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.”