You guys know I can be pretty harsh on Virgin America, but I have to say, I really like their latest promotion. I received it last night not only from Virgin, but also from two other people before the original had even landed in my inbox. That tells me it’s got some buzzworthiness to it.

What’s the deal? Wednesday night is Superfly party night. Seriously. The airline is calling it an online happy hour in the sky with two free drinks per person, and even some after hours partying once you arrive. The airline has designated four flights on each of the next five Wednesdays as follows:

VX 313 JFK-LAX leaving at 505p
VX 1839 SFO-LAX leaving at 6p
VX 1777 SFO-LAS leaving at 715p
VX 1852 LAX-SFO leaving at 355p

If you’re onboard, you’ll get free drinks, they’re encouraging use of chat rooms in their inflight entertainment system, and once you land, your boarding pass will get you in to some local hotspots.

So why do I like this? Well, Wednesdays are typically slow days, so might as well try to convince some twenty-somethings to hop on board and have a good time. It also does a good job of setting the vibe of the airline. Most importantly, the uniqueness of the promo makes it buzzworthy. It won’t generate a ton of money, but it will get publicity. It also doesn’t cost them much, and that’s important. Nice work.

And now, on an unrelated note. I received a lot of feedback that you liked Benet’s guest post while I was gone. She’s told me that she’ll have her latest version of “Strange but True Airport News” up on Towers and Tarmacs this afternoon. So head on over if you’re interested.

Let’s face it. It sucks to have to book travel right now. Ok, it clearly sucks to actually be an airline far more, but we’ve beaten that horse to death already. So why do I say it’s so bad to book? Uncertainty.

With my wedding coming up in October, there are a ton of flight arrangements that need to be made. There are showers, receptions, and more, and they all require family members hopping on aircraft to criss-cross the country.

Now, I know fares are high. That’s fine. I have no complaints about that at all. In fact, I’d complain if they weren’t. But if I buy a ticket, I want to make sure that flight will actually go. Unfortunately, that’s not something that we can really rely upon as much these days.

I started thinking about this when JetBlue pulled their LAX service before it even started. Now just about every other airline has decided to reduce capacity, so buying a ticket is like a game of chance. Will your flight still be there when it comes time to travel?

So, I’ve tried to put together some pieces of advice on how to best position yourself to have your flight actually exist when you go to travel. Here are my somewhat feeble thoughts. Sorry I don’t have anything more substantial, but everything is so fluid right now that it’s tough to really know how to deal with this best.

• Fly During Busy Times - That 8am flight to Chicago isn’t going away, but maybe that 6a or 10p flight will. When airlines look to cut flights, you’ll generally see it happen at off peak times. Sure, the flip side here is that the peak times will cost more, but that’s the price you’ll pay.




• Don’t Fly Northwest or Delta - Yes, this is being pretty harsh. And yes, I’m actually flying Northwest in August, so why do I say not to fly them? Well, they’re merging, and though their pleas to Congress have stated that they won’t be cutting service, I think that’s a load of crap. My guess is that flights will be cut, and smaller hubs will be shrunk significantly, regardless of what they say now. They’ve even started to hint about it. So, if you’re booking very far out, you might want to keep that in mind. Even if the merger were approved tomorrow, I wouldn’t expect major cuts to begin until after the summer. If you do end up flying on these guys (or any airlines that decide to merge), at least try to avoid marginal hubs like Cincinnati and Memphis for your connections. Those will likely see the greatest impact, I’d think.




• If You’re in Denver, Fly Southwest - As we’ve seen often over the last few months, Southwest is hell-bent on kicking Frontier out of Denver. So, they’re actually adding flights instead of cutting them. To be fair, they aren’t really doing much cutting elsewhere in the system either, so they might be a good one to book in general. Then again, what they’ve done so far isn’t necessarily an indicator of how they’ll behave in the future.




• Don’t Book Too Far in Advance - The easiest thing to do is wait until it’s closer to your travel time before booking. When flights get cut, there will be some advance notice, so if you’re traveling within a month, you should be fine (unless you were flying JetBlue to LAX, I suppose). I know this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and yes, you’ll have to pay for more this privilege, but it will give you more certainty.




• Keep Your Fingers Crossed - If you can’t drive, there’s really not much else you can do but keep your fingers crossed and hope that your flight goes. I know I make this sound like every flight is at risk, and that’s not the case. I’d like to think that I’m overstating the possibilities here, but it’s better to think about these things beforehand. The good news is that if flights get cut, you’ll be reaccommodated on another flight on that airline, but it may not be as convenient as you’d like.

It’s a tough time to be a traveler right now. So, just be patient and hope that your flight doesn’t get cut. What other tips do you have out there?

I noticed on One Mile at a Time yesterday that United has quietly started allowing people to upgrade to Economy Plus at the time of booking. Great idea. In fact, I almost thought about giving them a gold star, but not quite. While it’s a good idea, I have some issues with the way they’re doing this.

Don’t get me wrong, this is the right thing to do. If someone wants to pay more up front to sit in Economy Plus, why would United want to turn down that revenue opportunity? They shouldn’t, and they’ve now fixed that problem. BUT, looking at United’s page on the subject, I see that the pricing for the upgrade is the same regardless of whether you do it at the time of booking or at the airport. The value, however, isn’t the same, and United needs to make an adjustment to account for that, otherwise they’re leaving money on the table and possibly angering their elite customers.

Economy Plus is primarily meant as a bonus for elite members, supposedly the airline’s best customers. When they sold the upgrade at the time of check-in, most elites would have already been seated in Economy Plus so it wouldn’t be a big deal. But now, if someone upgrades at the time of booking, it could be taking a seat away from a valuable elite member. I don’t know how often the Economy Plus cabin fills up completely, but this would certainly make that more likely to occur.

So, if United wants to sell an upgrade at the time of booking, they should charge more for it than for an upgrade at the airport because the potential loss of value for the elite customer who gets stuck in Economy Minus is increased. Also, having an Economy Plus seat secured at the time of booking is of greater value to the purchasing customer, so the price should be higher.

Also, it’s a little disappointing to see that all classes of service pay the same amount for the upgrade. When United stopped giving people booking full fare tickets access to Economy Plus, I thought it was completely ridiculous. Now, I would have thought they might have reconsidered. If you paid that much money for a ticket, I think that access to Economy Plus is only fair. It should at least be discounted for the handful of non-elites who actually buy those fares, but it isn’t.

So . . . good idea, United, but you’re leaving money on the table and possibly angering your elite customers. Maybe some tweaking on the execution side would be a good idea.

The price of fuel continues to rise, but I don’t think it’s easy for most people to really grasp how devastating this is, because it’s rarely put in normal terms. $125 a barrel? What the heck does that mean in reality? JetBlue, when they pulled out of LAX before even starting, gave us a number to work with. They say that it now costs more than $15,000 to fly a plane across the country. So let’s do a little math.

Each A320 they fly has 150 seats. Let’s say they fly with 85% of their seats filled on average. That means 127 seats are filled. If you take that $15,000 cost and divide it over 127 people, each person has to fork over $118 each way just to cover fuel.

Seriously. Remember those days of $99 each way across the country? That wouldn’t even cover fuel these days. And that $15,000 estimate came out when fuel was lower than it is now. If you find a low fare, be thankful. They’re going to continue to become more scarce.

As promised, I spent the weekend putting together my photos and this trip report from our excellent Peru trip. If you’d like to see photos, I’ve posted them here. My fiancee is involved with Adventures by Disney, so they invited us to join them on a dress rehearsal of one of the guided trips. Needless to say, we jumped at the chance and we were lucky enough to get the Peru trip, our first choice. (And please go easy on me for the title of this post. That piece of cheesiness was the Disney theme for one of the days of the trip.)

I asked you guys to recommend how you would go about getting there, and the LAN nonstop won out. I’m certainly glad we went that way because it was really convenient. Service was ok at best, but we were on-time and it was easy. Disney put us on Star Peru for the flight from Lima to Cusco, and that was an interesting experience. Let’s get into the details.

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April 27, 2008
LAN (Peru) #605 Lv Los Angeles (LAX) 150p Arr Lima (LIM) 1225a
LAX: Gate 108, Runway 24L, Dept ~On Time
LIM: Gate 14, Runway 15, Arr ~:15m Early
Aircraft: CC-CEB, Boeing 767-316ER, White Star, ~75% Full
Seat: 20A
Flight Time: 7h50m

It was a hot day in LA, but instead of going to the beach, we spent the morning packing. We arrived at LAX at noon for a 150p flight, and there was no line at the LAN counter at the Bradley terminal, despite the fact that there were two flights leaving within a half hour of each other. I haven’t flown out of the Bradley terminal in a few years, but I still get that same excitement I used to get as a kid. Flying out of Bradley always meant we were going somewhere exciting.

An agent took our names and entered them into her portable device when we entered the line, because, we were told, the airline wanted to make sure everyone was in the right place and they wanted to see how long it took to get to the front. It took us just a couple minutes, and we found an agent who was able to help us with everything we needed. Well, ok, we couldn’t get an upgrade to business, but the agent confirmed the flight wasn’t very full, and she gave us an exit row.

After wandering the shops for a few minutes, something that was to be a theme of this trip, we headed toward security. The line minders from the TSA were barking orders at people despite that fact that it was painfully obvious most people didn’t speak English very well if at all. At one point, a TSO yelled at an Asian couple for not keeping their boarding passes with them through security, and they had no idea what he was saying. He angrily held up the line until he could get a supervisor. It’s this kind of offensive behavior that gives tourists a bad impression of the US.

We got to the gate an hour before departure to find boarding beginning. We had to get on a bus for a remote gate at the west end of the airport, so they really started early. Upon finding our seats, we noticed the plane had been outfitted with the new AVOD system, and that made our day. We pushed back on time and slowly made the long trek to the runway for departure.

Once airborne, the captain said we’d have a nice ride, so he turned off the seatbelt sign. With the exception of a 15 minute period, it stayed that way most of the flight. The flight attendants came around and served drinks as well as lunch. I had the chicken and potatoes and the chicken wasn’t bad but the potatoes were dry and not good at all. (That’s saying something, because I LOVE potatoes.) Once finished, I sat back and started watching movies. The system was a good one, but I actually couldn’t find too many movies that interested me. So I watched TV, played games, etc. I think my favorite feature of the system was that you could pull up the map in the corner showing where you were while you were in any movie or TV show.

After lunch, we didn’t see the flight attendants again until a couple hours before arrival when they served a midnight snack. Around that time, we were tracking along the dark coast of South America and we began our descent an hour later. There were no lights around until we were fairly close to the ground. We landed after midnight and had the unpleasant task of waiting in a 45 minute immigration line before grabbing our bags and heading into town.

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April 30, 2008
Star Peru #1117 Lv Lima (LIM) 930a Arr Cusco (CUZ) 1035a
LIM: Gate 5, Runway 15, Dept ~On Time
CUZ: Gate 3, Runway 28, Arr ~On Time
Aircraft: OB-1823, Boeing 737-2T2, Peruvian People, ~95% Full
Seat: 3A
Flight Time: ~1h

After a couple days in Lima, it was time to join the tour group. I had thought we were taking LAN over to Cusco, but when the coach pulled up at the airport, I was surprised to be handed a Star Peru boarding pass. Who?! I had never heard of them, so I started asking around.

Apparently, we were put on Star Peru because they make things much easier for tour groups. Disney was able to just give all our luggage to them, and they loaded it on the plane. Then they gave our group leaders a boarding pass for everyone and we didn’t have to wait in line once.

The Lima airport is very small and very easy to navigate. We went through domestic security and passed to a small holding room from where many domestic flights leave. That’s when I got my first glimpse of our nicely painted 737-200. According to Airfleets.net, this aircraft was delivered to Western Airlines at the end of 1982. Delta had the plane until 1995 when it was sent to Lithuanian Airlines. Star Peru picked it up in early 2006. Notice that Varig never had this plane. That’ll mean something in a second . . . .

We left the crowded waiting area to board our plane via air stairs. That’s always something that I love. Though the plane looked clean on the outside, it was a little scratched up on the inside. The interior didn’t look very old, but the old 737 moniker on the window shade didn’t exactly look new. Now that I know the airplane never flew with Varig, it seems very strange that each belt buckle had the Varig logo on it. They must have picked them up at a fire sale when that airline went down.

We took off to the South and turned toward the East for our flight to Cusco. The Andes start very close to the coast in Peru, so we were soon skimming the tops of tremendous mountains with an incredible view as far as the eye could see. The crew came through with drinks and a sandwich for everyone, and then soon enough it was time to descend.

Flying into Cusco is a bit tricky. The airport lies in a valley 11,000 feet above sea level. The mountains on the West are too high for a straight in approach, so you fly over the airport and do a quick descent as you spiral around from the East. Then you land on the runway right as you straighten out. This is all done by hand flying as there are no instrument systems. All flights land to the west and depart back toward the east. Flights also mostly operate in the morning because of the hot, high, and windy conditions. LAN now has an afternoon flight, but that’s a relatively new addition. During the rainy season, low clouds mean flights get scrubbed until it clears up. Fortunately we didn’t have any of those issues when we landed, and soon we were on our way.

Our time in Peru was fantastic. The scenery is something you must see in person, and the people were all extremely friendly. As I mentioned, if you’d like to see pictures from our trip, click here.

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May 6, 2008
Star Peru #1118 Lv Cusco (CUZ) 1105a Arr Lima (LIM) 1210p
CUZ: Gate 3, Runway 10, Dept ~:30m Late
LIM: Gate 13, Runway 15, Arr ~:30m Late
Aircraft: OB-1823, Boeing 737-2T2, Peruvian People, ~67% Full
Seat: 4B
Flight Time: ~1h

Soon enough, it was time to head back home. We had a morning flight on May 6 to go back to Lima and then we had a redeye back to LAX. We were originally told our departure time was at 1055a, but when we received our boarding passes when we arrived at the airport around 10a, they said 1105a. Once again, we never saw our luggage, so we went straight through security. The Cusco airport is small but modern and functional with just a little holdroom for a handful of gates and a couple shops.

Our flight wasn’t even on the board yet when we got to the gate, and that made me a little nervous. There also were no Star Peru personnel around. LAN and Aerocondor flights came and went, but we were creeping closer to our departure time with no info. Finally, our flight popped up on the board saying 1135a. I’m assuming that was delayed from the original time and not just a new schedule about which we didn’t know.

The plane landed, and they turned it around pretty quickly. We had the same plane that we had on the way out, so I’m assuming they just run this one back and forth a couple times every morning.

It was getting toward noon, and it was heating up outside. We had a relatively light load for a short flight, so I figured there wouldn’t be any problems, but it was still going to take a while to get airborne. Sure enough, our takeoff roll lasted for a loooong time. It seemed like we used all 11,000 ft of that runway, and once we were airborne, we were slow to climb.

What made things worse was the pressurization system that had everyone’s ears popping a little. My fiancee had a head cold, and it didn’t take long for her head to start feeling like it had been stabbed with an ice pick (her words, not mine). Once at cruise, she was fortunately able to get it cleared out in time for the flight attendants to do their food and drink service.

I have a friend who collects safety cards, so I asked one of the flight attendants if I could take one. That’s not an easy thing to do since most rows had one card if that (on the way out we had none). But the flight attendant offered to get me a new one. When she returned, she had two, but asked if I would fill out a comment card about the service the crew had provided. She even gave me the names of the entire crew. Pretty smart, if you ask me. To be honest, the service was quite good, so I had no qualms about filling it out.

Shortly after, we were over the foothills of the Andes and we started our fighter pilot descent into Lima. You could tell this guy was having fun, because he was coming down at a pretty good clip. We also came in fast, and he ended up dropping the gear about 15 minutes before landing so he could slow us down rapidly. It was actually pretty fun.

Once on the ground, we taxied back to the gate and went into town for our afternoon farewell lunch. We had a hotel that night, but we only used it for a few hours until we had to return to the airport for our flight home.

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May 7, 2008
LAN (Chile) #600 Lv Lima (LIM) 105a Arr Los Angeles (LAX) 740a
LIM: Gate 15, Runway 33, Dept ~On Time
LAX: Gate 105, Runway 25L, Arr ~:10m Early
Aircraft: CC-CQA, Airbus A340-313X, White Star, ~75% Full
Seat: 12A
Flight Time: 8h20m

Disney arranged for everyone to be picked up three hours prior to the departure of their flights. Ours left at 1240a, so we left at around 930p for the long and slow drive to the airport. We arrived at about 1015p and went to check in.

It took about 20 minutes in line before we reached the front. There are separate lines for the US flights because those require talking to an agent. All the other LAN flights can use the kiosks to check-in.

The agent gave us our boarding passes and I noticed that it was for a flight departing at 105a. Huh? That was the other flight; the LAN Chile flight (instead of LAN Peru). Well, the agent said that the second flight wasn’t operating that day. I think this was canceled long ago, but we didn’t quite get the message until I looked at the boarding pass.

The bad news? The flight left 25 minutes later than we expected, so that meant we had longer to wait. The good news? We would be on an A340-300 instead of a 767. I had only been on one A340 in my life before, and that was an A340-600 on South African from Cape Town to Jo’burg. So, this was not only my first A340-300, but it was also my first Airbus long haul trip. Cool. On top of that, the agent gave us the very first row of coach on the left side. The middle was occupied by another family on our trip, and the right was blocked off for crew rest, so it was a nice set up for us.

We waited in the restaurant and said bye to people on other flights until it was time for us to board. Once onboard, I noticed out the window that the runways were turned around and we would be able to depart to the north sending us directly home.

We took off and climbed at what seemed to be a very slow rate. It was slow enough that someone else asked me if it seemed we had been climbing very slowly. I pulled out the AVOD system (which isn’t as good as the new one on the 767, but it was adequate), and noticed that yes, we were taking our own sweet time getting up to altitude. Apparently it wasn’t an issue, because we continued on our merry way.

The flight attendants came by and dropped off some drinks before disappearing into the back for the next several hours. I was able to get about 4 to 5 hours of fitful sleep before waking up with the dawn as we passed over Mexico. The flight attendants came by with breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry at that point, so I passed.

As we passed over Mexicali, you could see the marine layer was pretty thick. We followed up the coast until we got near LA, made a few turns, plunged down into the clouds and landed. Fortunately, we were the only plane landing at Bradley at that time, so even after they made everyone wait on board for them to get a sick passenger off, we still made it through customs and immigration in less than 30 minutes.

I know I’ve already said it, but this was a spectacular trip. If you ever get the chance to go down to Peru, do not hesitate.

Man, this has been a busy week. I know I spent half of it lounging around Peru, but long vacations always make it harder to catch up on work when you return. Combine that with the fact that I’ve got a new job at PriceGrabber (Director of Community), and I’m just struggling to make it to the weekend. So, let’s get to what I missed in the international world and I promise I’ll have some more extensive stuff ready for next week.

Nationwide Goes Down - It’s not just US airlines that are dropping like flies. Looks like Nationwide Airlines out of South Africa is the latest casualty. To be fair, these guys didn’t really have their stuff together in the first place. I mean, they were grounded last year when a friggin’ engine fell off one of their planes. When something like that happens, it’s not easy to recover. They didn’t.

Virgin Atlantic Thinks You’re Pretty Enough - At least half the time someone brings up Virgin Atlantic, it’s quickly followed by a mention of the inflight massage and manicure. Of course, that was only available in Upper Class, but now it’s not available anywhere. Virgin has decided to kick the beauticians off the plane. So, you’ll have to get a massage or manicure beforehand. I know, rough life.

Neeleman Has Only One Name Idea - You’ve started a successful low cost carrier named JetBlue, and now you’ve moved on to found a Brazilian airline. What should you call it? Well, the plan was to have a naming competition, but that ended with the name Samba, and apparently he didn’t like that. So he went with choice #2 - Azul. Yep, that means Blue in Portuguese. Geez, so creative.

Alitalia Grabs Illegal Loan - Ah, my favorite subject. Italians are now 300m euros poorer since the government decided to loan Alitalia the money to keep the airline afloat. Of course, it’s already been challenged by the EU, and Italy has to somehow justify how this is legal. Good times.

Hey everyone. I made it back from Peru yesterday morning, and let’s just say it’s going to be a VERY busy end to the week. I hope you enjoyed the guest posts while I was gone, and hopefully we’ll get both Henry and Benet to return at some point in the near future. I think I’m going to spend the rest of this week catching up on snippets of what happened while I was gone. You’ll see more in depth discussion about my trip which included new airlines, airports, and airplanes, starting on Monday. For now, let’s see what I missed while I was away.

Continental Tells United to F*&# Off - This was a welcome surprise, I must say. Continental decided that it won’t be merging with United or anyone else for that matter. That left United to go lick its wounds and see if US Airways would come out and play. Meanwhile, Continental, not exactly thrilled at the prospect of playing second fiddle to DL/NW in SkyTeam has started looking elsewhere as well, including a possible oneworld membership.

Eos Won’t See Another Dawn - Just before I left, Eos quietly disappeared from the skies. This one is a little bittersweet for me, because I actually worked with the founder back in 2003 as he was just getting this idea off the ground. I always believed in the idea, but it was going to be tough to succeed even with fuel prices at lower levels. With fuel where it is, the only funding available appears to have been from foreign sources and that wouldn’t have worked with existing foreign ownership rules.

Virgin America Pumps Up the Frequency - You know I’ve been strongly against Virgin America’s strategy of entering highly competitive markets with low frequencies. Well it looks like the airline has finally realized that’s a bad idea. Business travelers will see a more frequent flight schedule on transcontinental routes as well as Seattle to SFO. While I still think these are bound to lose a ton of money with fuel where it is, it’s still the right strategy (except for that SFO-SEA route), if there is such a thing for them at this point.

JetBlue Goes Ex-LAX - While Virgin America builds up, JetBlue walks away. The airline now says it will “delay” its new LAX service. The airline says fuel is too expensive, but you know that also means revenue isn’t where they wanted it to be. It must have been really bad to cancel this service within a few weeks of it starting. This is of course good for Virgin America, but it also shows how hard this market is. Congrats to JetBlue for not being afraid to walk away.

Alaska Throws Down with Virgin America - Alaska, meanwhile, is not going to throw Virgin America a bone at all. Right after Virgin said it would beef up flights between SFO and Seattle, Alaska said it would do the same. Oh, and how about some double miles on the route? This looks like a losing battle for Virgin America, but Alaska’s going to bleed in the process.

Southwest Turns the Knife Further - Fresh off the latest round of Denver increases, Southwest is at it again. On August 4, the airline will start nonstops to Ft Lauderdale, New Orleans, and Sacramento. You’ll also find another daily nonstop to Phoenix. The good news for Frontier? Um, well, they don’t fly to New Orleans, so, uh, that’s good, right? Also, in unrelated Southwest news. If you haven’t seen Southwest’s new blog setup, check it out. The airline continues to be leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else.

That’s all for today. You can expect an international edition of what I missed tomorrow. Then I’ll have more on Peru next week.

It’s hard to write so many posts in advance of a long trip, so I asked my coworker and Cranky Photographer, Christopher Craig, to pick out a photo from his collection that I could post while I’m gone. Now keep in mind, I wrote this post on April 26, and I’m just going to guess that there’s been more merger activity since then. So, has this merger happened yet?

I’d like to blame this ridiculous idea on my brain not getting enough oxygen at the high Peruvian altitudes, but I guess I already told you I wrote this before I left. Oh well. My plane is landing as this post goes live (assuming we’re on time), so I guess I’ll find out what really happened soon enough. I’ll be back posting on my regular schedule again tomorrow.

I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a huge fan of Garrison Keillor’s work, but it’s not like I dislike him either. I’m just sort of ambivalent. But every so often I come across a column of his that I really enjoy. Before I left town on vacation, I came across a piece he wrote entitled “The Old Scout: Singing the Delta Blues” (via Get the Flick), and I thought that others might like to read it as well. It’s a perspective that only someone growing up in Northwest’s backyard could have, but it’s a nice reminder of the romantic side of air travel that exists even today. I recommend reading the entire article, but here are a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite.

We are good travelers, we middle Americans, and when Northwest opened a route to Beijing, everybody and their cousin talked about going there, and this spring the direct Minneapolis-Paris route opened, a beautiful idea to us as we scrape the ice off our windshields. We don’t actually go, of course—we go to work—but we could go on any given day, could write “Au Revoir, Ma Famille” on a paper towel and leave it on the kitchen table under a salt shaker and drive to the airport on the bank of the Minnesota River, abandon the car in a snowbank, flash the plastic, board the plane, and wake up in Paris, like Lindbergh.

And so I mourn the loss of my childhood airline and the silver planes with red tails that rose from the corn. What is a Delta? A delta is mud deposited by the river. Also the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. Also a sort of triangular shape. But to me it is mud which forms a rich bottomland where they grow cotton and late at night old black men sit in a juke joint and play an old beat-up guitar and sing: “I wanted to go to the Orient someday. Get on a silver plane marked NWA. But that plane that would take me, it done flew away. I heard it on the morning news. They’re wiping out the Ns and Ws. That’s why I got these Delta blues.”

Thanks, Brett, for the opportunity to guest post on your blog.

Hi everyone, my name is Henry Harteveldt. I’ve been a friend of Brett’s for several years, and I’m delighted to have been invited to post while Brett is on vacation.

I’m just as much of an airline dork as Brett, maybe even more so. Hmm. No, scratch that. No one can match Brett for his airline dorkiness. Regardless, my “day job” is that of a Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, a leading technology market research firm. I’ve been at Forrester since January 2000, and lead our airline and travel industry research practice. The majority of our airline research is on topics related to eBusiness, product and channel management – think distribution, Web sites and self-service – as well as social computing, mobile, customer experience, brand loyalty/CRM and interactive marketing. We also do some IT research – for example, we just did a joint study with the OpenTravel Alliance, a trade group that helps to establish XML development standards for the travel industry.

Now, I have a confession to make: Despite doing a lot of research on social computing and its role and impact on the travel industry, this is the first time I’ve blogged. So, if I’ve done something wrong with this post, go easy on me.

When Brett and I were discussing what I should blog about, he jokingly – well, maybe not jokingly – suggested I write about airline premium cabin service (to me, the economy class seat is an icon of inhumanity). Tempting as that was, I thought there might be something more interesting and relevant to write about: How US airline travelers view the economy. We just completed a Q1 2008 online study of 4,488 US travelers (1,970 took at least one airline round-trip in the preceding year), giving us fresh insight.

In general, US online air travelers – that is, air travelers who use the Internet at least once a month for any purpose – are doing a bit better than US online travelers overall. For example, we asked travelers to evaluate how their personal financial situations changed during the preceding 12 months. Among air travelers, 21% said they were financially worse off; 31% said things had improved. Among all travelers, nearly 29% reported a decline, while 29% said their personal financial situations had improved.

What about their outlook for the next 12 months? Air travelers are a tiny more optimistic than the general traveler population. Thirty-eight percent of air travelers believe they’ll be financially better off 12 months from now than they are today, slightly above the 36% we see for all travelers.

When we asked travelers how their travel behaviors might change, most indicated a desire to keep everything at current levels – for example, 54% of air travelers said they’d spend just as much on leisure travel in the next 12 months as they did in the preceding year, and 61% said they’d take just as many trips. These opinions, to me, reflect travelers’ perspectives that travel is a right, not a privilege. Travel is an activity we view with almost the same level of importance as paying our rent or mortgages, putting food on the table, and saving for our retirements or kids’ educations.

So do the airlines have anything to worry about? Of course they do – the drama in the airline industry is never ending and takes multiple forms. Remember that question we asked about future leisure travel spending intentions? Nearly 28% are considering cutting back to some degree – just 18% say they’re considering spending more (we didn’t ask the dollar amounts they’d consider increasing or decreasing their spending by, nor did we ask whether any increases were to account for expected higher fuel costs). And while 15% of air travelers said they’d consider taking more leisure trips, nearly one in four say they’re contemplating traveling less.

The fact that more air travelers are considering cut-backs than are open to increases is a cause for concern. Against the extraordinarily high cost of fuel, the softening economy will only intensify travelers’ desires to get a good fare – good fares that are less likely to exist because airlines simply can’t afford to profitably offer these anymore.

I’m finalizing a more detailed report for our clients on this topic, and expect it will be published on the Forrester site within two weeks or so. This is a topic we expect to follow throughout the year. After all, as I recently stated at TravelCom, the travel industry is a lot like the Tennessee Williams’ character Blanche DuBois (in “The Glass Menagerie” “A Streetcar Named Desire”): We’re dependent on the kindness of strangers. How so? The travel industry, including airlines, depends either on the largesse of business executives who determine their firms’ business travel budgets, or consumers who choose how to spend their disposable income. Blanche DuBois, of course, goes crazy at the end of “The Glass Menagerie” “A Streetcar Named Desire” – let’s hope the airline industry is able to better withstand this latest challenge.
Updated 5/7 @ 1032a to reflect Blanche DuBois association with “A Streetcar Named Desire” and not “The Glass Menagerie.”