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Yes, Southwest is testing reserved seating, and CEO Gary Kelly posted an explanation on the official Southwest blog. The Baltimore Sun looks at the comment section of the post, and the tenor of responses: negative!

Two pro-open-seating arguments make some sense to me: 1) Some last-minute travelers believe they have a better shot at getting a good seat on Southwest than they would on other airlines, and 2) some people use open seating to try to avoid sitting near potentially unpleasant seatmates.

So how about a compromise: Let anyone who WANTS a reserved seat get one. Guarantee reserved seats to full-fare tickets. (It’s not like you can upgrade on an all-coach flight.) Heck, even charge a couple bucks for a reserved seat, a la European discount carriers or rail companies. Maybe even limit the number of reservations to, say, 60 of the 137 seats on each plane, but let the last-minute full-fare folks override this limit. Board people with seat assignments first, and make only one call for that group. Then do open boarding for the rest.

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tags: travel | Southwest Airlines

Don’t ever let anyone tell you it doesn’t matter what kind of plane you’re on. You could be paying a coach fare but sitting in business, without using miles or upgrade certs. I’m referring to American Airlines’ policy of letting elite members reserve seats in business class on three class planes… on a domestic coach fare.

How does this work? First, you need to be eligible, i.e., an elite member in American AAdvantage, or on a full-fare ticket. Second, when booking a flight, make sure you’re on a three-class plane. American’s 777s between hubs (such as Chicago and Dallas) are such planes. Anytime you see an MD-80 (or -83, or “Super 80″), 757, or 737, you can forget it.

Importantly, American Airlines doesn’t provide a business class service in their domestic business class cabin. You’ll still have to pay $5 for alcoholic beverages, and you don’t get a meal. But you DO get a much better seat.

For people who subscribe to the belief that it’s all about the seat, this is a great deal. For those who want the full premium class service, you’ll be left wanting. (I imagine that international business class travelers who connect to a flight like this are comped into first class, instead of coughing up five bucks for a drink in their business-class seats.)

Added bonus: American is in the process of upgrading their business class seats. Frankly, it seems like kind of a tight fit to me, and it looks like the person in the window seat would have quite a climb to get to the aisle. But it’s a flat seat (if not horizontal). Photo below.

Click to see larger image.

Photographer: © Joe Statz

Westin Hotels are going 100% nonsmoking. Minibars are disappearing from rooms. Now Kempinski Hotels of Germany, backed by the Paris-based Guidance Financial Group, are rolling out a new, halal, 100% alcohol-free chain, called Shaza Hotels.

Aimed at the Muslim traveler, the shariah-compliant chain will be based in Dubai, but it plans to open 20 hotels in urban centers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The lack of booze won’t necessarily be part of the advertisements, though:

the Islamic and Arab angle is being downplayed in the marketing pitch; the promotional literature that expresses, in a contemporary design-led environment, the aesthetic art of living and values of the Middle East and North Africa. Each property will contain unique concepts such as ‘hammam influenced spas and bathrooms and restaurants inspired by an array of regional cuisine’.

Sounds swanky. If successful, the concept might spread elsewhere, too. Just probably not in Cancun.

(image: greybeard)
tags: travel | hotels | halal | sharia | Kempinski | Shaza

I didn’t see this one coming. Boeing is considering shutting down or selling its Connexion division, which offers inflight wireless internet service on many international carriers’ longhaul flights. If it happens, it’s a major loss to business travelers and the internet-addicted.

The weak link in the inflight wi-fi chain has always been in-seat power, and I’m wondering if this is what has slowed adoption, both by the airlines, and by consumers on the flights that actually DO feature the service. To make Connexion really attractive, airlines would have to wire the cabin with power sockets, so you don’t drag multiple batteries with you just to work on the plane. And even then: If you’re on a long flight, you’d better pray that your seat has a working socket, and that you have the necessary adapter to get your juice.

As an aside: When you select seats, be sure to check SeatGuru for both the location of power outlets and the type of cord you need. Even a carrier like American Airlines, which has had in-seat power for some time, doesn’t have power at every row. (The black dot on the seatmap means a socket.)

As reported earlier this month, AirCell and LiveTV are planning to roll out inflight internet within North America soon. But this won’t cover trans-oceanic flights. Hopefully someone else will take over the network and maintain the service.

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tags: travel | air travel | Connexion | Boeing | inflight wi-fi

Keith Alexander offers this fantastic example of the potential frequent flyer mileage you can earn with a credit card:

Ann Scharpf of Huntingtown, Md., scouted around for about 40 friends, neighbors and co-workers who were willing to help her pump her American Airlines Citibank card. She would use her card to cover their groceries and other necessities if they would reimburse her.
Within two months, Scharpf was paying co-workers’ car insurance. And on Saturday mornings, she would buy grocery-store gift cards on her credit card totaling $100 to $800, then hand them over and collect the money from her friends and co-workers. Next, she would deposit the cash and pay off the balance on her card. Once, a Citibank representative called her to inquire why in one day she had bought $1,500 at a Food Lion and then $3,500 at the Giant Food across the street.

Ann Scharpf, I salute you! You just entered the frequent flyer hall of fame in my book. Paying co-workers’ car insurance?!? Hard-freakin’-core. And I thought I was doing well by charging all of my OWN expenses to the card…

At the same time, Alexander cites oft-heard complaints that finding awards you want is hard, and that the “annual credit card fees of $60 to $85, depending on the airline and the credit card, also make the cards less attractive.”

I agree that, if you pay an annual fee for a credit card, you’d better be getting your money’s worth. And you’d better not carry a balance, because the airline-linked cards carry high rates.

Let’s assign an overly conservative value of 1 cent per mile to the miles you earn. If you’re paying a $50 annual fee for your credit card, you’re not breaking even until you’ve earned 5000 miles with your card. If you’re paying $85, the break-even threshold is 8500 miles, etc.

But AFTER you cross that point, I contend the cards are still worth it. (And my 1 cent/mile standard is too tough.) True, hoarding miles is stupid, since miles don’t earn interest and are a devaluing currency, but their value isn’t fixed, either: You can get 1 cent per mile if you cash in your points for a ticket you could buy with cash during a fare sale, or you could get 8 or even 10 cents per mile when you redeem an international premium-class award. (Unsure if it’s better to spend money or miles? Run through the Miles or Buy tutorial.)

Plus, the bonuses you can earn with mileage credit cards are sometimes nutty, and annual-fee waiver offers come around, too. At the low end of bonuses, there’s the Northwest WorldPerks Visa Signature: One current offer gives you 7500 bonus miles with a $90 annual fee, or 5000 bonus miles with a $55 fee, which frankly isn’t great. At the upper end, there’s a United Mileage Plus Visa Signature with the first year’s fee waived and 20,000 bonus miles. And that’s before you spend anything on the card! Even the low-bonus card might be worth it if it earns you sufficient miles through your usage.

Plus, cards are constantly offering bonuses, such as “spend $300 on groceries this month and get double miles,” bonus miles for buying from specific merchants, or annual “anniversary” bonuses. If you tally it up at the end of the year, and you’re not earning more than 1 mile per dollar charged to the card, it may be time for a new card.

Also, some airlines and banks have agreements to offer annual fee rebates to top tier elites. Even better!

Ditch my mileage card? No way. Now if only I could find some trustworthy suckers who will let me charge their car insurance and reimburse me…

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tags: travel | frequent flyer miles | credit cards

Reader Bob writes:

I’m flying AA in November, using miles to fly first class to Hawaii from Ft Myers, Fl… I have attempted to move my departure date one day earlier and have had no success…Seeking the change for two of us… Current reservations have us staying over in LA on the way over… Willing to make the stop on the return in LA/SF etc…. No luck thus far …seeking advice!! THANKS!! Bob

Well, Bob, there are not a lot of options open to you right now that *guarantee* success, but there are few things to do to maximize your chances of getting those seats.

First off, award inventory changes all the time, sometimes several times a day. Keep checking the website to see if there is availability, and keep calling the airline. You have several months to get lucky, so keep trying. (You’ll have to call to make any changes, since American doesn’t allow award ticket changes online.)

I always recommend using the phone for award reservations, even (grudgingly) if an extra fee is involved, because the airlines’ websites generally stink for a complete picture of award availability. They don’t show you all the options, and in most cases ignore partner airlines. (Continental will show some partners, like Northwest, but you’re still better off calling to get the full scoop.)

When you do call, make sure you’re armed with a knowledge of your options. This means knowing what possible combination of flights you would be willing to take: including partner airlines. Go to the airline’s award homepage, and see which airlines go to your destination. Then look up the timetables or use ITA Software’s search (login as a guest) to figure out who’s flying when. Then suggest specific options — first by airline, then by flight (segment-by-segment) — to the phone agent. Their computers are often programmed to just pull up the most direct flight combinations, and to favor their own company flights, so you may need to be proactive. If you don’t like the agent you’re speaking with, or they are unwilling to check individual flights, hang up and call again. Repeat until you get an agent willing to spend the time necessary to search things.

In your case, American Airlines flies to Honolulu (you didn’t say where in Hawaii you were going, so I’m assuming HNL) from Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Also, American is partnered with Hawaiian Airlines, which flies to Honolulu from Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and San Diego. Quite a list of possibilities. You would fly to one of those cities with American and then connect to Hawaiian. Make sure the agent checks flights to HNL for each of those cities until you hit a winner. I’m guessing that the segments to Hawaii are the challenge, and that flights within the lower 48 are probably easier to snag.

If I’m wrong, and the flights out of Ft. Myers are the problem, then consider driving to Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, or Miami. (If you want to keep the return flight to Ft. Myers, you might even consider a one-way car rental, which looks to be about $50…) Naturally, this is an inferior solution, but it’s worth a shot.

A change fee will probably apply (definitely if you add Hawaiian Airlines to the mix), but it may be worth the cost if it gets you where you want to be.

Good luck, and let me know how it works out.

Breaking news: The rumors are true. After years of open-seating, Southwest is rolling out assigned seating beginning July 10 for 200 flights originating in San Diego. The test period is unspecified, but will last “several weeks.”

Crucially, the test will determine if a 25-minute turnaround between flights is viable with assigned seats. No word on how they will be boarding the planes, i.e., whether they’ll keep boarding zones on the basis of check-in time, or if they’ll board by rows, back-to-front, “wilma,” “reverse pyramid,” etc.

This is a huge move by Southwest, and an admission that the open-seating model isn’t a customer favorite.

I’m betting they’ll still keep the A/B/C boarding groups. Just two weeks ago, Southwest sued third-party sites which checked passengers in early, to assure an A-group boarding pass.

In any case, we’ll be watching the test period with great interest. (Readers who fly Southwest from San Diego in coming weeks are invited to write in with reports.)

At the same time, Northwest Airlines just announced that they’ve quietly eliminated row-by-row or zone seating, though they kept seat assignments. They claim the move has shaved five to ten minutes off the boarding time. Why the speed improvement? My guess is that everyone is rushing on board to secure a space for their carry-on bags. Sure, you have a seat assignment, but you still have to fight the masses for the overhead bins. Sounds like fun.

tags: travel | air travel | Southwest Airlines | Northwest Airlines | airplane seating

From the reader mailbag, Lena asks:

We are going with Lufthansa next week to Frankfurt on miles tickets,can we upgrade?If so how?

The short answer is no. If you’re traveling on a ticket “paid for” with miles, then you can’t officially use normal upgrade methods, like miles or certificates, on Lufthansa or any other airline. There are exceptions, though:

1) You may be upgraded if the flight is oversold and you get moved up to make room for someone else. This is called an operational upgrade, or “op-up.” See here for more info. It has happened to me on award tickets, once: Business class award tickets, we were already in our seats, someone else had the same seat numbers on their boarding passes, and we got moved up to first class. Pure, unadulterated luck. So don’t count on it.

2) Some airlines allow for travelers to purchase upgrades at the time of check-in. It all depends on availability, timing, potentially your status in the frequent flyer program, and above all, luck. United, for example, doesn’t seem to differentiate between paid and award tickets when they offer to sell you the upgrade at their automated kiosks. (We got an upsell offer a few weeks ago on award tickets from Washington-Dulles to Amsterdam — $550 to move from economy to business — which we declined, since we already had seats 21 H and J.)

Since you’re traveling with Lufthansa, there is no option 2 that I am aware of. Readers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve never heard of upgrades for purchase on LH. You’re most likely going to be sitting in coach. But have a great trip!

And readers should feel free to send in other questions by clicking on the “contact” link at the top right of the blog.

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tags: travel | air travel

Cleaner airport bathrooms
Airports vow to keep their bathrooms cleaner. Best bathrooms in the country: Fort Smith Regional Airport in Arkansas (pictured), brilliantly described as “conversation-stopping clean.”

Cleaner jets
Hate taking red-eye flights? Now feel guilty taking them, too. New reports indicate they harm the environment more than daytime flights. (Kinda hard to avoid for inter-continental trips…) Help may be on the way, as research progresses on cleaner-burning jet fuel alternatives.

Power up your ‘pod inflight
Ingenious! A company that sells a unit that lets you recharge your iPod or other small electronic device by tapping into your airplane seat’s audio jack! It won’t power your laptop, but still! (via Mobissimo)

Power up with pie
Normally I don’t like to pass along press releases or stuff that the PR firms send to me. It makes me feel dirty, and it makes me want to freshen up at the conversation-stoppingly clean airport bathroom in the Fort Smith Regional Airport. But this one was just too silly to pass up: Starting tomorrow, Four Points by Sheraton hotels will be offering pie in their hotels — free to guests celebrating their birthday, as well as to platinum members of Starwood Preferred Guest. Tomorrow, the pie is free for everyone, it seems. Guerilla marketing hits the streets tomorrow as well, with free pie in New York City. And joining the trend of hotels pumping scents into the air, the chain will start misting their public spaces with the scent of baking apple pie. Why apple pie? They did a survey, and found that it “will spur thoughts of childhood (27 percent), home (39 percent) and holidays (48 percent).” As much as I like apple pie, do you really think it’s a good idea to make road-weary business travelers think longingly of home and carefree youth?

Polls that aren’t about pie
Brown is the new black. And drunks are the new babies. Drunk passengers now eclipse screaming babies as the most hated flying companions. Congratulations, drunk flyers!

Finally, shameless self-promotion
This blog was proudly featured in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, along with Gary Leff, Ed Hasbrouck, and inflighthq. Thanks for the recognition, and a hearty welcome to the new WSJ readers!

tags: travel | pie

A deceptively simple question, without a simple answer. For starters, not all upgrades are the same. There are the “unlimited free domestic upgrades” for elites at Continental, but good luck getting them on a popular route, especially if you’re not an ultra top-tier frequent flyer. There are the electronic certificates (e.g., at United Airlines), which improve your chances if you’re a low-rung elite, but you still need to sweat it out, often at the gate. Then there’s the option of using miles. But how successful are travelers at actually GETTING the upgrade?

To really answer the question, we need empirical data, which the airlines are not about to volunteer. A few websites are stepping up to the plate, but they all have a way to go:

UpgradeSuccess.com is building a searchable database of upgrade requests and their successes and failures for the major US airlines. The data are still pretty thin (Northwest has the most data, with just under 1000 flight segments) but the site has an option for sorting the results by elite status. If there were more flights entered into the system, it might be nice to sort by flight route, too.

Looking more globally, WebFlyer maintains an index for both award tickets and upgrades, ranking the airlines in both aggregate and monthly terms. But they don’t tell us how many segments have actually been entered. (n=??) Looking at Webflyer’s May upgrade data, there are only three airlines listed, with Air Canada showing 0% and American showing 100%. I’m pretty sure that Air Canada’s flyers are doing better than that, and American’s are doing worse. The site also collapses domestic and international flights, so you’re comparing domestic U.S. upgrades to first class with, say, trans-Pacific upgrades from coach to business class. (The latter is much more desirable than an upgrade from Chicago to Detroit.)

Both of these sites can only function with your help. So go, enter your segments! Tell them when you tried to upgrade, when you failed, and when you succeeded. Improve the data. It’ll be doing everyone a public service, and maybe in a year or so we can empirically say which airline is best for upgrades. At least for that year.

tags: travel | air travel | upgrades | first class | business class

Beginning in August, Delta is improving its service on transcontinental flights, USA Today reports.

The No. 3 airline, which is in bankruptcy reorganization, plans to renovate 100 of its 477 full-size jets for long-haul routes, with two cabins and digital TV and music throughout the plane. The planes, all Boeing 757s or 737s, will be equipped with 24 channels of live TV, interactive video games and MP3 audio programming offering more than 1,600 songs. First class will have leather seats. The first of the upgraded planes will appear on transcontinental flights. Within two years, the renovated planes will be available on all Delta domestic routes longer than 1,750 miles.
[…]
Delta officials said its new transcontinental service will serve both Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York, as well as Boston, Atlanta and Cincinnati in the East; Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle on the West Coast.

This makes a lot more sense than Delta’s doomed decision to put its all-coach Song subsidiary on the cross-country routes. Especially on the New York-Los Angeles route, you’ve got two markets — investment bankers and Hollywood — which have first class travel privileges included in their pay packages. Why give your competition this high-margin business?

We’ll see what the actual offering on the plane will be. What will the catering be? What kind of seat — we know it’s leather, but does it go flat? How much pitch between rows? Live TV at every seat is nice, but Delta only promises a two-class offering, not the three-class service that United “p.s.” and American feature on the same routes. This is clearly a response to the apparent success of United’s recently-revamped premium transcontinental product.

I suspect that Delta’s two-class planes will not woo away the biggest spenders, but they will make Delta customers happier. Especially those who don’t live in New York or California.

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Joel Widzer points to a quirk in the international conventions governing passports and immigration. Sometimes a valid passport isn’t valid.

For example, some countries require that your passport be valid beyond the length of your visit. Others look for entry stamps or visas from other countries to deny entry (e.g., if you have a stamp from Israel, you need to get a different passport in order to enter Lebanon or Sudan.)

Years ago, I almost got stuck at LAX before a flight to Fiji, because Air New Zealand noticed that my passport was set to expire in 2 months and 29 days. Indeed, Fiji requires that passports are valid for 3 full months, regardless of how long you intend to remain in the country, and I was completely unaware of that rule. At the time (this was in 1994), Air New Zealand staff took my ticket and passport, made some calls, and two hours later I was issued a boarding pass. In Fiji, I was sternly lectured, but allowed to enter; the passport control officer was already aware of my “special case.” I got lucky, on a rookie mistake. Would officials be as forgiving today? Who knows. Don’t take that chance.

The US State Department maintains a list of special entry rules, listed by country. Be sure to review that list, or better yet check with the embassy of the country you’re visiting.

And, in anticipation of September, National Passport Month, make sure your passport is valid.

(image: hjl on flickr)
tags: travel | passports