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Air Canada has apparently instituted a new policy: Delay our flight, receive a four-digit bill.

The airline sent Gus Fuentes a $1,350 bill for causing a flight from London to Toronto to be delayed. (Passengers, who were presumably similarly inconvenienced by ol’ Gus, might want to band together and send him a separate invoice.)

The airline says he was abusive, and he was forced to leave the plane before takeoff. He says they overreacted.

While it’s amusing, it’s also disturbing in some sense. Who’s to say what might warrant a fine from an airline? Where do you draw the line? “Sir, please put your shoes back on. Your feet smell. That’ll be $50.”

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tags: travel | Air Canada

Upgraded: First class meals on American Airlines
If your upgrade clears, your inflight meal may improve. Artisan breads, Ghirardelli chocolates, and the option of an antipasto/cheese snack in lieu of the ramekin of mixed nuts. Alternatives to the hot nuts? Blasphemy!
(Thanks, Benet!)

Downgraded: Gay travelers …also on American Airlines
Accusations of homophobia on board AA flight 45 from Paris to New York are percolating through the internet after the New Yorker’s article on a gay couple whose cuddles and smooches were met with flight attendant intervention. An attendant with “Texas hair, like from the nineteen-sixties,” demanded that the couple cease and desist. Ruckus ensued.
(Thanks, Stephen and John!)

Upgraded: Business class seats on bmi
Britain’s Star Alliance member, bmi, which operates a Manchester, UK hub for its international flights, is going fully lie-flat with its business-class seats.

Upgraded: Hotel bathrooms
Beds are better, furnishings nicer, and now, nicer hotel bathrooms, too. And missing? Tubs!

Upgraded: Passport photos
Downgraded: British security
A British man used his two-year old daughter’s passport to travel to the Netherlands. I guess he’s a young-looking fella.

Upgraded, maybe: Connexion inflight internet
Intercontinental internet junkies can hold out some hope: Panasonic is trying to step in and take over as provider of airplane broadband, after Boeing announced the forthcoming shutdown of its Connexion service. But it won’t just transition seamlessly, and will run on a different network, so don’t celebrate yet. As long as it works. Wonk out on the details here, if that’s your fancy.

Downgraded: Wine bars in Portland Airport
I love wine bars in airports, like the Vino Volo at Washington-Dulles. But if you’re going to have one, put it AFTER security… Portland, Oregon’s airport wine bar has been put on the deathwatch.

(image of hot nuts: ejpm99)
tags: travel

Some good news for U.S. consumers. The Department of Transportation isn’t relaxing rules governing the advertisement of airfares after all. (Background here, here, and here.)

What this means: Airlines can’t advertise a $100 base fare and then slap a $100 fuel surcharge on there. They’ll need to include fuel surcharges in the base fare in all marketing. No Ryanair-style pricing in the U.S.

Other policies were considered, including both more and less restrictive options. See here for a full breakdown of the alternative proposals, and which airlines supported which option.

Though more “total price” advertising would be welcome, at this point I’m content to see status quo rule the day.

tags: travel | fares

Harrassed by security for being too slow to take off your shoes? Frustrated that our luggage security is “in crisis” after years of warning? Want to kick back and relax, all with an airport security theme? You’re in luck: On the heels of bombornot.com, there’s another time-killing airport security game.

Your task: Remove prohibited items from luggage, or from passengers’ bodies. The rules keep changing as items go from being prohibited, to not, and back again. Audio provides snarky airport announcements. Hours of fun.

Click here to play.

(Thanks, Todd!)

tags: travel | games | airport security | TSA

Yesterday, the New York Times featured a special section on business travel, including an article by Christopher Elliott on how blogs are starting to change business travel. This site was featured.

Today, Barbara Correa summarizes the article on Yahoo! News, with one comment that I need to address:

Is there something too cozy about customers writing about the airlines, hotels and cars that can award them with upgrades and more? From what I’ve read on most of the blogs written by real road warriors, they never shy from telling it like it is. After all, getting the frustrations off their chest is the main reason most of them do it.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. On the one hand, it sounds like she is accusing bloggers, including myself, of accepting swag from the travel companies. Yet we’re also honest in our ventings? Let me address this head-on.

No travel company has ever offered me an upgrade, a discount, a free ticket, a wad of miles, an envelope of cash, or, frankly, anything at all. And I’ve never accepted anything for free. I have a code of ethics posted in the “Policies” link at the top of the page. It’s pretty straightforward, I think.

In reality, Correa’s question is a fair one. But it’s not fair to single out bloggers. The question could equally be asked of travel journalists — do they ever get “too cozy” with their subject matter?

Rest assured, if this blogger gets cozy with anyone, it’ll be with the missus.

(image: Team Horton)
tags: travel | blogging

All-business class startup carrier Maxjet is running another fare sale. The deal:

$999 INCLUDING all taxes and fees for travel between London-Stansted and Washington-Dulles or New York-JFK, in business class. That’s a great deal.

Book before midnight on October 1, 2006 for travel between November 1, 2006 and February 28, 2007.
Use Promo code: ANNV06

Related:
- Another all-business class airline…
- All-biz airlines filling planes… and knife-wielding passengers’ stomachs
- Do we really need ANOTHER all-business class airline to London?
- MaxJet’s fatal flaw?

Readers subscribing to this site’s Atom feed may be experiencing problems, including truncated posts. I strongly recommend switching over to the FeedBurner RSS feed, which should solve the problem. The Atom feed stinks.

Thanks for the heads-up, Bill!

Back in July, US Airways was widely mocked for announcing that they’d be putting advertisements on the barf bags in the seat pockets. But this may be the winner in the airline “revenue enhancement” race to the customer-service bottom:

One airline executive attending the third-annual World Low Cost Airlines Congress here describes how a certain Asian low-cost carrier uses blankets to increase its nonfare revenue: When in-flight sales of blankets aren’t going well, the flight attendants, who get a commission on sales, ask the pilots to crank up the air conditioning.

“Certain Asian carrier” ?? Give us a name!

That practice goes way beyond selling duty free goods, headsets, and the airline’s credit card. It even goes beyond turning the cabin into a 600 mph bazaar. It actively increases passenger discomfort mid-flight in order to eke out a few extra pennies.

Heinous. (And it affirms why I never wear shorts on a plane.)

This kind of anti-consumer behavior deserves public humiliation. Expose who the culprit is, and out them for what they’re doing. So who’s on the short list? Which airlines in Asia sell blankets in-flight?

Related:
- US Airways finds a new billboard inside the cabin: the barf bag
- Art of the air sickness bag — an online exhibition

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Flying internationally into Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport? Bringing in some duty free liquor? Taking a cab? Better hide the hooch, and hide it well.

A number of Somalian cabbies in the area, citing their religious beliefs, have been refusing to transport passengers who are carrying or are even suspected of carrying liquor. It’s become pervasive enough that the city is considering a system for marking cabs that are anti-booze.

Driving a taxi means transporting all kinds of people, most of whom probably have some habits that you find repulsive in some way or another. Where do you draw the line? Perhaps “cab driver” isn’t the best career choice for these particular Minnesotans.

I’m a fan of FareCompare’s fare drop alerting service, which I’ve mentioned before here. The alerts go out as soon as a lower fare is loaded into the system, sometimes several hours before it’s actually even available for purchase. That beats the pants off of Travelocity and Expedia alerts.

Until now, the problem was the volume of alerts. If you signed up for their e-mails, you’d get three messages a day, essentially one for every instance of new fares being published. If any flights, to anywhere in North America, dropped, you got an e-mail. That’s great if you’re completely flexible about your destinations, but really, how many people want to travel to Ketchikan, Alaska in November?

Now, finally, you can limit alerts to just those cities you want. Once you’ve signed up for alerts (see the box on the left side of their homepage), you can click “manage” and tinker with the settings. Big thumbs up on this improvement.

It would be great if the Star Alliance could take a break from expansion long enough to improve its cross-airline benefits. SkyTeam has recently (or, recently to me, anyway) made some major steps in that area: cross-airline club access is much smoother than it once was and accessing a partner club does not require a ticket on that partner airline, and all SkyTeam elites get access to preferred seating at the front of the plane (no more legroom, but faster getting off) and in exit rows on every Sky airline. It’s only a shame they don’t really have any airlines worth getting excited about.

Hear, hear.

(Except for the fact that Star Alliance does need to find itself some coverage in South America, now that Varig has become a shadow of its former self.)

I have a number of quibbles with airline alliances. While they offer convenience and single-ticket travel across a range of airlines, they aren’t yet a perfectly well-oiled machine, from the consumer’s point of view.

- As Cole says, benefits aren’t clear across partners. Can you sit in exit rows, or not? Can you use the lounge, or not? Priority baggage handling? Etc.

- You need a Ph.D. in Milesology to figure out how many miles you’ll actually earn in your “home” program. Buy a ticket that involves SAS, ANA, and Lufthansa, and you might only earn 25%, 70%, and 50%, respectively, of the miles flown if you credit a United Mileage Plus account. Ridiculous!

- Alliances are potentially monopolistic. (SkyTeam has already been investigated for price-fixing.) With multiple companies selling the same itinerary, competition concerns are appropriate.

Now, on top of it all, Gary Leff points to another problem: Fluctuating redemption restrictions. Some alliance members already seem to discriminate against some partners. Try inquiring about award ticket availabilty using Lufthansa’s miles. Then try the same award — same dates, flights, class, etc. — using US Airways miles. Odds are that the availability differs.

Now United is putting the kibosh on business class awards on Singapore Airlines, long considered one of the best (and most luxurious) carriers. Now, under the new rules, if you’re trying to book seats in business class, you can’t book two flights in a row on Singapore. Let’s say you fly over the Pacific in business class on Singapore, and you want to another destination in Asia, also on Singapore. That connecting flight has to be in coach. Even though you’re “paying” the full business rate in miles.

You can avoid this by flying two different Star Alliance airlines, but why why why is this sort of gamesmanship necessary?

If the Star Alliance is really worth anything for consumers, then the alliance’s management will clamp down on this sort of intra-alliance discrimination. Don’t hold your breath.

Northwest Airlines is famous for flying around planes that haven’t been built in decades. Their DC-9s and DC-10s may be classic, old-school aircraft, but the age is really starting to show.

The hardcore aviation insiders at IAG ran some numbers on Northwest’s fleet, and find that some of the oldest planes are causing some of the worst delays.

One single plane was responsible for 2564 minutes of delays alone, year to date.

This isn’t really a surprise, considering that the DC-9 hasn’t been built since October 1982, but the airline should really start looking at replacing these tired old birds.

Unfortunately, there’s no way for Northwest’s travelers to know which individual aircraft will be operating on their route, so you can’t avoid the worst planes. But you might try avoiding the DC-9s as a general rule, unless you’re into vintage aircraft. Or you’re into delays.

tags: travel | Northwest Airlines | flight delays | DC-9 | DC-10