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Traveling to and from Britain? The taxman is calling, and your tickets are about to get more expensive.

The UK government will double the air passenger duty for flights departing the UK, effective February. For short flights, the estimated effect on the total price of a ticket is a 7% net increase. For long-haul flights, the tax goes up £20 (~US$40) for economy class and £40 in business class. Ouch.

The monies are supposed to go toward reducing the environmental effects of air travel, according to the public statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. All well and good, but how exactly will the UK government be doing that? Are the added revenues going into a research fund, or into the general budget?

Update: As the Global Traveller astutely notes, this could lead some savvy tax-dodgers to book short-haul flights from the UK to mainland Europe, where they then board their (less-taxed) long-haul flight. If enough people sacrifice nonstop convenience for cash savings, then this could lead to an increase in takeoffs and landings, thereby backfiring against the stated environmentalist goal. Business travelers probably would suck it up and pay the tax, but leisure travelers might hop over to Amsterdam, Paris, or Frankfurt…

Upgraded: French-sounding names
All-business class startup airline Elysair, who will fly from Newark to Paris-Orly, decided at the last minute to change its name to “L’Avion.” (”The airplane” in French.) Why the change? It sounded more French. I guess this explains why, as recently as last week, their website was so… comment dit-on… crappy. Service, in the same vein as Maxjet, Eos, and Silverjet, allegedly begins December 27, but the newly-minted website isn’t ready to accept reservations yet…

Downgraded: British Airways
The apparent murder of a former Russian spy with polonium 210 has been big news. (FYI, though fingers are pointing toward Russia, the element isn’t necessarily weaponized. While small amounts are found in cigarettes, you can, in fact, buy some for $69 on the internet.) On top of it all, three British Airways planes have tested positive for the radioactive element. Affected: 221 flights, carrying 33,000 passengers and coming into contact with 3,000 airline employees on the ground or in the air. British health authorities say there’s no health risk, but I sure wouldn’t be thrilled to find my flight on the list. Click here to see if you flew on one of the flights, from the BA site.
UPDATE: BA has pulled the flight information from its website, stating that there was no health risk, so presumably there’s no longer a need to let people know if they were among the 30,000. Tsk tsk. No worries: The Seattle Times has the list.

Downgraded: Kids on Alaska Airlines
As of November 1, Alaska Airlines has stopped selling children’s fares at a 33% discount.

Upgraded: Competition between Chicago and New York
Delta is increasing service between New York area airports and Chicago, in a big way, including a “shuttle-style” service from LaGuardia. This comes as jetBlue starts up JFK-O’Hare service in the new year. That means American, United, Delta, jetBlue, and ATA all fly between the two cities. Viva competition!

Upgraded: Fake boarding pass guy’s freedom
The Indiana University graduate student who posted a fake boarding pass generator for Northwest Airlines (to prove a point about how easy it is to create such a pass, and how the boarding pass/id checks at airport security are pointless) is freed.

Upgraded: Shorter waits for toilets onboard China Southern Airlines
Pee first, fly later. The airline is asking passengers to use the bathrooms before takeoff, since each inflight flush burns as much as a liter of fuel. Yikes!

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!

Biology!
The key to conquering jetlag, brought to you by Drosophila Melanogaster! Fruit flies missing a particular protein had a hard time adjusting to extreme shifts in light and darkness. If science can find a protein like this for humans, jet lag may be a thing of the past.

Rocketry!
British frequent flyer Alan Watts hoarded two million miles with Virgin Atlantic, which qualifies him for a trip into space on Virgin Galactic. (In this blog’s endless obsession with aircraft interiors and seating, below you’ll find a peek at the interior of Richard Branson’s spaceship. Full details here.)

Ecology!
Virgin’s Richard Branson, again: The gazillionaire has vowed to funnel all future profits from his airline and train businesses into research on alternative fuels that don’t contribute to global warming. Good for him! Synthetic jet fuel might be a start.

Grammar!
Someone at the Jerusalem tourist bureau needs a less existentialist copyeditor who speaks better English. Their latest brochures read: “Jerusalem: There is no such city!” Lies. All lies. (via Jaunted)

Hertz is rolling out a “Green Collection” of rental vehicles, with some fanfare, but I’m not impressed.

The company is touting models with EPA highway ratings of 28 or more miles per gallon, with models like Toyota Camry, Ford Fusion, Buick LaCrosse, and Hyundai Sonata on the list.

Where are the hybrids? Heck, where are the non-hybrid cars with really decent gas mileage, like a Honda Civic?

The Buick LaCrosse gets 19 mpg in the city, and 27 on the highway, according to the EPA’s own site, FuelEconomy.gov. 19. Nine-frickin’-teen miles per gallon is not green.

This is a pathetic attempt to appeal to Americans’ increasing unease about the price of gas. A real green offering would be welcome, but this isn’t it.

Related:
- Incentives for adding hybrid cars to your travel plans

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Both Expedia and Travelocity rolled out similar features yesterday, allowing travelers buying airline tickets to placate their guilt over the environmental effects of air travel by purchasing carbon offsets. The way it works: You pay money to pay for trees and carbon-dioxide reducing environmental projects. The price you pay depends on the distance flown.

The programs are fully voluntary, and link up with existing programs such as TerraPass, which has been pushing carbon offsets for some time.

Amusingly, both Expedia and Travelocity claimed to be the first online travel agency to offer such a service. (If it’s a battle between press releases, Travelocity’s hit the wire an hour earlier. First to the gate!)

My question: Should they charge premium cabin passengers more than they charge economy passengers? On the one hand, you take up more room on the plane, as measured by square footage. On the other hand, you’re not really adding any more weight to the equation, so your presence in the front vs. the back doesn’t change the fuel requirements. Any ethicists out there want to take this on?

–

Separately, the European Union is pushing for limits on the amount of greenhouse gases which airlines legally produce each year. Treating airlines like power plants, the system would allow for “carbon trading” — companies that go over their emissions quota are required to buy “credits” for their overage from cleaner competitors. Since companies thereby have incentives to reduce emissions, both by avoiding fees, and by potentially profiting off the sale of credits, emissions trading schemes are widely viewed as successful. We’ll see how it works in aviation.

Related:
- Are open skies dirty skies?
- Buy, not fly, green

tags: travel | environmentalism | Expedia | Travelocity

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

Sure, the benefits of hybrids cars like the Toyota Prius include tax credits, lower fuel bills, and the generally warm and fuzzy feeling you get from saving energy and helping the environment.

Kimpton Hotels, the boutique chain, is offering discounts and/or free parking to guests pulling up in a hybrid. Rental cars are included.

At the Muse Hotel in New York, they’ll even throw in a copy of Honku : The Zen Antidote to Road Rage. (But why would you be driving in New York, though?)

If you ARE in New York, and you need to get to the airport, you might consider Ozocar, the car service that operates a fleet of hybrid cars by Toyota or Lexus. Each car is equipped with an Apple iBook and mobile wireless internet. It’s slower, but a lot cheaper than the helicopter service to JFK.

Renting a hybrid is tougher to do, and it’s rarely cheap. Some smaller or regional agencies advertise hybrids (Fox Rent A Car and EV Rental Cars, both largely operating in California, come to mind), and the rates are generally a bit higher than comparably sized regular vehicles. As a tradeoff, in California, hybrid cars are always allowed to drive in the multiple-passenger express lanes, even with only one driver. The time saved in traffic may be worth the premium.

But while smaller firms are trying to appeal to the increasingly energy-aware public, the major rental firms are still wedded to their standard issue Detroit gas guzzlers. And as guest blogger Dr. Vino pointed out two weeks ago, the demand for those gas guzzlers is going down. Hopefully the supply of hybrids will increase to meet the demand.

tags: travel | rental cars | hotels | Kimpton | Ozocar | hybrid cars

A few years ago when gas prices were at $1 a gallon, I laughed at your regular host, Better Living Through Miles, as he told me he had declined a free upgrade to an SUV from a rental car company. Was it the safety I wondered? No, it was the horrendous gas mileage he replied.

Well it turns out that lots more people are following BLTM’s frugal lead these days. The WSJ has a story in today’s Personal Journal reporting that daily rates on SUV rentals are now lower than fuel-efficient mid-sized cars across the country. In Boston, it’s $71 for a mid-size, $63 for an SUV. In DC, it’s $83 and $71. And in LA, $41 to $37.

Wow, with spreads like that already reflecting the high gas prices, it’s almost time to step in and rent a Jeep! Anyone for some offroading? However, be sure to check the rental agreement since many companies don’t like their 4×4s actually going off-road. And for city driving, the lower gas mileage could be a real buzzkill.

Do you take into account the mileage of cars you rent these days?

–Dr. Vino

(Update May 29, 2006: Full WSJ article now available without a subscription here.)

tags: travel | rental cars

Flying harms the environment. A flight from New York to Los Angeles generates one ton of CO2 per person. (go to CO2.org to compute your next flight’s impact). Jets are a fast growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

If you can’t skip the flight altogether and opt for a teleconference (or go to the nearest halo room) then you can ease your green conscience by buying a credit. According to an article in the current Vanity Fair, guilty travelers can now go to ClimateCare.org, calculate the environmental degradation of their journey, and then make a donation that is put toward forestry and energy-efficient products.

The NY-LA flight would result in a $10 guilt tax. Our regular host, Better Living Through Miles, is burning up 1.85 tons of CO2 on his way to and from Schiphol right now, or about $20 if ClimateCare would put a price tag on his environmental degradation. If only everything bad that we did could be so easily remedied.

What do you think? Would you pay such a fee? What if it were mandatory, like a Homeland Security surcharge?

–Dr. Vino

tags: travel | air travel | environment | greenhouse gas

The last week has seen a number of travel-related protests, many of which have been affecting significant numbers of people moving from point A to point B…

The big story is of course France, where students, protesting a new labor law that would allow young workers to be more easily fired, blocked trains, roads, and airports. Even aircraft under construction were affected, as groups of protestors blocked a Toulouse-area road used by trucks carrying parts for the Airbus A380. (After aircraft operated by British discount carrier Jet2 were grounded by striking air traffic controllers, the airline’s chief, Philip Meeson, stirred the pot with some particularly feisty, and by some measures offensive, href="http://www.jet2.com/News.aspx?id=65">comments…)

In the United States, 275 Delta pilots picketed in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, protesting the bankrupt airline’s hardball tactics with the pilots’ union. Days later, nearly 95% of the pilots voted to authorize their union’s management to call a strike if necessary.

Airline workers in Bolivia staged a protest as well, blocking runways in La Paz, Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, and Tarija, demanding that the government nationalize the nearly-bankrupt carrier Lloyd Aero Boliviano. On March 31, the Bolivian military took control of the airports; the airline’s international flights have all been cancelled indefinitely.

Finally, protests over airport expansion hit the United Kingdom and India. Marking the 60th anniversary of Heathrow Airport, members of the environmental group Plane Stupid (previously mentioned here) chained themselves to the door of airport management offices. In India, protestors objected to the plans to expand Chennai’s airport without consulting local residents sufficiently.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley got off comparatively easy, given that plans to buy a cemetery in order to use the land for O’Hare Airport expansion have been challenged in the courts, and not on the runways. But the dead have been known to vote in Chicago elections, so anything can happen.

(images: BBC, NBC5 Chicago)
tags: travel | air travel | environmentalism | airport expansion | labor protests | Heathrow | Delta | O’Hare

I admit that I have always felt a little guilty about the environmental impact of air travel. For the most part, I consider myself eco-friendly: I recycle, I keep the heat low, I avoid unnecessary driving, I have a very fuel efficient car, I contribute to environmental causes, I buy local produce when it’s in season, and I turn the lights off when I leave the room. My two biggest eco-sins: long, hot showers, and travel.

Suggesting that people fly less is not at all common in the United States. In fact, the ecological impact of aircraft is conspicuous by its very absence in the recent coverage of microjets or air-commuting. (Whether this reflects geography, awareness, or policy is a matter for debate.) Across the pond, though, the United Kingdom seems to be engaged in a vigorous debate over the morality of airplane travel. Organizations like Plane Stupid and FlightPledge seek to raise awareness of the environmental effects of all those miles.

In the context of the recent debate over “open skies” treaties, George Monbiot makes the most forceful case against air travel. (Apparently, his editors felt his original title “We are all killers” was too inflammatory, though…) Monbiot’s argument is a powerful one, especially when you mull over the numbers. (The version of the article republished on his personal site contains footnotes to back up the data he presents.) Read the whole thing.

Of course, not everyone agrees. The counterpoint by Jowett and Wiltshire (who represent the airport and airline industries, respectively) suggests that carbon trading may be a solution. In such a scenario, pollutive industries (like airlines) would buy credits from cleaner industries; logic suggests that this would spur innovation on both sides. Companies seeking to sell credits to dirtier counterparts would have incentives to build up “clean” credits, and smog-belchers would replace old equipment and seek greater efficiency in order to lower their costs.

I admit arguments advanced by Monbiot and others give me pause. Yet I’m one of the hypocrites he mentions — willing to concede that air travel is bad for the environment, but not yet willing to stop traveling. I try to appease myself with arguments based on fuel economy, like this:
The distance between Los Angeles and Auckland is approximately 13,000 miles round trip. Boeing estimates that the average 747 will burn 5 gallons of fuel per mile, so the round trip would burn 65,000 gallons. An Air New Zealand 747 carries just under 400 people when completely full. Let’s assume that the plane is only 80% full, though – 320 people on board. (They don’t sell out every flight, after all.) Therefore, the roundtrip fuel burn is approximately 203 gallons per person, or 64 miles per gallon per person (mpg/p). If the plane is full, then that number rises to 80 mpg/p. Fairly efficient transportation, right? Right?…

Maybe the “enemy” shouldn’t be air travel in general, but short hops on small, inefficient (and often uncomfortable) planes. Smaller regional jets are less eco-friendly on a per-person basis. The fuel burn at full capacity for a Canadair Regional Jet is approximately 34 mpg/p — a big drop in fuel economy from the 747. Larger, modern planes (especially Boeing’s forthcoming 787) burn less fuel per passenger, and should be favored, at least until planes start flying on solar power… A viable carbon trading system could help reduce emissions, but even then, long distance travel would mean negatively impacting the environment.

tags: travel | air travel | environmentalism | carbon trading