I was honored to find out that I am one of the top 5 finalists for two Travvies this year. So, now it’s your turn to help me win. Here’s how you can help.
1) Go over here to vote for Cranky before 6p CST on February 28.
2) Vote for me for both Best Single-Author Travel Blog and Best Informative/Practical Travel Blog. While you’re there, don’t forget to vote for the other categories as well.
3) Check out all the other finalist blogs – there are some great ones in there.
4) Turn off your computer and go to bed. It’s getting late. Do NOT go back and vote again – you can only do it once.
Thanks to everyone who nominated me. Now let’s see if we can win one of these things. Remember, go here to vote for Cranky.
The JetBlue Customer Bill of Rights has now been out there for over a day, and there is a lot of buzz about it. Unfortunately, most of the buzz is on defining the oft-used term “Controllable Irregularity.”
See, JetBlue will give you vouchers if you are delayed or canceled but only if the problem was due to a “Controllable Irregularity.” There has been a lot of speculation about what exactly that means, so I decided to do some more digging.
I spoke with JetBlue’s media relations office, and when I asked what the term meant, I was told that it meant anything that was under JetBlue’s control. Uh, ok. With a little more prodding, I was told that it meant things “other than weather or other than air traffic control.”
I then asked if they planned on updating the contract of carriage with a definition, especially since the term was capitalized in the Customer Bill of Rights. Generally, capitalized terms in legal documents require definition. I was simply told that it was just a JetBlue style to capitalize things and that was all. Wow.
So what exactly do we know now? Let’s use the above handy-dandy graphic as a guide. Maintenance and crew delays will receive compensation. Air traffic control and weather delays are not compensated. What if it’s a canceled flight due to crew delays from weather problems last week? Um, not so sure.
Just going on speculation here, I think we can add dinosaur attacks and military coups as additional events that won’t receive compensation. I mean, if either of those happen, they’re clearly out of JetBlue’s control. Besides, if that happens, we have bigger things to worry about anyway.
We all know that the British government is tax happy when it comes to the airline industry, but thanks to some loopholes, airlines are figuring out ways to help reduce the tax burden.
The Air Passenger Duty rule specifically states that there are two levels of taxation. People traveling in the lowest class of service on an aircraft pay GBP5 for European flights and GBP20 for all other flights. People traveling in any other class of service have to pay double that amount.
This means that customers on all-business class flights on airlines like MAXjet and Eos get to pay the lower level because they are in the lowest class of service. According to this article, bmi’s regional airline has now realized that by removing the dividers between the business class and economy class cabins, they are technically considered the same class under Section 2.5 of the rule since the seats are the same.
BA says they have no plans to follow, but I can tell you as a customer I’d be happy to pay GBP5 less for a short haul flight if all it meant was having no curtain in the aisle.
From the looks of JetBlue CEO David Neeleman’s face on news shows this morning, I get the feeling it was a sleepless few days for the BlueCrew. Remember how I said before that by not pre-canceling their flights, the airline was helping a lot more people than it hurt? Well I’ll have to take that one back. Continuing to cancel up to a quarter of their flights through the entire holiday weekend most certainly had to have hurt a lot more than pre-canceling would have done.
What happened? Well in short they didn’t have the systems in place to recover from such a mammoth disruption. It has taken days to get everyone in the right place, including customers who may have been stranded. This has turned uglier than anyone could have imagined.
So where do we go from here? Nope, not to a government-mandated Passenger Bill of Rights. Why do that when just the threat of one will get airlines to act?
Remember, the airlines created their Customers First plan after the last threat appeared. That was good enough for 5 years until the recent incidents have thrust it back into the spotlight. So once again, the airlines are reacting.
First, American put a four-hour cap on the amount of time they’d leave a customer on the plane. (Thanks, Global Traveller and Upgrade: Travel Better) They also promised technology upgrades to help prevent the problems from occurring again.
JetBlue took a much stronger approach by introducing its own Customer Bill of Rights this morning. You can read the announcement here, but I’ll summarize myself.
*They’ll notify customers of delays, cancellations, and diversions along with the cause
*They won’t keep customers on board an aircraft on the ground for more than 5 hours
*If a flight lands but can’t taxi to a gate, it pushes back and can’t takeoff, or it is just plain delayed due to circumstances under JetBlue’s control (not weather or ATC), customers will be compensated with vouchers worth $25 to the full price of the roundtrip ticket depending on the length of the delay
*If a flight is canceled due to something under JetBlue’s control (not weather or air traffic control) less than 12 hours before scheduled departure, each customer will get either a full refund or a full credit as well as a voucher for the entire roundtrip cost of the flight
*If a customer is involuntarily denied boarding due to overbooking, they’ll get $1,000. (Don’t get too excited by this one. The airline doesn’t overbook, so this will rarely happen.)
Of course, they’re also going to be making technological changes to ensure that this meltdown doesn’t happen again. I think this is quite proactive and it goes a long way to address people’s concens. True, they aren’t handing out cash, but they will be handing out a lot of vouchers. If you’d like to hear more about the reasoning straight from the horse’s mouth, watch this YouTube video from David Neeleman.
By the way, all of these policies are retroactive to February 14, the day of the weather debacle, so people on those flights will be receiving compensation. It doesn’t help people get where they’re going right now, but it does at least make an effort. Is it enough? We’ll see if it satisfies people or whether more is necessary. Personally, I’m glad to see airlines responding. It tells me once again that there’s no need for further regulation. Simply the threat will be enough.
Oh happy day for members of Alaska Airlines’ Mileage Plan. Now you can redeem your miles for one way awards for half the mileage of roundtrip awards. That is definitely a development worth of a gold star.
If you’ve never needed to book a one way award, you probably don’t realize that on most airlines you can’t do it. You actually have to book a roundtrip award and throw away the return if you want to fly one way. Seems ridiculous, no? Well it is. But now Alaska is allowing one way redemption and that’s great news. According to this FlyerTalk thread, it happened last week. Let’s hope others follow (but don’t count on it).
