"Travel Escape Hatches" Make Sense This Summer

Travel advice from the Charlotte News Observer suggests that this summer is the time to think about an 'escape hatch.'

One frequent traveler says that he learns the flight attendant's names and schedules on his regular flights out of Newark so that he knows which flights are frequently delayed. He's even figured out which American Airline planes offer the least amount of legroom.

One strategy this saavy flyer uses is the keep the airline reservation numbers on his cellphone, and if he's cancelled, he quickly rebooks from the terminal. "There is usually only one person at the counter, but 100 people on the phone waiting to help you, he said. He uses the airlines websites to check the ontime percentages...less than 80% and he might bail out and find another flight.

Other advice in the column suggests using a luggage shipping service to send the bags ahead, or else using Fed-X or UPS. There are many companies in several price ranges that can take the hassle and fear out of traveling with luggage. One thing to watch out for is wine--it weighs a lot and some airlines are limiting luggage weight, meaning you might have to donate it to the desk clerk when you're checking the bags.

Some advice that I learned during my trip to Sardinia this week is some that I rarely heed myself. A man traveling with us had his luggage lost, but looked great the next night because he had packed a change of clothes in his carryon. I never do that, but I guess I should.

In Sardinia, I learned a Bit More About Alitalia

Last night we had dinner in a monastery on Sardinia, and at the table was an executive with the Eurofly Airline. He used to work for Air France and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the airline business. Across the table as we sipped the wonderful dry Sardinian wine, I asked him to tell me about how he thinks the Alitalia mess will resolve itself.

"Alitalia is the primary driver of tourists to Italy," he explained. Many visitors who fly Air France are heading somewhere else, they might stay in France a few days, but then leave for other countries. But Alitalia brings 85% of travelers to Italy and they stay here. It's a vital part of the tourism infrastructure, because it's more than just an airline.

He told us about the five planes that the airline has for cargo...and that there are 360 pilots who fly just these five planes. How the pope has several Alitalia liners always ready, always gassed up and waiting, in case his holiness wants to go somewhere. He told us that the airline has been used by politicians and big government honchos as a sort of private shuttle. The unions are the killer here, he said....and KLM is never going to make another offer.

But he defended all the money that the government pours into Alitalia, explaining that other flag carriers do the exact same thing, despite EU rules to the contrary. "They pumped money into British Air, Lufthansa, Air France, they all do it, because of how those airlines are more than just companies, they are national carriers with lots of government duties as well.

Branson's Virgin America Gives Passengers the Menu on the Seatback--And they Love It

Richard Branson's handsome face graced a full page article in last week's Time Magazine. I read the story as I sat on a plane bound for Sardinia. The story was about his new airline, Virgin America, that has recently begun flying between New York, Seattle and LA.

The airline, like any in this cut throat, tough environment, faces challenges. Yet Branson is his usual supremely confident self, describing his keys to success in the airline business. It starts with avoiding the traditional hub and spoke system, and instead, choosing high profit routes. But another part of their success is that they are cool, always cool, and stylish.

The planes Virgin America flies are all the same: new Airbus A320s, which seat 149 passengers. The interiors cost 2-3 million to decorate, but for that money you get very cool looking planes.


Instead of dishing out 'gruel from a cart,' the article described their innovative new way to serve passengers: The menu is in the seatback video screen, and as soon as you want to put in your order for a salad, or a turkey bacon wrap, you swipe your credit card and a server in a crisp purple uniform brings it to your seat.

Once the plane runs out of certain popular food items, they no longer appear on the seat-back screens. The trips from LA to NY cost just under $300. A fair price. They also offer a first-class service for 29 passengers up front with hot food and the usual amenities.

Virgin America also offers another perk: Free Wifi and the ability to send text messages to other passengers. These fun little extras are some of what sets Virgin apart.

But Branson also stresses that he'll never fly a Kansas City-Phoenix route, or the other more pedestrian, and less profitable airline routes. No, he leaves the middle of America alone, and concentrates only on high demand routes such as NY-LA.

He said he considered an all business class airline, like Eos, but decided not to do it...because there would not be much business during weekends. And they want to keep their planes flying and making money seven days a week.

Alitalia Can't Give Itself Away

The ongoing saga of Alitalia took another twist as the outgoing president of Italy, Romano Prodi, gave the ailing carrier a $469 million gift to ensure that they can keep flying until the new government comes to power in May.

The deal was almost made to sell the carrier to Air France/KLM. But the unions in Italy objected to the loss of jobs in Milan, and tried to play hardball with the biggest airline in the world. But it didn't work--KLM walked away when the unions tried to play hardball, and even after this, the union bosses thought that the big player would come back.

NOT! With an aging fleet and difficult contracts, Alitalia has lost money every year for decades. But the European Union won't allow the Italian government to keep propping the carrier up. When he was running for office, Silvio Berlosconi railed about how the airline should remain in Italian hands, and said there were Italian investors who would pop up and buy Alitalia. Now that he's been elected, these "Italian investors" are no where to be found.

Why doesn't he buy, it, he can afford it, and that way the union headaches, the old jetliners and the hundreds of mid-level managers will be his headache.

Frontier Runs Out of Credit....and Goes Chapter 11

I visited with my friend Johnny Jet in his Manhattan Beach bachelor pad, and learned a bit about the recent spate of airline bankrupcies that are making travelers nervous around the US. Johnny is the editor in chief of Johnnyjet.com and he's a regular guest on the local ABC news affilate as well as with Peter Greenberg. He told me about the latest victim of the times, Denver-based Frontier Airlines.

Then I picked up the Wall St. Journal for a closer look at just what has happened this once-high flier that has taken a beating from Southwest and United who both operate a heavy schedule out of Frontier's home airport, Denver.

The tipping point for Frontier was when First Data, the airline's main credit card processor told them they would be increasing the 'holdback rate' of proceeds to 100% from 45%. "This shift threatened to severerly impact Frontier's liquidity," the article said.

Companies like First Data 'typically turn over revenue to airlines in a couple of days...but when they have a customer who is shaky like many airlines are, they set up agreements to keep the money paid by the passengers longer from the time they buy the ticket until the actual date the fly.'

For Frontier, this change was the nail in the coffin that pushed them into bankruptcy. They have said they will continue flying....but Aloha Airlines said the same thing and eleven days later they were gone for good.

Find Out If Your Flight Will Be Delayed With Delaycast.com

Delaycast is a website that predicts airline flight delays at 60 US airports, and reports on ten major airlines.

Wired news had a story last week about the new service, and said that the predictions of which flights will be delayed came within 15 minutes of what actually happened.
A next step they are considering is to provide data about how long the security checkpoint waits will be.

"Delaycast gathers historical delay data and runs it through powerful computers, using algorithms to search for patterns. This gives it a road map it can use to anticipate future delays. It's predictive modeling, and its similar to what sites like Farecast use to guess which way ticket prices are going to go.

Right now Delaycast provides two different tools, and they're both pretty cool. Delay Profiles predicts delays for a single airport, either by time of day, day of the week or airline -- 100 on the index equals the average, so a score of 120 means that delays are 20% above average.
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/04/using-predictiv.html

Two Drunks Holding Each Other Up

History does not shine a positive light on what's in store for travelers now that the Delta and Northwest merger has become reality. The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday that took a look back at how some other airlines fared in the years following gigantic mergers.

The gist of the story is that nobody really does any better. "Two drunks holding each other up is not a good idea," said one aviation consultant.

In Philadelphia, for example, US Air lost its share of the market by 16.5% after merging with America West in 2005. What happened was that Southwest came in and increased their business there by 64%.
US Air also bought Pacific Southwest Airlines and in a few years, they no longer even serviced the west coast. Struggling routes often just disappear after mergers, and that's not good for travelers.

In a different article, another point was raised about the many kinds of airliners that the newly enlarged Delta will be flying. Too many. They will have 27 different models, and more than 1000 planes. That means many more parts, more difficult integration and headaches trying to manage such a diverse fleet. Be careful what you wish for, airlines!

Humble Roots for Airport Parking Reservations

How did Airport Parking Reservations get its start? The answer was published this week in an article by Jaclyn Stevenson in BusinessWest, a magazine published in Western Massachusetts.

In the story Guy Piccolo, one of the company's owners and the owner of Executive Valet Parking in Suffield CT is profiled. It tells the story of how his dad, Domenico, the owner of a pizza shop in Windsor Locks, kept seeing people walk by the shop with suitcases, heading for the newly opened Bradley Airport in the early 1970s.

“When the parking lots at the airport were full, people would actually park their cars on the soft shoulder of the highway and walk in,” said the younger Piccolo.

With a vacant lot in his possession, his father capitalized on the overflow. He started by waving cars onto the land, and later shuttling travelers to and from the airport in a bright yellow microbus." Guy Piccolo thought he might take time off from his father's business after he died in 1975, but it was not to be.

“I thought I wanted to take some time off or try something new, but that only lasted about six months,” Piccolo said with a laugh, noting that he sold Piccolo Valet Parking to a national parking outfit in 1997, only to purchase the existing Executive Valet Parking in Suffield in 1998. He pulled two partners into the venture: Tom Lombardi, former marketing manager at Piccolo Valet; and Bob Bielecki, an IT professional who soon found an intriguing niche in the business.

This trio went on to form the national airport parking company we know today as APR.

Instead of merely augmenting his first Web site, however, Piccolo decided to make a bigger move, further integrating technology into the Executive Valet business model. He purchased dozens of domain names related to airport parking and Bradley Airport specifically, such as bradleyairportparking.com, and other variations. All of these URLs directed customers to Executive Valet, and by the early years of this decade, the site was bringing in about $10,000 a month in sales.

That got Piccolo thinking again.

“I thought, if this works here, this could work everywhere,” he said. Today you can make reservations at all major US airports, more than 200 lots in more than 65 different cities.

Melbourne Australia Gears Up for the A380

The APR blog took a trip to Melbourne Australia, to provide our readers with further research into the world of traveling, air travel and airport parking. The first thing we noticed as we waited in line in Melbourne is that there is a massive effort going on here to rebuild this airport to accommodate the new Airbus A380. They are spending more than two billion to reconfigure the jetways, so they will be two decks to allow people to deplane from both the top and the lower levels of the massive plane. They are also building new terminals and adding parking and larger hangars.

Despite the billboards that you see in the city center put up by Singapore Airlines touting the 'new age in travel as of March 18' there is no such age yet, since the planes have been delayed. It's all good though since the airport renovations are still being done, as they are in dozens of Asian cities where airlines like China Southern and Malaysia Air have also ordered the big birds and anticipate the big change.

Imagine getting out of a plane with more than 550 other passengers and waiting at the baggage carousel, there must be at least 700-1000 pieces of luggage passing by. So you can see that the airports are going to have to invest a lot in order to make this a workable plane to land there. Maybe a double decker baggage carousel?

After we collected our luggage from this trip, the airport officials made us wait in another line, this time a select few of the bags being taken out of the airport had to be x-rayed again. I was glad to see that mine past muster and we walked free, but what a pain, another big line. Oh well isn't that what air travel is all about these days?

Why Skybus' Fate Didn't Happen to Ryanair

Budget Travel Online's Sean O'Neil recently weighed in on the Skybus bankrupcy, and made some interesting points about why this same fate hasn't befallen many similar ultra-cheap carriers in Europe.

"Which airline will fail next? Frontier and Airtran look shaky. Among the majors: United. That's all according to Fox Business. Admittedly, the major airlines should be doing better because they have hiked their prices in recent months, as fare-watcher Rick Seaney has blogged. But the fare hikes haven't been enough to cover the higher costs of flying planes today, notes Hartford Courant columnist Jeanne Leblanc.

Why do European low-cost carriers succeed while Skybus failed? The difference may be in the route maps and in the public transportation systems. As Jared Blank explained recently on his blog, Skybus had hub airports at medium-sized airports trying to serve other, even-smaller airports. But not enough passengers visited these small airports to keep Skybus planes full.

Skybus's costs were thus far higher than those for European success story Ryanair, partly because Ryanair flies most of its flights out of major hub cities, such as London and Rome, with lots of passengers. Of course, Ryanair also flies to some truly out-of-the-way airports, such as Hahn, Germany. But European governments have subsidized public transportation links between many of its smaller airports (such as Hahn) and its largest cities (such as Frankfurt), while the U.S. government hasn't invested in public transportation.

For Skybus, this meant that not enough budget-conscious Americans were willing to fly to small airports, such as Punta Gorda, Fla., because they'd have to add a rental car cost into their trip budget--something Europeans fliers have the practical option of skipping."

Despite the Hype and the $10 Fares, Skybus Says Good Bye

Tough times for airlines everywhere. We trumpeted the launch last May of Skybus, a regional carrier that provided air service from Chicopee, MA's Westover Air Base and featured $10 tickets on a limited schedule including flights to Columbus Ohio and to Florida. Then they excitedly added more Florida cities and everything seemed....well, ducky.

Skybus announced just last week that they were filing bankrupcy and going under. They had an innovative approach, adding fees for just about anything you can think of. They also had planned to sell ads on the sides of the planes and hawked concessions down the aisle. This might have been a model but the fact is, $104 per barrel oil changes everything. You can't ignore this and despite the buzz that those ten dollar seats generated, it was hopeless.

On the flight down to Australia I was on earlier this week, the pilot announced that it took 170 tons of jet fuel to fly there. Imagine that in gallons, and you see that just one flight is a mighty costly thing.

Rate Hike at Sacramento Airport Makes Reserving an Even Smarter Way to Go

In Sacramento, there are now a few good reasons to consider booking an off-airport parking space with Airport Parking Reservations. That's because beginning July 1, parking rates are being increased $2-3 per day.

Officials tell the Sacramento Bee that the reason for the hikes is to finance the biggest expansion in airport history, including building a four-story central terminal and another multilevel garage.
So now, the cost at the Terminal A garage will be $15, up from $12 per day, and the surface lots at Terminal B will jump to $13 from $10. Even economy will see an increase, to $9 from $7 per day.

Officials in Sacramento are quick to point out that their rates are still lower than San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.

But the thing for you to know, dear readers, is that you can save money by visiting Airport Parking Reservations and reserving ahead in Sacramento.8:28 AM 4/3/2008

Just Because You Pay, Doesn't Mean It Won't Get Lost

You might have heard about the new trend, airlines now charging passengers for many things and upping fees for others. Delta, for example, has announced a $25 fee for passengers who want to check a second bag, and US Airways and United do the same. One tiny ray of light is that this fee doesn't apply to first or business class passengers or elite frequent-flier members.

But a newspaper story in the South Florida Sun Sentinel raises an interesting question--does paying to ship the bag guarantee it will arrive on time and in the right airport?

The paper looked at Spirit Airlines, an upstart carrier that has made great inroads in routes to Latin America from its South Florida hub. One woman lost her bag despite paying the fee, and the sad part was that the luggage contained several expensive wigs she needs as a result of cancer treatments. The limit to the airline's liabilty is $3000 per bag on domestic flights and $1500 on international ones.

The airlines say it's just a result of high fuel costs, and reason that they have to make the difference up somewhere. They say that since the other carriers are doing it, now it has become 'general industry practice.'

So the answer is, you might even lose your bag after you pay to have it put into the cargo hold.