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

The digital age continues: Wired passports started rolling out across the U.S. this month. This means passport data will be stored electronically, which the State Department says will speed up customs and bolster security.

Citizens who get new passports can expect to pay a lot more. New ones issued under this program will cost $97, which includes a $12 security surcharge added last year. Not all new passports will contain the technology until it’s fully rolled out — a process expected to take a year. Existing passports without the electronic chips will remain valid until their normal expiration date.

Read the full article at wired.com

What do uncertain business times do? Stimulate new ideas. And this is definitely a new idea — Ryanair is giving away tickets on a regular basis.

Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of Ireland’s Ryanair (Research), Europe’s most profitable airline, wants to make air travel free. Not free as in free from regulation, but free as in zero cost. By the end of the decade, he promises, “more than half of our passengers will fly free.”

The remarkable thing is, few analysts think his prediction is far-fetched: Ryanair already offers free fares to a quarter of its customers.

Read the article: A radical fix for airlines: Make flying free

This is interesting because it’s the airlines thinking about doing it themselves (unlike private companies, like in the United States). Lost-luggage compensation costs in Europe are about to mushroom with the introduction of new laws that triple the potential “refund” for lost luggage (to 1,200 euros). This makes RFID tags on held luggage is an attractive solution, basically because data stored electronically is harder to mess up.

» Read the article: Airlines eye up RFID tagging

» Related Post: Reduce your chance of lost luggage

Hey, in case you didn’t know, Flight Club is an online community for air travelers. Flight Club (the parent of this blog) has online tools that help members meet other members on airplanes and in airports — basically, we’re fun people that make travel more exciting. Business travelers, recreational travelers, if you fly for fun or for work, if you fly just once a year, Flight Club has a spot for you.

Membership is booming, so if you haven’t thought about joining before, then now is a good time. Registration takes about a minute and you can do it at this page. It’s free, it’s a fun site, uh huh oh yeah.

Virgin Galactic launches space tourism: Commercial flights into outer space start in 2008. It will cost $200,000 for the trip, which includes five minutes of weightlessness (that’s $40,000 per minute). Lots of people are interested in going up (no joke). Interesting bits in the article on the topic:

• Only 450 humans have been in outer space
• 4000 pilots applied for the 75 jobs available to steer the space craft. Oh man would that not be the sweetest job on the planet? “By day, I pilot space craft. By night … “

This blog is not a Continental Airlines hate-parade, but seriously: that airline keeps popping up, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’m not flying with them today, for they would take revenge for this pile-on … here’s another Continental customer service complaint:

Another airline squanders a customer service opportunity

Now that customers can broadcast their complaints across the internet I wonder if that’s changing how major corporations think about customer service.

From hotelmarketing.com

While fully 35 percent of heterosexual respondents said they don’t book travel online, fewer than one in five (18%) GLB respondents said they did not.

This writer isn’t as enthusiastic about the prospect of double beds in first class travel as I am. She thinks it flies in the face of public decency. I think people ought to be given a choice, and considering the wealth of airline options available, heck, it’s no big deal.