Upgraded: Room rate guarantees
In a continuing escalation of the war between the online travel agencies, Orbitz has added their Price Assurance guarantee to hotel reservations. If you book a room, and then someone else uses Orbitz to book the same hotel, with the same class of hotel room and on the same dates, and the price has dropped since you booked it, you get a refund. That’s a lot of if’s! This is not as robust as Yapta’s effort to track hotel room rates, but it’s an improvement, nonetheless.

Upgraded: Coffee on Southwest
Southwest Airlines is cranking out an improved brew on its flights. They are quick to remind customers that they’re still not charging a fee for the pleasure of arabica beans at 35,000 feet.

Downgraded: Coffee on Northwest
Back on the ground, a Northwest Airlines flight attendant charged with tending to an unaccompanied minor allegedly took an 8-year old to Starbucks. The flight attendant allegedly gave the girl a venti coffee loaded with cream and sugar, which made her sick. “I told her I was tired and she took me to Starbucks and said, ‘Go order a large coffee.’ She made me pay with my own money.” Why would anyone give an eight-year old, who is about to get into a plane, coffee? I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that an airline employee had slipped the kid a Benadryl, frankly, but giving an 8-year old a giant coffee makes no sense. Northwest says the story “doesn’t match their records.”

Upgraded: Stories of irate passengers
Every time I think the latest story of a passenger gone wild on an aircraft is the winner, there’s a new story that takes the crown. And I quote: “A British woman allegedly had an in-flight meal of prescription drugs, wine and liquid soap — before trying to bite the crew of a London-bound jetliner. Galina Rusanova punched and kicked flight attendants on the Chicago-based United Airlines flight after downing two or three bottles of wine, prescription drugs and liquid soap from the jet’s lavatory, prosecutors said.”

Upgraded: Nonstops to see Yakov Smirnoff
Upgraded: Airline monopolies
Branson, Missouri! America’s low-rent Vegas! No, gambling or smut, but you can get Soviet Union jokes o’plenty! But this Ozark mecca of entertainment has-beens finally has its own airport. It apparently bears the distinction of being America’s first privately-owned airport with commercial service, and it was built without federal transportation funds. The flipside of this savings to the taxpayer: The airport can negotiate exclusivity on routes. If airlines have exclusive contracts for service for a delimited timeframe, “That’s a major incentive to an airline because they know they won’t have to duke it out over fares with anyone.” In English, we call that monopoly.

Drink up that can of coffee, water, or ginger ale, and leave your money tucked away, champ!

US Airways has figured out that the bad press it received for being the only major U.S. airline to charge for soft drinks wasn’t worth the revenue it collected for coffee, water, and soda. So it’s no longer charging the soft drink fee, effective Saturday.

Not to mention the fact that clever passengers were getting around the fee by paying with $20 bills…

No wonder US Airways flight attendants released this statement:

“Flight attendants are safety professionals first and foremost,” [Mike Flores, president of the US Airways' unit of the Association of Flight Attendants] said. “This decision by the company will help return us to that status rather than being salespeople in the aisle of the airplane.”

This gives Southwest one less piece of ammunition with which to relentlessly mock the competition.

It’s a small gesture, and a minor but nonetheless appreciated act of restoring dignity to air travel. So thanks for bringing it back, US Airways.

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Starbucks recently changed their wi-fi provider from T-Mobile to AT&T, and a different pricing scheme is in place. But why pay, when you can get it for free?

Frequent Starbucks wi-fi user Dr. Vino sends in this tip from WiFi Net News:

AT&T says in their press release that all Starbucks Card holders, which is simply their value-storing swipe card system [edit: would it have been too hard to call it a gift card?], will get two hours of free Wi-Fi a day. No purchase is needed: you just need an active card, I confirmed with the company. Walk in, buy a $5 value card, activate it, and you’re on for two hours a day from then forward. You can also use multiple devices with a single account, within reason, Starbucks told me.

So it’s not free, since you have to drop $5 on a Starbucks card, but you can tap the value AND get free wi-fi. Until there’s free universal wi-max, it’s worth considering.

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It’s not Halloween, it’s ‘Take Your Columnist To Work Day’!
The New York Times’ Joe Sharkey, apparently tired of writing about business travel for his business travel column, pays a visit to someone’s place of business instead. But it’s no ordinary cubiclefest, but the wacky offices of Vegas.com. Joe’s money quote that makes the whole article worthwhile, though, is this: “Once, for a newspaper story in Philadelphia, I went to the animal shelter to bail out a stripper’s boa constrictor that was part of her act (the job of the snake, who adored her, was to untie her bikini top on stage).” Baby, that’s journalism.

It’s not Earth Day, either
Environmentalists in the UK aren’t cutting KLM any slack. The airline is introducing coffee grown on “sustainable” plantations, but the announcement was greeted with scoffs. Since airlines pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a few acres of shade-grown coffee apparently don’t matter. Okay… but the airlines aren’t going to stop burning jet fuel overnight, and they have a choice TODAY regarding shade-grown vs. clear-cut-the-rainforests coffee. Give KLM a little credit.

Tehran is lovely this time of year
Iran is looking to attract tourists, and what better way to get them than to offer cash incentives? Iranian travel agents get a $20 bounty for every Western tourist they attract. Maybe they should start a rewards program for the visitors, though…

Air New Zealand goes ’round the world
Last week, Air New Zealand started flying from Hong Kong to London, making it the only airline to fly around the globe. (United gave up its Washington-London-Delhi-Hong Kong-Los Angeles-Washington circle in 2001, the previous holdout of single-airline RTW travel.) You can fly the loop for £801 (US$1521) including taxes for flights starting in London with stops along the way in Hong Kong, Auckland, and Los Angeles — cheap for a trip around the earth.

The life and times of (lost) luggage
Jane Engle follows the path of checked luggage. It’s a long but interesting tale, with some of the bags ending up at the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama. Her suggestions at the end for making your bags identifiable are good ones, classics of travel advice. One variation on her suggestions, which I keep meaning to employ in practice, but somehow keep neglecting, is to print out your itinerary and put it inside the checked bag. That way, if the tracking tag falls off, it’s presumably easier to reunite you with your luggage.

Better food on Continental
Continental Airlines announced revisions to its menus, featuring recipes concocted by the airline’s “Congress of Chefs.” Call me a skeptic, but a stable of celebrity chefs doesn’t necessarily make the food taste any better at 39,000 feet. It still tends to taste like airline food… But change is good, and I’m all for trying out new recipes, so good on ‘em!

With its Hampton Inn brand now a late entrant in the Bed Wars, Hilton has opened a new front in the global lodging wars: Coffee.

Hilton rooms will soon feature Cuisinart dual-cup single-brew coffeemakers, stocked with Lavazza coffee (Grand Filtro roast, for those keeping score). Sounds better than the single-use packets of Superior Coffee, a company that seems to have the corner on the in-room coffee business.

Begun, the Coffee Wars have.

Who will escalate? I demand in-room espresso! Or the option of a “triple Venti, no fat, no foam, extra hot, with pink sugar” like Katherine Harris orders.

But seriously, better coffee is a nice touch.

Nonetheless, I’m still hoping for a lodging chain to take up my saber-rattling calls for Door Wars.

James Wysong decries the state of inflight coffee and offers a number of theories that might explain why the coffee is subpar.

Coffee onboard is certainly better today than it used to be. But with name brands on board, like Starbucks on United, Seattle’s Best on Alaska, or local favorite Alterra on Midwest, expectations go up as well. It’s true, though, that coffee is still generally not as good in the air as on the ground. Plus, unless you’re riding up front on certain international flights, you can’t order a cappuccino in the air.

Wysong has five theories to explain the bad state of brew, but the five explanations really fall into three categories:

- The disgruntled flight attendant

Flight attendants want to make their jobs easier, so they brew bad coffee so no one will ask for a second cup, or they brew nothing but decaf to keep passengers sedate.

- The coffee roasters’ conspiracy

The coffee supplier sells crappy coffee to the airline to boost sales at airport vendors.

- The flawed brewing process

The process for brewing coffee on planes stinks, because the water isn’t hot enough, or the water from the “galley springs” tastes bad.

To be honest, if I had not read that the author of the piece was an airline flight attendant, I would have dismissed some of those hypotheses out of hand as a bit tin-foil-hat. (All airline coffee is decaf!!?! I’m skeptical…)

What I’ve found is that coffee varies by flight, not just by airline. The Starbucks coffee on United might be a watery swill one flight, and a reasonably robust brew on another.

If the caffeine on board isn’t all you wanted it to be, and you’re not as amped on the flight as you hoped, then perhaps a nap is in order. Can’t sleep on the plane? Maybe you’ll get lucky and arrive at an airport with a napping center. Vancouver is one such airport where you catch some quick z’s, with pods by Metronaps onsite. Hopefully located near a coffee shop.