city in the world for religious travel.

How’s your general knowledge?  Can you guess either/both cities, and of course the country they are both in?  And, a bonus question, can you guess the world’s second best city for gay travel?  Answers further down the newsletter.

TripAdvisor’s Problems Continue

TripAdvisor has now been formally instructed by the UK Advertising Standards Authority that it can no longer claim to offer ‘trusted and honest reviews’.

The ASA’s investigation determined that the site could not guarantee customer feedback was genuine.  As a result, TripAdvisor may not claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on its website were from real travellers, or were honest or trusted.

TripAdvisor’s response?  They said ‘We have confidence that the 50 million users who come to our site every month trust the reviews they read on TripAdvisor, which is why they keep coming back to us in increasingly larger numbers to plan and have the perfect trip’.

So, there’s nothing to see here, folks.  Move along now.  Or so TripAdvisor wishes us to think.

I just checked their site, and at the very bottom it has the tag line ‘World’s most trusted travel advice’, and a friend confirmed it remains visible in the UK too.

To be fair, the ‘official’ UK site is tripadvisor.co.uk rather than tripadvisor.com, but I bet many people in the UK click on a link or otherwise just type in the .com extension because both links seem to reveal very much the same underlying website and data; so – and contrary to the Advertising Standards Authority ruling – TripAdvisor is still making its ‘trusted’ claim in the UK.

Interestingly, the UK site’s tag line (‘The world’s largest travel site’) is echoed on the French site too (‘Le plus grand site de voyage au monde’).  Apparently TripAdvisor’s lawyers must feel the UK ruling can be enforced in the EU as well.

Even more strangely, neither tag line appears on the Canadian site.  Make of that as you will.

Costa Concordia Updates

Three interesting updates, and all are perhaps not complete surprises.

The first is that the race to file lawsuits seems to have been won by a New York based personal injury attorney, who has filed a $460 million class action suit on behalf of more than 500 passengers.  (That’s about $900,000 per passenger – a surprisingly modest sum, considering.)

This is in response to the ‘improved’ offer from Costa of $14,460 per passenger in compensation for lost baggage and psychological trauma.

The lawsuit was filed in Florida, the world headquarters of Costa’s parent company, Carnival.  But the terms and conditions on passenger tickets require lawsuits to be filed in Italy, where apparently the jurisdiction would be less favorable to the claimants, so the lawsuit is in the very early stages of legal maneuvering.

Talking about maneuvering, you may recall the Costa CEO complaining that the much maligned captain of the Concordia had failed to keep the company informed of the problems he was experiencing with the ship as between when it struck the rocks and finally went aground.

It now appears that – oooops – the captain actually had made at least six calls to the head of marine operations at Costa during the 73 minutes between hitting the rocks and deciding to abandon ship, and it further seems that during these calls he provided frank and detailed information about what was occurring.

That’s not to say the captain is now blameless.  But it is interesting to see that he may not have been quite as bad as he was first made out to be.  I wonder if he has any chance at all of getting any sort of libel lawsuit awarded in his favor as a result of these now clearly erroneous slurs?  Probably not, alas.

Lastly, Carnival has now revealed that its bookings have dropped about 15% since the Concordia disaster.  They are outlooking at least a $175 million drop in profits for the year – although about half of this reduction in profit is due to not being able to sail the Concordia and make money from its voyages.

It might be unkind and unfair to show this picture in view of the earlier item about the Concordia captain, but is there any truth to the story that the captain began a new job as a bus driver yesterday?

More Thoughts on This Week’s DHS Outrage

Further down the collection of articles you’ll see a piece I wrote earlier this week about the latest extreme example of the surly stupidity of the DHS.  You could probably sense my bubbling outrage at this idiocy – never a good frame of mind in which to write, but even so, probably justified in this case.

I had some discussions on the matter with a reader, and to clarify/amplify the article, one of my big concerns is that this can’t be excused as the actions of just one rogue officer.  How many colleagues and supervisors also had to participate in this appalling mistreatment of two innocent harmless ordinary British tourists, too?  It shows an endemic culture of – I’m not sure what is the best term (you choose one to suit) – that runs throughout the institution.

Not only was the event reprehensible in the extreme, the really big frustration is that none of the people involved will experience any sort of negative outcome at all.  It is sadly accurate to describe the people involved and the agency they work for as being out of control.

If you read one of the reader comments in the Daily Mail story that I link to, you’ll see this (US) reader say, in support of the DHS actions, ‘after 9/11, we have a right to be a bit paranoid’.

No, we don’t have that right at all.  We have an obligation to be more prudent and more sensible, and better focused on truly potential enemies; but we have no right to be paranoid or to mistreat our friends.  Paranoia, by definition, is a sick state of mind that does nothing to help the person so suffering to better cope with the world around them.  Paranoid DHS officials lack the mental clarity to distinguish right from wrong, and the unavoidable flip side of perceiving harmless Brits as terrorists intent on ‘destroying’ the US is that this lack of reasoning prevents them from recognizing and focusing on real threats when they appear.

Lastly, the most puzzling thing is the way these incidents appear from nowhere.  Most of the time, most of us have perfectly positive experiences going through immigration on the way into the US (although to be fair, most of us are also US citizens).  How is it that an organization that, most of the time, is somewhere close to fair and reasonable, occasionally goes so far out into left field without any sort of self-correction, either at the time of the incident or subsequently?

Answer to The World’s Best Cities

The best gay travel destination is Tel Aviv, with 43% of respondents choosing that destination, a clear win over the world’s second best city – New York – which was mentioned only 14% of the time.  The best religious travel destination is Jerusalem, and of course, need I tell you that both cities are in Israel.

Until next week, please enjoy safe travels

David.

Spirit Airlines insults us all with their latest fee and their feeble excuse for levying it

We’ve all of us yet to meet an airline fee that we like, but some are more odious than others.  The same is true of the airlines that levy the fees – some are more odious than others.

Winning this week’s award for most foul smelling odor is Spirit Airlines.

They have added a new $2 fee to every ticket issued, what they are calling the ‘Department of Transportation Unintended Consequences Fee’.  This gratuitous grab of another $2 out of our pocket is being excused by Spirit on the basis that the new DoT rule that passengers be allowed to hold flights for up to 24 hours prior to paying and, if they wish, can cancel them without penalty (assuming travel commences more than seven days out) is costing the airline presumably something like about $2 per every ticket they still end up selling.

This is male cow manure, pure and simple.

As justification/excuse, Spirit says that by holding a seat for up to 24 hours and then releasing it again, it might have lost a sale to some other person who wanted to buy the seat for real while it was being held for someone else.

On the face of it, you can sort of see their point, but there are three reasons why this concern is invalid.

Reason 1 Why Spirit’s Claim is Nonsense

This first reason is a bit complex to explain, so if you get lost in the middle, perhaps just accept its validity and evaluate the other two reasons as well.

Spirit is presumably assuming that the few seats that might be held for up to a day prior to being confirmed or cancelled represent the last remaining seats on each flight – as long as the provisionally held (and subsequently cancelled) seats don’t zero out the availability of more seats, it clearly is not losing any business at all.

So – what are the chances of the provisionally held then subsequently cancelled seats being all the remaining seats on the plane?  Close to zero.  Spirit operates A319s with 145 seats, A320s with 178 seats, and A321s with 218 seats.  Let’s say a typical flight has 178 seats on it.  And let’s say they average a stonking great 90% load factor on those flights.  Which means that, on average, there are 18 empty seats on a plane the day it departs, and of course successively more empty seats each day prior to it departing.

Now, remember that the one day hold rule only applies until one week prior to departure.  Let’s say Spirit sells 10% of its seats in the last week (I’ve no idea what the number is, but all the airlines claimed there would be serious problems if the one day hold rule applied in the last week, so it seems reasonable to infer at least 10% of sales occur in the last week).

That means on the last day that the one day hold rule applies (ie the eighth day prior to departure), there are 36 empty seats on a typical Spirit flight – 18 which will be empty when the plane leaves a week later, and 18 more which will be sold during the last week.

So Spirit would have us believe that on the day eight days prior to departure, it is holding more than 36 provisional bookings for each flight – that of the 142 seats sold prior to one week before departure, more than 36 of them are all bunched up on that magical eighth day.  Bear in mind this is a flight that has been available for sale for something like eleven months already.

Also bear in mind that only a small percentage of provisional bookings will cancel.  Let’s say half the bookings cancel (probably it is less than that.  Which might mean that Spirit is saying that of the 142 seats sold on that flight, it is holding 72 provisional bookings on the eighth day.

Does that sound even remotely likely to you?

And, if it does sound possible, the numbers get even more extreme with each previous day.  Let’s see how it works with just one more day.  If Spirit sells 36 seats on Day 8 prior, then on Day 9 prior, if it is to have the same problem on that day, it would need to be holding 144 bookings for the flight that day.  And more and more for each day backwards.  Within that single preceding week, it will have sold every seat on the plane – several times over!

Is that ridiculous enough for you?  Well, if you’re not already abundantly convinced, there are two more completely different sets of reasons why this is nonsense.

Reason 2 Why Spirit’s Claim is Nonsense

Cancellations are nothing new to the airlines.  This is why airlines oversell seats – to reflect the reality that not all passengers travel.

So if there are going to be a certain percentage of people who place 24 hour holds on seats and then cancel – and no-one is disputing this will happen – the solution is simple.  Adjust the over-booking profiles to reflect the projected percentage of speculative bookings that will cancel.

This is actually a very easy thing to do, because the overbooking period is only for 24 hours.  Once the booking has become unconditional, there’s no need to continue to worry about a cancellation, other than for traditional reasons that are already built into the overbooking algorithms.

So the adjustment to the current overbooking profiles is minimal rather than major, and only applies to a moving 24 hour window of bookings.

Reason 3 Why Spirit’s Claim is Nonsense

What goes around comes around, right?  So think about this – let’s assume that Spirit’s worry is correct, and it will start losing appreciable numbers of passengers due to some mysterious and maladroit way of Spirit handling the 24 hour hold provision.

But – this 24 hour hold applies to all airlines, not just to Spirit.  So at the same time they claim they are losing some passengers, they’ll also be picking up other passengers from other airlines who are losing their passengers for the same reason.  All that’s happening is a game of airline musical chairs.  AA loses a passenger who books on DL.  DL loses a passenger who books on Spirit.  Spirit loses a passenger who books on AA.  Net result – the same as before.

Upraising One’s Own Digit at Spirit

So, however you look at it, this new fee is absolutely not the ‘fault’ of the US Department of Transportation.  If Spirit is indeed losing passengers and money from the new 24 hour hold provision, it is only due to its own management ineptness, rather than the fault of the DoT, and it hardly seems fair we should suffer the consequences of their own limitations.

Someone suggested – and it strikes me as terribly irresponsible, so I’m mentioning it merely as something that you’d of course not want to do – that they were so outraged by this piece of fakery by Spirit that they were going to make and cancel a bunch of reservations.

How unfair is that?  Definitely a very unfair act.  But is it any more unfair than Spirit hitting us all up for another $2 and saying ‘The DoT made me do this’?

The Last Laugh

Actually, the last laugh goes against Spirit.  Thanks to the new DoT rule that requires the airfare to be shown as one aggregate total amount, all Spirit is doing is increasing its fares by $2, with the increase obvious to us all, rather than obscured, and in reality, the obscured part will be the blame it places on the DoT.

All we’ll see is that a Spirit fare has become $2 less competitive than it used to be, and hopefully that will encourage more of us to book away from Spirit and towards a decent fair airline instead.

News reports this week revealed that director James Cameron has bought a very large farm spread in New Zealand and is moving there to live.

We’re not suggesting you too should move to live in New Zealand, but a vacation there might be a good idea.  Indeed,  now is a great time of year in New Zealand, with their seasons of course reversed, meaning you can escape the worst of our winter and enjoy lovely long sunny warm days in New Zealand.

Okay, so maybe I’m biased (I’m a New Zealander myself).  But if NZ is a destination you have been considering visiting, or if you’re thinking about returning there, did you know we have an extensive series of articles about What to do and Where to go in New Zealand on our website?

I’ve just added a new article to this collection, about a part of New Zealand that is, to my mind, possibly its ultimate obscured treasure.  Te Anau and the Fiordland area.  Sure, many people do a day tour from Queenstown to Milford Sound, and that includes a drive through Te Anau on the way there and back, but read the article and see how you could easily spend three nights in Te Anau, giving you a chance to see and do some amazing things unique to that part of the country.

Again, possibly I’m biased.  When I was a small child – perhaps 6 or 7, in the early 1960s, I have a vivid memory of eagerly counting down the hours and minutes each afternoon until 5.45pm when my favorite radio serial would then play for 15 minutes – ‘The Lost Tribe of Te Anau’.  This was a captivating children’s serial about a tribe of Maoris living in the unexplored rugged bush country that surrounds Te Anau – even now, almost 50 years later, much of the region has never been visited by modern man.  Rumors exist not only of a tribe of Maoris that are living undiscovered there, but also of 12′ high Moa flightless birds (a bit like ostriches), even though they are believed to have been extinct for hundreds of years in the rest of the country.

For sure, the children’s serial did a brilliant job, on my impressionable young mind, of evoking the mystery and mood of this (dare I say) very spiritual part of the country.  But, you know, I also have to say that the best part of listening to this series, as well as so many other radio productions back then, both for children and adults, comedy and drama, was hearing the end credits, announced in my father’s voice, always ending  ‘…. produced by Earl Rowell in the Auckland studios of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service’.  And then, usually just a few minutes later, he’d walk in the front door, home from another day’s work as the country’s leading producer of radio programs – he’d even been offered a position in Hollywood.  How different – or perhaps even how similar – my life might have been if I’d moved to the US as a young child rather than as a youngish adult.

You can maybe imagine how proud I was of my father back then.  Alas, by the time I turned a teenager, and like most of us, I perceived him as a worthless fool.  It took me a long decade or two to return back to my earlier admiration and respect.

I hope that even without similar childhood memories to frame the experience, you too may get to visit Te Anau and feel its mysterious (and its obvious) appeal.  Here’s the link to the page all about Te Anau and the Fiordland area of New Zealand.

If you think the guy in the middle of this picture is a terrorist, you should apply for a job with the DHS. (Twitter profile picture of Leigh Bryan)

We’re hearing more and more about various US agencies monitoring social media sites in their ongoing efforts to keep us all safe.

A spectacular example of our being ‘kept safe’ was revealed today, showcasing how our illustrious border police managed to waylay an evil pair intent upon destroying America.  Clearly deranged, this couple were also apparently planning to ‘dig up Marilyn Monroe’.

So, which Muslim extremist group did these two would-be terrorists belong to?  And what super-sleuthing caused their evil plans to be uncovered and thwarted?

Well, actually, it turns out they were not terrorists of any type at all – well, at least, reasonable ordinary people would probably consider them to be perfectly harmless and ordinary.

Instead, they were a very ordinary middle class pair of twenty-something year old British tourists.

So how did the DHS have such a case of mistaken identity?  Well, one of them – Leigh Bryan – had published a message on Twitter as part of his excited chatter about his upcoming vacation to the US, saying

Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?

He had also tweeted

3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up

So when Leigh and his girlfriend arrived in Los Angeles, armed guards detained them, handcuffed them, and locked them up for twelve hours in, shall we say, unpleasant conditions.

Our alert border patrol also searched their suitcases for spades and shovels that might be used to dig up Ms Monroe’s remains (such as there may be – she died almost 50 years ago) and conducted full body searches on the couple (who knows what for).

The couple tried to explain to the border guards that :

• In popular parlance in Britain, when you talk about going to destroy something, that doesn’t necessarily involve explosives.  It more likely involves getting very drunk and having an extravagantly wonderful time, with little or no damage at all to the venue that one ‘destroys’.  The tweet message was simply a suggestion of meeting up prior to going to have a wonderful time enjoying a US vacation.
• The reference to Marilyn Monroe was a quote from the US television comedy series Family Guy and had no meaning other than indicating that they were excitedly looking forward to their US trip in three weeks time.

Our alert paranoid border forces refused to believe them, and after five hours of interrogation and twelve hours in holding cells, deported the couple.  The story of their mistreatment is now being widely circulated in Britain, where yet again, the country in the world we claim to have the closest ‘special relationship’ with is left blinking in disbelief at our stupidity, our paranoia, and our aggressive unfriendliness.

Did this sorry episode make the US any safer?  Or did it simply reduce the opinion that our friends have of us even more, while causing our enemies to roll on the floor, laughing out loud at our stupidity?

Will the people involved with this appalling mistreatment of two would-be tourists be fired?  Or is there no-one with any degree of sense in the Department of Homeland Security?

One more question needs to be asked as well.  How much time and resource went into tracing back the two nonsense ‘tweets’ on Twitter (an online environment designed to encourage casual throw-away joking comments) and finding out the identity of the person who sent them?

There’s not only an element of paranoia in this, but also an element of vindictiveness.  If the DHS and their sub-agencies decided not to allow the two people into the US; and noting that they knew who the people were and their travel plans, couldn’t they have communicated that decision to the couple before they left the UK (or to the airline that was to fly them here), rather than tricking/trapping the couple into coming all the way to the US and then giving them an appalling treatment to ‘teach them a lesson’?

Lastly, far be it from me to offer advice, but does the DHS really think that terrorists intent on destroying the US would post tweet messages about their intention for the entire world to read prior to their visit?

Actually, scratch that last question, because, sadly and self-evidently, the answer is clearly yes, this is indeed what the DHS believe.