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Northwest axes its standby program
While yesterday’s guest blogger Tyler Colman couldn’t hop on the earlier flight of his choice on American Airlines, he should thank his lucky stars that American still actually has free standby as an option.

Today, with a press release that trumpets the good news and buries the sad reality, Northwest proudly proclaimed the expansion of its “FlyNow option,” which allows travelers to confirm flight changes on the day of travel for a $25 fee. But here’s the real nitty-gritty:

Northwest WorldPerks Elite customers will still maintain the ability to stand by for alternate flights throughout the entire day of departure and will not incur a fee if a seat becomes available. Beginning April 24, all other customers traveling on non-refundable tickets will be charged a $25 fee for same day flight changes, whether boarding via standby status or confirming through the FlyNow option. The $25 fee for boarding via standby status replaces the current option that allows non-Elite customers traveling on non-refundable tickets to stand by for eligible flights at no cost.

Bottom line: Free standby is gone at Northwest, much like it’s no longer available at US Airways. You’ll pay $25 to confirm, or to standby. Why isn’t there a discount for the non-guaranteed standby option?? (Hat tip to reader Sarah in the comments!)

United kills Silver Wings Plus and Ameniti
United has pulled the plug on its two travel clubs. Silver Wings Plus, aimed at seniors, and Ameniti, targeting paying business and first class flyers, are closing shop at the end of June 2007. Ameniti was fairly short-lived, but Silver Wings Plus was around forever. The clubs each cost money to join and provided discounts for certain tickets. (Ameniti gave free companion tickets on full-fare tickets.) But therein was the problem. Much like learning the rules of a frequent flyer program seems to require an advanced degree, the rules for getting the benefit of these clubs weren’t always obvious. Members will receive prorated membership fee refunds. (Thanks to reader Richard!)

Delta to offer carbon offsets
Travelers feeling guilty about the carbon emissions spewing out of their plane’s jet engines will be able to buy carbon offsets through the Delta website beginning June 1. It won’t be mandatory, like all-business class Silverjet requires. It’s more like Expedia and Travelocity’s optional offsets.

Some seat changes on American cost $15
Bought your American Airlines ticket from a travel agent or website other than aa.com? Then you’ll pay $15 to change your seat assignment over the phone with the airline. Seat changes via the American website are still free.

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Wineblogger and friend of Upgrade: Travel Better Dr. Vino pays us a visit today with this report from the field.

On Friday afternoon, I made my way to LaGuardia to catch my American flight to O’Hare. Since I knew I would be cutting it close with my appointment soon after scheduled arrival, I tried to go standby the hour earlier flight.

No dice.

During the check-in on AA.com, there was no option to fly stand by on an earlier flight. When I got to the gate of the 2 PM flight, the agent told me it was unlikely that I would get on the flight.

“Would it have mattered if I had gotten on the list when I did the check-in on the web site,” I inquired?

“Nah,” she said glancing at my ticket. “You don’t have status.”

Truer words were never spoken. In the ensuing half hour, I became enthralled with my plunging fortunes, prominently on display for all in the gate area to see (providing they could work out the short form of my name). I started in slot #6, which struck me as distinctly possible.

Soon I was at #7, then #11. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, I plunged to #24. An entire bus of passengers with “status” (in the frequent flier program) must have arrived. When I saw my fortunes rise only marginally to #22 I knew it was time to pony up for the wi-fi and settle in a few gates down.

Stand-by, it’s not just a function of being early. It’s a function of being big.

– Tyler Colman, a.k.a. Dr. Vino

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Three offers that might help you if you’re looking to beef up your frequent flyer account.

(Don’t forget to spend some of those miles, too, you know… They don’t earn interest!)

1) Delta
Airlines have a bajillion partners through whom you can earn miles, and Delta is adding an incentive for you to spend your cash with Delta partners. Register here. Then, through May 31, you’ll get 5000 bonus miles for every set of 5 Delta SkyMiles partners you transact with, up to a 25,000-mile bonus.

2) US Airways
Reader Matthew points to this promo from online bank Netbank for new customers opening accounts:

4000 Dividend miles for opening a netbank checking account and keeping a minimum average daily balance of $500 USD for 1 month. Miles arrive 4-6 weeks after this. They have a similar promotion for their CD and money market products, but each requires more cash. Offers CAN be used in combination for a total of up to 13,000 miles. Not sure if miles arrive in lump sum or if they’re given over time.

Miles are not elite-qualifying, so you won’t hit Gold or Chairman’s Preferred any faster this way. But they’re still redeemable miles. (Thanks Matthew!)

3) United
This isn’t a new offer. In fact, it dates back to October. But I get asked about this semi-regularly, and the fact that it’s still ongoing amazes me. Chase is still offering the United Mileage Plus Visa with no annual fee for the first year, and with a whopping 25,000 bonus miles. If you’re looking for a Visa for your business, they have a 1-year no-fee card with 25,000 bonus miles for commercial accounts, too. See here for the latter card. Previously posted here in slightly greater detail.

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It’s tax day, and what better opportunity to ask what taxes you’re paying when you travel, and where that money is going?

Of the big three — air, hotel, and car rental — air travel within the U.S. is the most tax-standardized (which isn’t saying much). Hotel occupancy taxes vary by municipality, and car rental taxes range wildly depending on how badly the state or local government wants to stick it to out-of-towners.

Air taxes, on the other hand, are more readily summarized. But when you learn about how some of those taxes are spent, you may not be happy.

Bob Porterfield of the Associated Press does the heavy lifting for us and tallies them up — 7.5% federal taxes, $3.40 segment taxes for each leg of the flight, $2.50 security fees per segment, and the airport-imposed passenger facility charges of up to $4.50 per landing.

But the real kicker is where some of those monies — in particular the 7.5% federal taxes on all scheduled air tickets — are going:

The federal government has taken billions of dollars from the taxes and fees paid by airline passengers every time they fly and awarded it to small airports used mainly by private pilots and globe-trotting corporate executives.

Fan-freakin’-tastic. Not only do these folks get to opt out of the mass-market security hassles, they get subsidized by the general public till to do it.

You may be asking if private aviation pays a different set of charges to cover its use of America’s overstretched aviation systems. Yes, and no. Mostly no.

Passenger taxes are collected in noncommercial aviation only in instances involving the fractional ownership of private jets, air charter operations and small commuter flights. Instead, it contributes to America’s air transit infrastructure in the form of a fuel tax that covers just a fraction of the services it uses.

For the most part, private jets don’t pay taxes, and certainly not nearly the percentage of taxes to which commercial travelers have gotten accustomed.

So are private jets paying enough? Nope.

A study released in February by the FAA said it cost $2.4 billion just to provide air traffic control for private and corporate planes in 2005. The industry contributed just $516 million in fuel taxes that year.

So how do you fix the disparity? Uniform, distance-based taxation? Fuel taxes? Landing fees? I don’t know, but I’d love to hear your ideas.

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Several great tips rolled in as responses to recent posts on car rentals. Some were posted to comments, but in case you missed them, I’m upgrading them to a post of their own:

Max out your dropoff time
Reader Jason, a former employee of one of the major rental car chains, responding to a post about disappearing grace periods for late returns, offered this advice:

Make sure the rental agent updates your pickup time if you arrive after your scheduled pick up time (i.e. scheduled to pick up at 2pm and you don’t arrive until 3pm). If you arrive early, the computers will likely set your pickup time to the actual time you pickup the car, but if you arrive late it’s up to you and/or the agent to update your pickup time. This little trick has caught a lot of renters who return at the same time they picked up the car, but still get the late fees.

International rentals: Test-drive local booking sites
Reader NPM, author of the Porto City Guide (or Oporto, if you prefer) offers this tip:

Internationally, renting online through local branches can be cheaper than using US major car rental companies’ websites — even for the same company. For instance, in Portugal www.budgetportugal.com tends to be much cheaper than budget.com.

Warehouse discounts for underage renters
Reader Brent offered this tip on saving money if you’re under the age of 25:

Get an Executive membership at Costco. The cost is 100$ but you get the membership right away and it’s worth it. Then rent a car from Budget Car Rentals. The executive Costco membership waives the 21-24 underage driver fee (savings of 25$/day), allows you a free upgrade in car category, so basically if you’re going to get a full size vehicle, you only pay for what a mid-size would cost - and finally they also waive 10% for being a Costco executive member.

After four days, you’ve broken even! And the Costco executive membership is yours to keep…

Know the upsell speech
Finally, over at the Consumerist, they got their hands on Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s script which their associates use to try to convince you to buy their loss/collision coverage. Read it and ignore the temptation to spend your money unnecessarily.

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A reminder: Reader tips are always welcome! Just use the “contact” link at the top right of every page, or leave a comment.

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Related:
- Reader mail: If you’re under 25, how do you rent a car without huge surcharges?
- Reader mail: What happened to car rental late-return grace periods?
- Rental car agent blows smoke up my backside, redux
- Loss of use? Get lost.

For the last year, the big story on international travel was the all-business class airlines — Maxjet, Eos Airlines, Silverjet, L’Avion, and the (defunct?) MiMa. But the other end of the travel spectrum — the no-frills economy class travel segment — saw two major steps forward this week.

Zoom, the Canadian-British discounter, has jumped its earlier hurdles and received approval to fly from London-Gatwick to New York-JFK. Flights are scheduled to start June 21, 2007.

Zoom’s service onboard is generally well-liked, though you need to be careful and read the fine print if you want to avoid add-on fees. Baggage policy in particular is a potential snag: You can only check 44 pounds total (not per suitcase) without incurring a surcharge. Other airlines offer 50 pounds each for two bags. Better pack light.

Separately, European uber-discounter Ryanair is reportedly getting into the trans-Atlantic game, using the same pricing model that they’re famous for: Crazy-low fares, with add-ons for everything else, from checked bags, to beverages, to mandatory surcharges for wheelchair service for all passengers.

The new airline technically won’t be part of the European operations of Ryanair, but will stand alone. A fleet of up to 50 Airbus A350s or Boeing 787s, neither of which are actually being built yet, would ferry passengers over the ocean for as little as $12 plus fees and add-ons.

Unlike Zoom, which will fly to JFK, one of the busiest international airports in the world, the new Ryanair subsidiary would fly to smaller ports like Baltimore, Providence, and Islip, NY.

It’ll be interesting to see how other airlines will respond — either by attempting to lobby Congress to somehow regulate the competition out of existence, or by actually treating the newcomers as real competition. With Zoom and Ryanair coming to North American shores, and with Spirit leading the way in homegrown nickel-and-diming, I’m not holding out much hope for real improvement in service.

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Ian at Brave New Traveler is running a contest for the funniest travel photos.

They can be pictures of you, or pictures taken by you, as long as they’re from your travels. The photo doesn’t even have to be that funny, as long as the story that goes with it is hi-freakin’-larious.

It’s a fun idea. I’m sure I can do better than this, but the cheesy travel photo supply is low on the laptop…

Most of my more amusing pictures are from pre-digital days, so my only offering (for now) is this image from my friend Barbara’s apartment in Amsterdam.

It’s not a picture of a collegiate me making an ass of myself sticking a finger into a Lenin bust’s nose in a Moscow subway station, but you work with what you’ve got.

Downgraded: Lavender
Update: The controversial and lame American Airlines website for women got a minor redesign, as Meg at the Consumerist noticed. See the before-and-after screenshots above. The criticism must have gotten to them. Gone is the lavender flight search box, though it’s still a dumbed-down version with fewer options than the main search page. Is this progress?

Upgraded: US Airways, Downgraded: Southwestern temperance
The booze is back in the Land of Enchantment! US Airways is once again serving alcoholic drinks on flights to and from New Mexico. Recall that they got busted for serving liquor without a license. Tipple with impunity.

Downgraded: Late night arrivals at Detroit; Upgraded: Odds of a PBOR
It happened again. Passengers were stuck on a plane for hours, bathrooms had no water, etc. A late-arriving Spirit Airlines flight from Cancun couldn’t be processed after landing (at 11 p.m.), because Homeland Security’s Customs/Immigration agents had gone home for the night. It took until 4 a.m. the next day for passengers to be let out. Update: Or the plane landed early! And Customs’ computers were down. And passengers left the plane at 12:30 a.m., if you believe Customs. Or later, depending on who’s telling the story.

Upgraded: Lufthansa first class seating
No preview images yet, but Lufthansa is upgrading their first class cabins, beginning with winter 2008. The new seats were meant to debut with the A380, but given the delivery delays, they’re just rolling them out anyway.

Upgraded, potentially: Baggage screening
Assuming the bill survives a veto threat from President Bush, airports across America could receive new equipment that supposedly screens baggage faster and more accurately than previous versions. Why the veto threat? The bill also contains a provision permitting TSA agents to unionize.

Downgraded: Flights from LAX
United Airlines and Los Angeles World Airports are having a spat about the rent. United says the rent hike is a violation of the lease agreement, but until the dust settles, they’re charging passengers who board a flight at LAX an extra $10 to cover the difference, even though the actual costs to the airline are allegedly a lot less. Now Delta and US Airways have followed suit and raised fares out of LAX by the same $10. Lovely.

Upgraded: Baltimore!
Layover at BWI? Grab a glass of wine at the newest branch of Vino Volo, the chain of in-airport wine bars. Other locations include Washington Dulles, Sacramento, and Seattle. (Via Jaunted)

Oh no, here we go again. About a year ago we had the hub-bub over the standing seats (which, for the record, I still believe existed). Now, new and improved for 2007: Rear-facing seats!

Rob at the Airline Hub pointed to this article in the Times of London last night, and the folks at the IAG blog posted the above image today.

This configuration makes me practically pine for standing seats! Can you imagine crawling out from the window in such a configuration? According to the Times, this is a real possibility:

Ten airlines, including one British carrier, are considering turning half their economy-class seats to face the opposite way to the other half to squeeze in an extra column of seats along the aircraft.

Airlines could add up to 50 seats to each aircraft and increase the seat pitch, the gap between one seat and the seat in front, by four inches (10cm).

Rear-facing seats aren’t new, per se. Business class seats on British Airways have alternated between forward and reverse-facing seats for some time. But such an arrangement is new for economy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new economy option is designed by the Premium Aircraft Interiors Group (PAIG), the same company that designed the BA Club World seats.

But business class seats have a degree of privacy that economy seats simply don’t have. Not only will crawling over your neighbors be harder, but you’ll be staring at your neighbor’s face. And romantic couples won’t be getting too frisky in this configuration.

So, who are the ten airlines that are reportedly considering this puzzle-piece seating arrangement?

American Airlines may think it’s onto something new and exciting with its lame website for women, but it’s hardly a new approach. Check out this 1968 advertisement from United Airlines. “Some of our best businessmen… are women!”

Southwest Airlines may be bringing back their honey-roasted peanuts (allergies be damned!) but longhaul carriers might consider adding cherries to the snack mix. The melatonin in dried cherries apparently makes them a good jetlag-fighting snack.

…when flying east (say from New York to London) travelers should eat a handful of dried cherries (which have even greater levels of melatonin than fresh cherries) 30 minutes before trying to sleep. Once at their destination, they should eat a handful of cherries 30 minutes before going to bed every night for the same number of nights as the time change. (For a five-hour time shift, eat cherries for five consecutive nights.) When heading west, do the same regime, only eat your cherries the night before departure.”

Just be careful if you try to bring your own cherry pie onto the plane, especially if it’s filled with particularly gooey, gelatinous filling. Some overzealous TSA agents have confiscated pies in the past, despite TSA Director Kip Hawley’s public reminder that “pie is not a liquid.”

Now, with this jet lag research, you’ve got a defense. If anyone gives you a hard time, insist that your cherry pie is for medicinal purposes. “It’s a prescription pie!”

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American Airlines has launched a website aimed at women. Is this a step in the right direction, or a marketer gone amok?

Granted, I’m a man, and I’m not in marketing, but I think the site is awful. For starters, I’m skeptical of a gender-specific airline booking site to begin with. How gendered is a plane ticket? After all, this is American Airlines, a traditional international airline, and not Hooters Air or its women-oriented equivalent. (Chippendales Air? “Chicks dig planes!” Umm, no.)

But I could understand it more if American were pitching itself as an airline that actually catered to women’s needs more than other airlines did. But what are women’s needs, when it comes to air travel, and how could American really cater to those needs any better than their competition?

More after the jump…
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