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In-flight attendants are losing their pensions. And to underscore this point, they’ve lost their clothes.

In an odd non-sequitor, in-flight attendants (just women) have compiled a calendar that would have been considered risque in a pre-Heffner era to get sympathy and raise, um, awareness. From their site (safe for work):

Our mission is to create a national awareness to the naked truth that no retirement fund is completely secure and that there is a definite crisis in the pension guaranty system. Make certain that your retirement plan is not sitting on a time bomb. Take an active role in your future and get involved now. You can never start too soon !!

Will your pension/retirement fund be there for you when you need it??

Apparently the calendar has been so successful at getting the message out that they have raised the price on the 2007 to $14.95 from $9.95 in 2006. “There is a definite crisis in the pension guaranty system.” [Thanks, Joe]

–Dr. Vino

tags: travel | air travel | pinups

You can be forgiven if you think it’s costing more to travel these days. A government report out this morning shows that consumer prices rose 0.4 percent last month. That might not seem like a lot if you’re talking about buying a magazine before check-in, but if you’re planning a vacation, it’s worse. And if you’re a central banker, 0.4 percent in a month is approaching panic levels.

The Labor Department strips out fuel and food prices from their measure citing them as too “volatile” (who needs to eat or drive after all?). So sectors that burn $71 a barrel oil reflected the rising price of oil the most in the official measure. And that means air travel. And hotels for good measure. Consider this excerpt from Bloomberg:

Marriott International Inc. and United Airlines are among companies charging more to recoup costs as fuel prices jump to record levels…The travel industry is taking advantage of strong demand to lift prices and protect profits from the rise in commodity costs. UAL Corp.’s United Airlines, Delta Air Lines Inc. and AMR Corp.’s American Airlines raised some one-way fares by $50 earlier this month. Rising travel demand combined with fewer aircraft seats help the carriers charge more for tickets.

Hotels are also getting more for rooms. Occupancy was up to 68 percent in the week ended April 8 compared with the same period last year and the average room rate rose to $99.62 a day from $91.65 in 2005, according to figures from Smith Travel Research.

“Utility costs are our biggest concern” after they’ve risen 10 percent to 15 percent, Bill Marriott, chief executive officer of Marriott International, said in an April 11 interview. “We are able right now to increase room rates, primarily because the market is so strong. So we have been able to pretty much cover these costs.”

Of course what consumers want is for the airlines and chains to eat the high costs and keep prices low in order to gain market share. But many of the bigs appear to be successfully passing the costs on to the consumer. Ugh. Just don’t tell Ben Bernanke.

–Dr. Vino

tags: travel | air travel | inflation

Argentina is a destination that is true to the motto of this blog: living the first class life, at coach prices. And the time to go is now before inflation takes off. The NY Times recently nailed this timing giving good tips for visiting Buenos Aires.

But they didn’t comment on the flight, which is a breeze. When I went on AA#955 from JFK a couple of weeks ago, I left at 10PM and arrived in Buenos Aires at 10AM. With only one hour time difference, it was the easiest adjustment to the local time that I’ve ever had on a long flight. I’m more used to afternoon departures and early arrivals after traversing time zones from east to west. Several airlines run nonstops to BA from Washington Dulles, Miami and Dallas as well as JFK.

The key to this overnight flight is sleep. The best way to feel like you’re in business class–even if you aren’t–is to splurge on a
Tempur-Pedic Eye Mask. Forget those elastic bands, this one has adjustable velcro and “memory foam” for supreme comfort. Pop in some ear plugs (or drop the $300 for a Bose noise canceling headset) and you’ll be ready to tango when you arrive. Buenos dias, Buenos Aires!

* * *

One of the great values on the ground is all the good, cheap wine (you’re certainly not going to be hard pressed to get anything good on the plane). A bottle that costs $9 in the US can cost as little as $3 in Argentina. Try a malbec from Pascual Toso or the aromatic white torrontes from Alta Vista and you’ll be getting a great wine that’s hard to find in the US. See Dr. Vino’s blog for more info on visiting Mendoza, the epicenter of Argentina’s wine country.

You’ll want to get a recent guidebook to keep up with the fast pace of changes on the ground. Food and Drink in Argentina was published last month.

* * *

Finally, this headline from today’s NYT made me laugh:

A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed

Where else? Why in Argentina of course!

To really get your juices flowing, see my photo stream from Argentina on flickr.

–Dr. Vino

tags: travel | air travel | Argentina

Flying harms the environment. A flight from New York to Los Angeles generates one ton of CO2 per person. (go to CO2.org to compute your next flight’s impact). Jets are a fast growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

If you can’t skip the flight altogether and opt for a teleconference (or go to the nearest halo room) then you can ease your green conscience by buying a credit. According to an article in the current Vanity Fair, guilty travelers can now go to ClimateCare.org, calculate the environmental degradation of their journey, and then make a donation that is put toward forestry and energy-efficient products.

The NY-LA flight would result in a $10 guilt tax. Our regular host, Better Living Through Miles, is burning up 1.85 tons of CO2 on his way to and from Schiphol right now, or about $20 if ClimateCare would put a price tag on his environmental degradation. If only everything bad that we did could be so easily remedied.

What do you think? Would you pay such a fee? What if it were mandatory, like a Homeland Security surcharge?

–Dr. Vino

tags: travel | air travel | environment | greenhouse gas

Death. Taxes. Mileage points.

While all of these may be inevitable, blending the last two don’t go together (actually, blending the first one with anything isn’t such a hot idea either).

According to a story in the NY Times business section, it’s becoming increasingly popular to pay your tax bills with plastic. Why? The miles of course.

But it turns out that 1.57 million people might be wrong. “Jim Tehan, a spokesman for Myvesta.org, a credit counseling Web site, summed up the feeling of most credit counselors on this point: ‘It’s absolutely ludicrous to use your credit card for taxes to rack up points.’”

The rub is that the IRS charges a 2.49 percent “convenience fee” for processing the credit card. According to Miles or Buy, that’s WAY too high a price to pay for miles.

So when you render unto Caesar today, take out the checkbook and resist this opportunity to turn it into a mileage run.

–Dr. Vino

tags: travel | air travel | mileage points | taxes

Next week, wine value maven Tyler Colman (not pictured), a.k.a. Dr. Vino, will be filling in for me here with the occasional post, when he’s not posting at his own blog.

I’m off for a week, using some miles: Easter is tulip season in the Netherlands, after all! (Take THAT, Joe Sharkey, et al. You CAN use miles for tickets to places you want to go, during high travel seasons…)

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tags: travel

A number of websites have cropped up in recent years, offering multi-site searches for airfare, hotels, and rental cars. I don’t mean the online travel agencies like Expedia or Orbitz. Rather, I’m referring to the sites which allow you to search availability across online agencies, consolidators, and the providers themselves. These sites, called aggregators, collect a few dollars for every sale that results from their referral, at no additional cost to the person doing the searching.

The great benefit of these sites is that you get greater transparency of fares. However, not all aggregators are created equal. I put a few to the test.

For the time being, I limited my comparison to airfare searches. I looked for accuracy (did the quoted price match the price actually offered at the provider’s page?), depth of information (does the site give the booking class, cancellation policies, etc.?), and control (can you sort searches easily, by provider, by price, by distance, etc.?)

For airfare, I compared Kayak, Farechase, Mobissimo, Bezurk, Farecompare, Sidestep, and Pricegrabber. (Since I’m based in the United States, these results may be biased toward North American searches.)

The result: Kayak came out on top, with the lowest prices, the most control over the output, and most information about both airlines and sellers. Sidestep comes close. Farecompare gets an honorable mention for its price-driven approach. All sites accurately reported fares — there were no surprises when clicking through to the target site. However, no single aggregator actually found every flight option or every major travel site.

Kayak
If you know your dates of travel, Kayak offers the most powerful site, in my opinion. It covers a range of websites, including a number of consolidators. The fare results can be sorted by airline, by time, by price, by airports (it searches alternate airports automatically), and by stops. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to see the precise fare booking code, by clicking “details.” (This is great if you’re looking for a cheap but upgradable fare, for example.) A downside to Kayak is that they seem to exclude the big three online agencies — Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz don’t seem to come up in searches. On the plus side, JetBlue, who (like Southwest) doesn’t show up in the big three’s searches, comes up for comparison on Kayak. Negative is that they don’t seem to grab every possible routing from every airline (a common complaint for all aggregators). Kayak is 95% there, but not quite 100%.

SideStep
Sidestep is a very close runner-up to Kayak on the pure-airfare search. It covers a similar range of sites, plus includes Orbitz in the search. It has one interesting benefit: offering air and hotel package searches across multiple sites. Note that Sidestep is perhaps best known for its downloadable toolbar, which “watches” where you browse, and offers fare alternatives. I am not a fan of this over-the-shoulder co-browsing, but you don’t have to use their toolbar in order to run a search.

Farechase
Farechase, owned by Yahoo, copies much of Kayak’s template, but searches a slightly different universe of sites, including both Orbitz and Cheaptickets. The total number of sites searched is smaller, but doesn’t overlap entirely with Kayak or Sidestep. One downside: the flight details do not include the booking class/fare code. Presumably you need to go through the process of a complete booking in order to see that info.

Mobissimo
Like Farechase, Mobissimo DOES include some of the online agencies: Orbitz, CheapTickets, and Opodo, for example. However, it offers less flexibility in sorting the data than Farechase, and it doesn’t give much in the way of flight details. While the fares it finds are comparable to Farechase, the presentation is previous-generation.

Pricegrabber
Update: PriceGrabber has thrown in the towel, shutting down their travel search feature. The rest of their site is still up and running. This review stays up, though the travel service is defunct.
Pricegrabber is a comparison shopping site, and their travel search is just one among many. The search engine again follows the Kayak template, but it doesn’t tell you up front which sites it has searched. Results can be sorted by price, airline, time ranges, and, interestingly, ontime statistics. But you can’t see the flights’ booking class here either, the range of alternate airports is limited, and you don’t even know who the seller is until you choose the flight. They do work with Orbitz, and perhaps others, but they need to provide more information.

Bezurk
This is an Asia-based site that taps into a completely different pool of providers. It copies the Kayak model, again. However, because the search is based on Asian companies, it may be difficult to find a fare you can actually purchase if your travels don’t touch Asia. Nonetheless, for international travel, check it out.

Farecompare
This recently unveiled site is notable for its price-driven approach. Instead of entering cities/dates and comparing options thereafter, Farecompare asks for cities only, and drills down on the basis of price. Much like Travelocity’s Dream Maps or Search by Price, you may end up with a great price… on dates you can’t use. However, the site is interesting for the sheer volume of information it provides, and it offers historical data tracking the city pair’s fare trend over time.

What if you just care about price, without regard to anything else? Who has the best price? I did two searches, one for Chicago to Los Angeles, one for San Francisco to Sydney. The city pairs made no difference: In both cases, Kayak, SideStep, and Mobissimo found the identical lowest prices. Farechase’s “lowest price” was more than the others.

Aggregators are a great tool, but even then, you may want to run one or two of them, to see if they differ. Maybe we need an aggregator of aggregators (perhaps metakayak.com?) to truly get thorough searches.

In two weeks, I’ll test the aggregators’ searches for hotels, which offer an entirely different set of challenges. If there are any sites that you believe I have missed, or if you think my assessment is way off base, let me know by leaving a comment or using the contact link at the top right of the page.

Update (April 24, 2006): One reader wrote, reminding me of ITA Software’s excellent fare search tool. ITA powers Orbitz.com for airfare searches, though Orbitz’s search engine is a dumbed-down version with far fewer features. The genius of ITA is that it is incredibly powerful, if you know how to phrase your searches. However, it’s not a booking site, just an informative flight search, so even if you find a great fare, you have to find and book it elsewhere. Since ITA doesn’t actually get you to a booking (and, as the aggregators demonstrate, fares aren’t always available everywhere), I didn’t originally include them in the earlier discussion.

Update (April 28, 2006): Reader Todd points out that I forgot to include Qixo.com in my review. He’s right. Ahem:

Qixo.com
Qixo came up short. It offered less information (fare booking classes, provider, etc.) and had the highest price for identical searches. I ran fresh searches for new dates, with the same city pairs. Once again, Kayak had the lowest fare with the most choices and depth of information. Sidestep and Farechase had the same prices, with less info. Pricegrabber was a few dollars more expensive. Bezurk found nothing at all for North American itineraries. And Qixo? $120 more than the others. When the site even worked. Qixo came in last.

United Airlines’ post-bankruptcy strategy includes upgraded premium cabins, hiring new customer-oriented staff, and a little bit o’ NASCAR:

Chief Operating Officer Peter McDonald said in a speech Tuesday evening at Northwestern University that the company has hired NASCAR pit crews to train ramp workers in order to reduce turnaround time at airports.

Indeed, as reported a few weeks ago, United crews have been training at Pit Instruction & Training in Mooresville, North Carolina:

By immersing its supervisory “lead” ramp workers in the adrenalin-pumping realm of Nascar, the airline hopes to cut the average aircraft ground time by eight minutes to 53 minutes, competitive with United’s peers. For the airline’s leisure-oriented “Ted” flights, the goal is to cut ground time by five minutes to 36.

While the NASCAR combination may actually help build crew unity and cooperation, and the shorter turnarounds would indeed affect the bottom line, the possibilities for other combinations, with more or less utilitarian outcomes, are endless. Cabin service working together with MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” perhaps?

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tags: travel | air travel | United Airlines | NASCAR

Ahh, the Onion…

Air India Now Offers Business Caste Seating

April 12, 2006 | Issue 42:15

MUMBAI : Air India, the subcontinent’s largest airline, announced it will offer upgraded Business Caste seating on all flights starting in July. “More legroom, wider seats, and no need to associate with the manual laborers,” a spokesman for the airline said Tuesday. “Our business travelers must have lived good past lives to deserve this.” Air India still ranks at the bottom of the airline industry in customer satisfaction, with a high volume of complaints about cooking fires in the climate-uncontrolled cabins, wandering cows that flight attendants refuse to remove, and the “Untouchable” Coach Caste, which is towed behind Air India jetliners in a giant burlap sack.

tags: travel | air travel | The Onion

The snarksters at Consumerist.com have been running an experiment for the last few days, calling various U.S. airlines’ phone numbers, to see how long it takes them to get through to a real human being. (Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.)

The loser, by a mile? Midwest Airlines, every day.

When they do get through to a customer representative, they might try asking them where they’re located. Soon, phone reps may be REQUIRED to state where they’re located. If U.S. Senate bill S.2553 makes it out the Commerce Committee and to a floor vote, overseas call center workers would need to identify their location to their U.S.-based customers.

While a number of flyers have grumbled about foreign-based phone representatives not understanding U.S. geography, among other complaints, it’s not clear that identifying one’s location would help matters any. It’s not like you have a choice in the phone tree between a domestic or an international call center. This seems like a jingoistic attempt to get people angrier about jobs moving overseas.

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Reindeer can fly… In sausage form, as a pizza topping.

Nome, Alaska’s Airport Pizza delivers its pizzas, including the Reindeer Sausage Pizza (Reindeer Sausage, Feta, Onion, Red Pepper, Diced Tomato, Mozzarella w/ Marinara) to outlying villages, including on islands in the Bering Sea, via airplane.

The exotic fare in this case isn’t the reindeer sausage — heck, you can get it from street vendors in downtown Anchorage — but pizza.

Now does the pizza collect frequent flyer miles for the trip? (The reindeer is out of luck, in more ways than one…)

(image; not pictured: Rudolph)

Christopher Elliott says that those who book fare errors are unethical. He opines that such travelers are wrong to take advantage of someone else’s mistake.

It’s great to be all high and mighty when you KNOW that something is an error. But how can we know if something is a promotion or a mistake? As I wrote last week:

Sure, some of these rates should never have been posted, but with Ryanair and Easyjet regularly selling seats for zero base fare plus taxes, or Spirit’s recent advertised $9 fares to the Caribbean, why shouldn’t the public assume some of these prices are legit?

Someone might also say that a fare that’s quickly pulled might more obviously be an error. But couldn’t those fares have been limited in availability, and thus genuinely sold out?

Given such an environment, in which today’s fare error might be tomorrow’s sale price, there is nothing wrong with expecting a low fare to be honored. ESPECIALLY if it is prepaid. The burden of quality control rests with the seller, not the consumer. And any tickets or rooms actually sold at such low rates should be an incentive to improve accounting procedures in-house, not an opportunity to punish the lucky consumers who booked the deal.

tags: travel | air travel | fare errors