Flight Blog
News and Tips about Air Travel, Business / Industry, Flying, Airplanes, and other fun

A deep dark cloud rained bad news on the airline industry this week. Note: I link to CNN stories here because they don’t go into archive and don’t get deleted after two weeks. To recap:

• More than a hundred thousand passengers get stranded at Heathrow after a British Airways strike (article)
• The New York Times reports that airport delays are at the worst since 2000 (article)
• Airplane fuel is now an issue, prompting the majors to raise fares and raising the possibility of big problems on the tarmac (article, article)
• Delta and Independence Air share more bad news about potential bankruptcy (article, article)
• CNN investigates U.S. airport security for three months and finds lots of problems, then decides to pile on and release the news this week (swell move, guys) (article)

Hope this week is better, people.

Sunday Update: Plane crashes in Greece, killing all 128 on board (article). Not a good start for the week.

Christopher Elliott knows a lot about travelling. He’s got connections in the biz. He was an ombudsman for National Geographic, and he’s covered business travel as a journalism for more than a decade.

On the internet he helps solve travel problems. He’s got a column about travel problems. These problems make for an entertaining read, and usually they have a happy ending, which is cool.

This is my favorite, a tale about a ski trip gone wrong.

Sure, writing about stuff you like is cool. The lucky people get to do that for a living. Tom Parsons, an internet travel entrepreneur, is one of them. He runs a web site about cheap flights. He also gets a few less-than-choice quotes in a recent Southwest Airlines press release (http://www.travel.fresh-coffee.com/flights/286/southwest-airlines-subscriber-fares-ding.htm ).

Quote:

“[Southwest Airlines Product] is an air traveler’s blue light special in the sky,” Parsons said. “Only Southwest Airlines would dare to offer fares this low.”

How much did they pay him for that quote? And after this dedication of allegiance to Southwest, why would I trust him as a source of information about cheap flights on non-Southwest carriers? I know it’s a free world, and a free market. But quotes on behalf of corporations rather than customers compromise the integrity of all the services you offer.

Shilling for the man is a one-way a ticket to the no-credibility parade.

The New York Times covered a report that Consumer WebWatch did last month. It takes an in-depth look into the mechanisms of booking first-class flights online, and they come up with a couple problems. One was “fare jumping,” when the price quoted would jump hundreds of dollars when the customer clicked to check-out. The other was false labeling: certain sites came up with first class tickets for low-cost airlines which don’t have first-class seats.

• Advice on airports around the globe,
• Rankings and opinion on just about all the airlines in the world
• A chart comparing how far your seat goes back, on average, with each major airline (North American chart linked)

Back in 2003 CNN published this piece: Travel talk: Online and dangerous.