For those who have tried to book a flight on Delta in the last week, you’ve probably noticed that the layout of the booking process has changed. Delta is now showing amenities by flight all in the booking path. That’s a huge improvement and means you don’t have to hunt and peck to figure it out anymore. I still think there are a few more amenity logos that could be added, however.

If you go to book a flight, here’s what you’ll now see:

The top flight is what it looks like before you start clicking and mousing-over. The bottom is all the info that can be displayed. I do like the “More Price Options” on the left side so that you can see whether it’s worth it for a non-refundable or first class fare without re-searching. (Hint: If you really care about price, that will almost never be useful.) It would have been nice had Delta simply said, “for $xxx more, you can fly in biz” instead of making you mouseover, but that’s minor.

The meat of the improvement in my mind, however, is at the top right of the flight where you see amenity icons. If you mouse over them, it explains what they are. In this particular case, it shows that there is wifi and a personal screen at each seat. (If you’re wondering what the little red icon is, that just shows it being a redeye.) From what I can tell, Delta now has 10 icons. (I was told there was an 11th for food, but I haven’t seen it in the wild, so I refuse to believe it. Food does appear at the bottom of the flight info.) Here’s the list of all of them along with a few suggested additions of my own.

This system is a big improvement but it’s not perfect. For example, the icon will only show up when the fleet is completely outfitted with a technology. So while they’re adding wifi to the regional aircraft, it won’t show up. Only when the whole fleet is done will that happen. I suppose it’s better to underpromise here, but it would be nice if they could do more of a real-time display like American does.

It also gets a little confusing on connections. For example, you might see a personal screen and an overhead screen in the amenities area. That’s because the first flight might be on an airplane with a personal screen while the second is on an airplane with an overhead screen. Or you might just see the personal screen icon and realize that the second flight has nothing at all. If you mouse over the icon, it shows you which flight has which. And to be honest, I can’t really think of a better way to do it so I’m probably not in a place to say anything.

The one thing that absolutely needs to be fixed is that amenities aren’t available for codeshare flights. With Delta becoming increasingly close with Air France/KLM, those airlines’ results show up a lot. So to just have blank amenity information for those flights is a big deal, especially if you’re going to Europe where they consider their flights interchangeable. According to Delta, it would like to add codeshare flights but there isn’t a timeline for that yet.

I know it sounds like a lot of complaining here, but this really is a big improvement. And it’s actually going to get better next year. I’m told that Delta will soon have the ability for a customer to search for a flight by amenities. So if you want a personal screen, you can put that in as a requirement for the search. That’s huge, but this is a big step in the right direction as well.

As we all know by now, this past weekend was a mess for air travel as much of the country was buried under snow and high winds. It was a busy day for us at Cranky Concierge as well. We were following four clients and three of them had flights canceled. That’s no surprise considering how ugly things got. Look at this snapshot I took from FlightStats during the heart of the problem.

In the end, the three people we followed were all able to get to their destinations thanks to a little bit of creativity. Each of these stories seems to have a good lesson for anyone who gets stuck in weather and needs to try to find an alternate route. So I thought I would go through each to display lessons learned.

Lesson #1 – Always Look at Alternate Airports
One client was flying from Chicago to Northwest Arkansas for an important meeting with that big box retailed based down there. Both United and American fly the route, and this time he was on United. His flight was canceled relatively early and so was almost every other flight to Northwest Arkansas that day. There was at least one morning flight that did go, but it was too early for him to make.

We looked at connections through other airports, but we couldn’t get to the other airports from Chicago, so that wasn’t an option. We ended up finding an option to Springfield, Missouri at 6p that was still showing is going so we consider that since it was less than 100 miles away. In the end, the client decided to go to Tulsa instead which is also less than 100 miles. Several flights to Tulsa had been canceled that day, but I had a hunch this one would go. It was the last flight of the night heading into a major maintenance facility. My guess was that airplane needed to be in Tulsa. (Any American people know the answer?)

The client was doubly lucky because he had American miles that he was able to use to go to Tulsa. To make things even better, there were Saver seats available for only 12,500 miles to get down there. So, we found him a car rental and his flight made it down there without incident.

Remember, always look for alternate airports.

Lesson #2 – Don’t Trust the Airline to Find the Best Alternate
Another client was traveling from Ottawa to Boston. There’s one flight a day on Air Canada and that flight was canceled, so what did Air Canada do? The airline automatically rebooked him on the next nonstop flight available to Boston, which happened to be the next day. That wasn’t going to work, so we went online to find that there were plenty of options connecting through Montréal or Toronto. The system simply didn’t look at that as a possibility.

In the end we sat on interminable hold with Air Canada trying to find the best option to get him to where he needed to go. When we finally got through, I asked the Air Canada agent if she thought that Toronto or Montréal was running better in the weather since they were both affected. She suggested going through Toronto so that’s what he did. His connecting flight ended up being late but he did get into Boston that night as planned, in time for those morning meetings.

Remember, never trust the airline’s systems to give you the best option.

Lesson #3 – Check Your Flights Early When the Weather Goes South
The last passenger whose flight was canceled actually wasn’t traveling on Sunday at all. He was traveling on Monday morning, but it was the first flight out. Normally we wouldn’t look at early morning flights until the evening before, but in this case with all of the weather issues on Sunday we decided to start looking early. When weather goes bad, cancellations start early.

Sure enough by mid-day on Sunday, his flight on Monday morning had already been canceled. In this case Delta (the airline he was on) had auto-rebooked him on the next best option on Delta, which was through Atlanta to get to Florida. Unfortunately this still arrived later than originally planned and our client was going to miss his appointment.

We were able to call Delta and even though it was a weather delay, the airline was willing to put him on another airline. In the end, he flew nonstop on American at a slightly earlier time than his original Delta flight, easily making his appointment.

Whether this would’ve been possible had we not looked into options the day before is unclear. That later it gets, the better the chance that any seats on other flights would have been taken by someone else.

I know a lot of people were stranded on Sunday as cancellations were massive. Fortunately this was a lower travel time. Had it happened one week later during the Christmas rush there wouldn’t have been very many options for anyone. But hopefully if you were stuck on Sunday you were able to find a good option and get home. If not, keep some of these options in the back of your head for next time.

Well, this is going to be a popular post, huh? The idea that you should love airline fees probably sounds ridiculous to you. After all, complaining about fees has now replaced complaining about airline food as the traveler’s favorite pastime. But you really should be happy that there are fees out there. Before you start an internet campaign to talk about how much I suck, hear me out.

Since airlines are private entities, I assume we can all agree that airlines have a right to make a profit. If airlines were run by the government, then that would be a different story, but they aren’t. So airlines are trying to make a profit (some better than others) and should do whatever they can to get to that point. On a basic level, this means revenues need to be higher than costs. Ok, I think we’re still on the same page.

The problem, of course, is costs have spiked to a new sustained high level in the last few years thanks to jet fuel prices. This is probably familiar to many of you, but take a look at this graph showing jet fuel prices per gallon at the beginning of July in each year:

Even excluding that spike year of 2008, jet fuel prices have still more than tripled to become the largest single cost at many airlines. And fuel prices is pushing higher once again as I write this. Just think about that. Let me try to put it in easy-to-relate terms.

Let’s say that you sell televisions and times are good. To make this easy, you only sell one type of TV and it sells for $550. Your total costs average out to $500 a TV, so you make a 10 percent profit. (That’s not great for a lot of businesses but for airlines it would be stellar.) Up until now, your cost for a screen has consistently been $50, or 10 percent of your total costs. But all of a sudden, there’s a change in the screen world and prices permanently jump by 300 percent. Now, screens cost $150 and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. If you keep prices where they are, you lose $100 per TV for a negative 18 percent margin that will put you out of business.

So you have to raise prices to cover your costs. You think about jacking up prices from $550 to $650. You’d make a 7.5 percent margin which is ok but a lot fewer people want TVs at $650 than they did at $550. This is where things get ugly.

If you bring prices up to $650, you have to figure out how many TVs to make. After doing the math, you realize that if you jack up prices to that level you might lose half your demand. Since you have so much invested in the factory and tooling, if you cut your production by half, the cost per TV will rise dramatically because you have fewer TVs over which you can spread your fixed costs. It might rise to, say, $700. Then you’d have to raise prices even more and that’s going to cut demand even further. It’s an ugly spiral.

There are a couple ways out of this. If you’re a manufacturer of TV, you can just keep producing TVs and sit on them until you hope demand grows again. But that’s not an option for airlines, so let’s pretend that’s not an option here. So that cuts down on decent options dramatically.

You can lay people off, but you also need to get rid of machinery and tooling that you don’t need anymore. You might need to move into a smaller factory too. This might not even be possible so you have to consider bankruptcy to keep your company as a viable ongoing operation. There has to be a better way.

You then realize that there’s a way to keep prices in check without killing demand. You do raise your prices about 10 percent to $599 and most people are still willing to pay that much. But now, you tell people that the $599 version doesn’t have HD capability turned on. To get that, they’ll have to pay an additional $25. Then you start adding new options to help get the price up. They can order a deluxe remote control for $25. You start offering wifi capability for another $25. Now, those people who want the add-ons can pay more for them. But those people who wouldn’t pay the higher price can still get a base unit for a relatively affordable price. People can buy what they want and demand stays relatively high.

In the end, your total revenue per TV goes up to $700 with all of the add-ons that people choose. The basic TV being priced at $599 still keeps demand high for the unit, but the amount that some people pay to dress up their TV to make it better is what actually pushes you into profitability.

This isn’t a perfect comparison, of course, but the idea is sound. With the high cost of fuel today, there are two ways the airline industry could go. It could keep the previous pricing scheme but that would mean a lot fewer flights, much higher fares, and probably another visit to bankruptcy-land. Or it can provide a menu of options via fees that keeps the base price low for the no-frills traveler and still keeps a broader schedule available to serve everyone.

In the end, fees are a good thing. I may not like how many airlines have implemented them in a clunky, difficult to compare way, but that will change as airlines start to get better at this and consumers demand more. It doesn’t change the fact that the a la carte pricing method is a good thing for this industry.

Boeing’s Response to the Airbus A320 Revamp Is Simple: Nothing – BNET Headwinds
Now that Airbus has decided to re-engine the A320, Boeing has to decide what to do. I don’t think we’ll see anything for awhile.

Silver Lining: A380 Grounding Helps Qantas Maintain Its Safety Reputation – BNET Headwinds
The A380 grounding has been a mess for Qantas, but in the end is does help it keep a strong safety reputation.

How Southwest Could Deploy a Larger 737 for Greater Profits in New Markets – BNET Headwinds
Now that the 737-800 is all but a done deal for Southwest, it’s time to think about where those airplanes are going. I’ve got a good idea myself.

In the Trenches: Looking Beyond the Customer for Revenue – Intuit Small Business Blog
This talks about our decision to start booking travel via Cranky Concierge and why we did it.

Southwest’s Performance Problem: How to Fix Those Late Arrivals – BNET Headwinds
Southwest didn’t have the best month for on time arrivals in October and it looks like some bigger changes may be required to get back on track thanks to a changing model.

How to Set a Travel Policy for Your Business – Intuit Small Business Blog
Talking about a travel policy is not usually at the top of the list for small businesses, but it should be. Here are some ideas for getting started.

How many of you saw Cathay Pacific’s announcement that it’s putting new seats in business class? It seemed relatively quiet on this side of the world, but it is big news. Possibly the biggest news is that Cathay is following the lead of . . . US Airways!?! That’s right, it’s the reverse herringbone. What do you think?