Faced with a Long Layover, What Do You Do With Your Luggage?

At the Rome Fiumicino airport, a travelers problem was easily and affordably solved. What a relief! We were traveling home from Sardinia to New York, and had a day-long layover in store. What to do with all of this baggage, from a week's trip?

The solution lies in a place called Deposito Baggagi, or "Left Luggage Area." It's like a similar service I found on my way home at JFK, the same idea.

Rome's facility is located on the first floor level of Terminal C way far down at the far side of the building. There you'll find an x-ray machine and a man who takes your luggage to store and hands you back a bar coded reciept. For seven hours, it costs 2 Euros per bag. Over seven hours and you'll pay 3.5 more Euros per bag.

We left our bags for the day and happily boarded the train into the Rome's Travestere neighborhood for some shopping and lunch at a cafe in a Piazza. On the train, everyone but us were lugging huge suitcases, and piling them on the seats of the train. Glad we found Left Luggage area, it made our day much easier.

Clever Ways to Save Fuel in the Air

While I was on a trip to Sardinia this week, I read the International Herald Tribune, and found out that airlines are finding new ways to shave their costs in this time of climbing fuel prices. One way is to slow the plane down, and add several minutes to the arrival time. This saves as much as $548 per long haul flight for Delta, and passengers aren't going to notice.

Southwest began slowing down each flight by 1-3 minutes two months ago, and projects it will save $42 million in fuel this year. Jet Blue adds an average of just under two minutes per flight, saving $13.6 million each year by going about 10 miles per hour slower. Another way to save fuel is to land with just one engine running. By using just one to land, a European carrier saves hundreds of gallons of fuel.

Don't be alarmed, this isn't that uncommon...it's a good way to save because you don't need two engines to fly the plane, or to land it. You do need both to take off, however, so nobody is trying that out yet.

Eos Dies Before We Can Talk it Up on GoNOMAD

Eos, we hardly knew ye. Just as we were about to publish a glowing article about the all business class airline, Eos, they went under. What happened, according to my friends in the airline business, is that most likely they didn't get their next round of funding from their banks and stock holders. Plus American matched their business class fare...and kapow!

The story that we would have published quoted Eos' CEO saying that it's not what you add to airline service, it's what you take away. These folks had come up with a luxurious configuration of just 48 seats in a 220 seat airplane. They had reduced the lines one had to wait in to a minimum, and offered their own limo service to and from the airport. They took away the hassles and that was their business plan.

But lurking in the background of any airline start up are the big bad wolves...Like American Airlines, who matched the $3800 fare offered by Eos from JFK to Heathrow, not London Stanstead, where Eos left you off. This combined with losing their funding spelled doom for Eos, a great idea whose time, most likely, will not come again. There are just too many of these all business class airlines in the graveyard for anyone to try this again, at least not anyone except a major who might be able to pull it off.