US Airways reduces the value of frequent flyer programs further with their latest policy change. Here’s the official statement of the changes to the US Airways Dividend Miles program:

Accrual
Tickets purchased on/after March 1, 2008 for travel on US Airways on/after May 1, 2008 will earn the actual number of miles flown and will no longer earn a minimum of 500 miles per segment.
Tickets flown on partner airlines after May 1, 2008 will earn the actual number of miles flown.
Tickets purchased prior to March 1, 2008 will continue to earn the 500 mile minimum for travel after May 1, 2008. Accrual on flight segments greater than 500 miles in length are not impacted by this change.

Redemption
Members redeeming miles for award travel online within 14-days of departure will be assessed a quick ticketing fee of $50 per ticket.
A quick ticketing fee of $75 per award ticket will continue to apply for award tickets purchased from US Airways Reservations. Chairman’s and Platinum Preferred members booking within 14-days (both online and by phone) are exempt from the fee.

The “quick-ticketing fee” is not an innovation. American has been doing it for years, and United followed suit just over a year ago. It’s obnoxious, and purely a cash-grab with no sensible justification, but it’s not a new idea.

What IS a new idea is the elimination of the minimum mileage for short flights. Until now, travelers on short hops were able to console themselves with the knowledge that they’d at least get a few miles for their trouble. This will make earning elite status harder, too. (Which might be a corporate goal.)

What remains to be seen is if when other airlines will follow suit and eliminate the minimum mileage earned.

Another unknown at this point: how US Airways’ partner airlines will credit US Airways flights. For example, US Airways flights can accrue miles in a United Mileage Plus account. As of this morning, this page on United’s website still lists a 500-mile minimum accrual rate for US Airways flights credit to Mileage Plus. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Yay. Aren’t these programs fun?

The tide continues to turn against smokers at North American hotels. Sheraton and Four Points, both part of the Starwood group, are the latest to ban smoking at all properties in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean, much as their corporate cousin Westin did a few years earlier.

This isn’t just about the market responding to a smaller population of smokers, or a kindly gesture designed to improve your longevity. It’s also a way for the hotel to cut costs, since cleaning a smoky room is more time-consuming and expensive than cleaning a non-smoking room. And minimizing the variation between hotel rooms, by eliminating an entire class of rooms, makes it easier to manage inventory.

Nonsmokers are celebrating. Smokers are inevitably planning their boycott.

Related:
- Nicotine jitters: Another hotel chain goes non-smoking
- Smoking prohibitions: Hurdles and tradeoffs
- Marriott hotels to eliminate smoking in all its North American brands
- The captain has turned on the smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em sign…

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Reader Joe writes in:

I live in Ventura, California, and I was looking at a flight to Philadelphia. But the fares don’t make sense. It’s cheaper for me to fly from Santa Barbara to LAX to Philadelphia than it is to fly nonstop LAX-PHL. I don’t get it. It’s cheaper to connect at LAX??! I’m flying further, so why is it less? About $80 less, too. Why??

Ahh, airline economics. Use more of a resource, pay less! But believe it or not there’s sometimes a logic to it.

In fact, this is quite common. I recently faced a similar thing when buying a ticket. It was cheaper to fly from Greensboro to Charlotte, and onward to San Diego, that to fly nonstop from Charlotte to San Diego. Adding the Greensboro to Charlotte leg actually caused the price to drop about $70.

Two important things to remember:
1) Pairs matter. Distance doesn’t.
Fares won’t necessarily depend on the route you fly. Fares are based on city pairs — the departure and destination city.
2) Supply and Demand.
Supply and competition for a particular route will generally trump other economic factors like distance flown.

Airlines price flights based not only on the costs they incur, but also on the demand for the route and the amount of competition for the particular city pair. In your case, Joe, the LAX-Philadelphia route may have seen hefty sales already, selling out the cheaper seats on that route. But the Santa Barbara-Philadelphia city pair may have seen only light sales, so the cheap seats could still have been available.

And don’t forget fare sales: If a competitor is driving prices lower on the Santa Barbara-Philadelphia route, then prices are likely to drop. This is especially noticeable when a new, cheaper competitor starts service from a city. (The “Southwest Effect” is a common phrase to describe the effect of fares on a city when Southwest starts service in a market.)

[As a sidebar: Given the fact that you'll have to change planes, thereby risking a misconnection and spending more time in airports, is it really worth saving a few bucks to increase your inconvenience? You might also be paying a nonstop premium, which could easily be worth it. I realize your question was about why the price difference exists, but the lower price may still be a bad value.]

Bottom line: If you’re trying to make sense of an airfare, ignore distance. Ignore where you’re changing planes. And ignore superficial logic. Focus on price for the explanation.

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Upgraded: Frequent flyer legislation
Downgraded: The value of your miles
Frequent flyer programs can be a byzantine maze. Above all, nearly everyone is cranky about being able to cash in their frequent flyer miles. I just tried winnowing down the uncomfortably large kitty of points for some Caribbean travel in May and was given the Heisman. But I’m not cheering on Washington state legislator Chris Hurst, who’s proposing a bill that would allow consumers to cash in their miles at 0.2 cents apiece. “Cash in” literally — for cash. House Bill 2707 is probably not going to go anywhere, but it’s meant as a shot across the bow of airlines whose point redemptions are increasingly stingy. Representative Hurst, call me when you start demanding 2 cents per mile or better. (via Pointswizard)

Upgraded: Delta’s business class seats… on some of its planes
Delta is rolling out new fully-flat seats on its 767s that travel internationally. Excellent news. But only on the 767s for starters, which means that the Delta fleet will have a patchwork of seating at the front of the plane. Sure, every airline rolls new seats out one plane at a time, but it’s odd to limit the rollout explicitly to one aircraft type.

Upgraded: Delta’s flight attendants’ trepidations
With Delta and Northwest in confirmed talks regarding a possible merger, the as-yet non-unionized flight attendants at Delta are looking to organize. Delta’s attendants might be members of the AFA-CWA as of February 14. Consider it a Valentine to Delta management. The goal is to “have a seat at the table” when merger discussions take shape.

Upgraded: Competition for hourly car rentals
With the success of hourly “car-sharing” rentals like Zipcar, the big car rental players are getting in on the action. Reportedly, Enterprise is launching its own version, dubbed “WeCar,” which is being test near Washington University in St. Louis. Just be sure to walk around the car and take photos before and after the rental. If WeCar is anything like their regular operation, those Enterprise guys will try to nail you for any damages on the car, whether it happened on your watch or not.

Upgraded: Gitmo!?
Disturbing and bizarre: There actually exists scheduled service to Guantanamo Bay, ironically provided by the happy-go-lucky sounding Air Sunshine, using 9-seat Cessnas. For those wishing to plan their trip, service is only four days a week, at $250 each way. Not cheap, for such a short trip, and you’d better hope they honor the return portion of the ticket. But you may never want to leave. After all, as Dick Cheney described the conditions for detainees at the base’s prison facilities, when he spoke to CNN in 2005, “They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

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A chilling article that’s must-reading for anyone who travels with a laptop, smartphone, or any other electronic device that stores personal data. Some snippets:

[At San Francisco International Airport] a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.
[...]
“I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days,” said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. [...] More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation.
[...]
The U.S. government has argued in a pending court case that its authority to protect the country’s border extends to looking at information stored in electronic devices such as a laptop without any suspicion of a crime. In border searches, it regards a laptop the same as a suitcase.

My view: Airport security officers should be there to check the materials you intend to bring into the airport for explosives or weapons. Not for content. Screen the computer to see if it’s loaded with plastic explosives, sure. But don’t read my e-mail. You shouldn’t be editing for content the books I bring onto the plane, you shouldn’t be viewing the phone numbers I dialed, or the web sites I accessed unless you have a warrant and I am a suspect in a crime. And even then, such a search should be conducted by appropriate law enforcement officers, such as the FBI.

But the current administration argues that things like warrants aren’t necessary at the border. Anything goes, regardless of the color of your passport. Here’s hoping the next president has the backbone to reassert some control over this runaway fearmongering security apparatus and reincorporate some basic all-American rights into the legal movement across our borders.

In the meantime, individuals and businesses need to be aware that anything electronic can be confiscated, copied, or destroyed if you’re arriving at an American airport from abroad. That means backing up and/or deleting anything of possible personal or business value. Simply renaming files, as suggested here over a year ago, may not cut it anymore.

Related:
- Rename filenames, avoid laptop confiscation
- Batteries not included: New rules ban loose lithium batteries from checked luggage
- A handy guide for luggage inspectors
- Your shoes remain a threat to security

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If you invest in socially-responsible mutual funds, you may not be investing (however indirectly) in airlines much longer. And it has nothing to do with labor practices, if that’s where your mind is drifting.

Fund manager Standard Life is dropping airlines from its “ethical” portfolios:

Airlines have been labelled unethical by one of Britain’s biggest investment firms, which plans them to blacklist them alongside arms dealers, pornographers and animal-testing laboratories.

Concern over the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide produced by commercial aircraft has prompted the Edinburgh-based Standard Life to cease investing in carriers such as British Airways, Ryanair and EasyJet on behalf of tens of thousands of customers of its ethical funds.

Sure, the parallel with arms dealers and pornographers is intentionally inflammatory, and makes great headlines. And if the funds have an environmental focus, then the exclusion makes sense. Air travel isn’t without its carbon impact (though short-hop airlines like Ryanair presumably have a greater negative impact than long-haul airlines like British Airways…)

And let’s not forget that airlines have been pretty lousy long-term investments. But that’s not ethics, that’s business.

But above all, this highlights how different the discourse of travel is in Europe and America, despite perpetually increasing environmental awareness among Americans. Sure, airlines spew plenty of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but this is barely an issue in the US.

Ethical investment? Or a distasteful stain on any self-respecting person’s portfolio? Hit the comments.

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