Am I the only one who thinks this whole boarding pass advertising thing is a little creepy? It’s not the concept that bothers me. You want to throw some ads on my boarding pass? Go ahead. It’s the fact that they’re using my demographics to target ads that makes me nervous.

The basic idea is that right now, when you print your boarding pass at home, it’s just a boarding pass. So, American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United, and US Airways have now all partnered with a new company called Sojern that will sell ad spots on your boarding pass and mask it by offering weather information. Of course, the spin is that this makes life easier for the traveler. Whatever. I’ve never had trouble clicking on Weather Underground to get my own weather, but if you want to put it on there . . . fine.

None of that bothers me. What bothers me is something that I haven’t really seen talked about. Yes, the company admits that it’s targeting based upon where you’re going, and others have mentioned that. Well duh, that makes sense, and I don’t mind them sharing that information. But, if you click on the sample boarding pass (PDF), it states “Sojern’s new media delivers tailored advertising messages based on travelers’ unique itineraries and demographics.”

Hold on here. How are you getting my demographic information? Is the airline sharing it with you if I’m logged in to an account when I check in? I don’t like that at all.

Has anyone had the chance to check out Yapta yet? The site originally launched as a way to see if the price of a ticket you had purchased had gone down. Since some airlines will give you a credit if the fare goes down, this could be a handy little tool to help you save some money. When it first launched, it required you to download a browser plug-in to work, but now you can get Yapta on the web. Unfortunately, there were some kinks that made the site unusable initially, but while some of those have been fixed, there’s still a ways to go before this is a helpful tool.

I decided to go to Yapta (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant) and put in four itineraries I had already purchased to see what I could find.

Northwest to Indianapolis
This one ended before it started. You can’t check Northwest flight information on Yapta (maybe they won’t give you credit for a lower fare?), so I moved on.

United to Indianapolis
By entering my confirmation number and last name, Yapta originally told me that fare had gone down, but that’s because it saw our total price (for two people) as the per person price. Bzzzzt, no good. Now that’s been fixed, and it’s saying that the fare has gone up from $242 to $349. That’s still not quite right. I go on to United.com and it tells me that the price is $370 for that flight right now. So I’m not sure where this is coming from. True, the outcome is the same, but it won’t necessarily always be that way.

JetBlue to San Jose
I figured the third time would be the charm, right? Not quite. Yapta came back saying that the price has gone up from the $109 we paid to $149 per person so there’s nothing to gain here. But just out of curiosity, I checked JetBlue.com and the price is actually $139. Still nothing to gain, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when the fares are not accurate on every itinerary I try so far.

Alaska to Seattle/Portland
This one I thought would be interesting. I’m flying out of Long Beach, going to Seattle, and then flying back from Portland to Orange County. This time, it was just me traveling so there was no issue of viewing two fares as one accidentally. The result? It says that the fare has gone from $310.57 all the way up to $744. Whoa, not so much. I did pay $310.57 (with a % discount certificate), but the current fare is $324. For those keeping score, Yapta was 0 for 3 in getting the correct current price of the ticket. Not good.

Bottom Line
The site has a great idea, but man are there problems. I’m glad to see they’ve worked out the kinks on the fare initially paid. That’s working perfectly now, but every single time it returned the wrong “new” fare that was currently available. Both components need to be right for this site to be successful. Without that component, I still find myself going to the airline website to double-check to actual fare, and that makes Yapta not very useful. Once they solve these problems, it’ll be worth a return visit.

The writing had likely been on the wall for sometime, but it looks like Delta’s experiment in building up LAX is coming to a rapid end. Last week, Delta and ExpressJet announced that their agreement (covering 23 regional jets) would end on September 1. Something tells me we won’t see anyone else come in to fill their place.

The press release had plenty of hints at the ultimate plan for LA. Expressjet had been flying 13 aircraft under a prorate agreement (meaning they take all the financial risk), and I had fully expected those to disappear, but apparently the 10 other aircraft under the cost plus agreement will go as well.

Those 23 planes under the Delta brand had been flying mostly out of LAX and some out of Salt Lake. The release makes it clear that “Delta intends to award a portion of this flying, including all routes currently operated by ExpressJet at its Salt Lake City hub, to another Delta Connection carrier.” That doesn’t address how much of the LAX flying will be replaced, but I think it’s safe to say that the deafening silence says it all.

Many of the flights are already removed from the booking systems. Boise, Portland, and Reno, for example, are already out. Others show reduced flying still in effect, like a single daily Phoenix flight and some Bay Area flying, but most of those don’t have any seats for sale. If that’s the case this far in advance, that means they’re toast, but they just haven’t removed them completely yet. Of course, this also means the smaller Mexico markets like Leon and Torreon will disappear as well. The LA Times confirms that flights will drop from about 93 to near 60 by Labor Day.

It’s entirely possible that some of these will come back via another carrier, but that would really surprise me. This was just a failed experiment, and now it’s time to go back to where they were before. I’m sorry to see some of those Mexico markets go away, because I think they still might work one of these days. But they would have a better chance of working with someone like United or American with a larger local base here in the LA area as well as better connecting opportunities.

Now, I wonder what will happen to Delta’s physical presence in LA. This is a tough one. On one hand, they have a nice, functional terminal over in Terminal 5, but it will now go down to being severely underutilized once again. It would be nice to just bring Northwest over after the merger and fill out the terminal, right? Not so fast. Northwest has an equity stake in Terminal 2, and that’s a nice little asset that they might want to hold on to. Meanwhile, LAWA has to be excited at the prospect of opening up more gate space, but I’m not sure that there’s much they can do beyond working with Delta/Northwest to help them come to the right decision.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Delta to do the right thing here and make room for more airlines to come in? Yeah, right. I think we all know there’s slightly less than no chance of that ever happening. Maybe LAWA can find naked pictures of Delta’s CEO to help get them to move. It’ll be interesting to see how this gets resolved.

(Original LAX image from Flobrio)

After I wrote my post “Booking A Flight In a Time of Uncertainty,” I knew it was bound to bite me. Sure enough, it happened yesterday when Midwest canceled one of my flights this summer. Though that’s a big deal to me, you guys probably don’t care. But there were a couple of things that I found during this process that I thought might be worth writing about.

It started just after lunch when I simultaneously received an email and a recorded phone call saying that there had been a schedule change and I needed to call Midwest to be reaccommodated. Uh oh. Since they said I had to call to be rebooked, I knew what that meant. My flight was toast.

I called the airline and had to wait for a full 10 minutes before someone answered to rebook me. Unfortunately, our redeye from LAX to Milwaukee has disappeared, so they offered to rebook us on a morning flight with a) a four hour connection in Milwaukee or b) an overnight in Milwaukee. Um, no.

So, I quickly went online while I sat there weighing my options and noticed that there were alternatives that were actually cheaper than what we originally paid. I told Midwest I wanted a refund and they obliged. Then I rebooked on Northwest (I know, I said not to do that in my post, but it was convenient). Now, we’ll get to our destination a little earlier and we’ll save $160 between the two of us. That brings me to my two points.

1. Since I had to wait for 10 minutes on the phone with Midwest, something tells me that our flight wasn’t the only one that was canceled. Anyone have any details on what else might have quietly been cut out?




2. Why the heck have fares gone DOWN for a flight this summer?!? That is definitely not a good sign for demand trends. I mean, I’ll gladly take it, but I certainly would have expected to pay more. Airlines cannot afford to be lowering fares right now.

Hopefully these flights won’t be canceled on me, but in this environment, who knows. At least I’m not flying Silverjet.

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 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.”

It’s on like Donkey Kong. Yesterday, Northwest and Delta finally announced that they would merge. This of course follows speculation that began back in 1932 when C.E. Woolman and Lewis Brittin first discussed such a possibility. Now, before I go any further, let me just say once that this all completely depends upon receiving antitrust approval from the government. I’d argue that this administration is likely to be friendly to such a merger, but it’s still far from guaranteed. Enough of the disclaimers; let’s get it on.

You can read the bible-length press release issued by both airlines if you’d like to get all the details. If that’s not enough, you can go to the new Delta website found at the ridiculous url of newglobalairline.com. I’ll just focus on what this means to you, the customer. But first, a brief rundown of the deal.

Let’s make no mistake about it; Delta is the lead dog here. The name of the combined airline will remain Delta and it will continue to be headquartered in Atlanta, though oddly there will be “executive offices” in Minneapolis as well. Delta CEO Richard Anderson will be in charge, and his second lieutenant Ed Bastian will continue as President and CFO. So what does Northwest get? Well, the shareholders get 1.25 shares of Delta stock for each share of Northwest stock, and everyone else gets . . . um, screwed.

Routes
On paper, this airline looks mighty sexy. You’ve got Delta’s strengths in the South, Northeast, Europe and in the West to a limited extent. Combine that with Northwest’s domination in the Upper Midwest and Asia and you’ve got very little overlap at all. Now, about the hubs. Delta says it “will maintain all hubs at Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York-JFK, Salt Lake City, Amsterdam and Tokyo-Narita — each of which will benefit from improved global connectivity.”

The guys who wrote that release were very careful to say that no hubs will be eliminated but notice that they don’t say the same about flights. In fact, they do say in the release, “The transaction is expected to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue and cost synergies from more effective aircraft utilization, a more comprehensive and diversified route system and cost synergies from reduced overhead and improved operational efficiency.”

Wow, that’s a lot of bullcrap, isn’t it? Anytime I see “synergies” mentioned, I throw up a little. But what this says to me is that they’ve got $1b worth of ideas on how to make this airline more efficient. And that has to involve cutting capacity out of the system. Where are the most likely candidates? I’m looking at you, Memphis and Cincinnati.

Yes, they should keep all their “hubs” if they use that term loosely. By the time they’re done with Memphis and Cincinnati, they might look more like Indianapolis. See, all those small Upper Midwest cities that Delta serves from Cincinnati can now very adequately be served from Detroit and Minneapolis. And all those southern cities that Northwest serves from Memphis can be served from Atlanta. Heck, those two cities themselves are only 400 miles apart. So, I would completely expect to see those hubs shrunk down. Whatever cities they can serve due to strong local demand, they will. But many of those other cities can be better served elsewhere. And Northwest has plenty of old DC-9s that they can just send to the boneyard to easily reduce capacity. And don’t forget, Delta just kicked Mesa’s 50 seaters off the property, so they now won’t need to replace that capacity either.

Internationally, this will probably only result in growth. There aren’t any real overlap issues here. With the recently approved antitrust immunity approval from the US government, they won’t even have to wait until the merger is done to start coordinating with Air France/KLM on routes and fares over the Atlantic. In the Pacific, Delta has just about no presence at all, so this will only create more opportunities.

Onboard Product
Great, so there will be a bunch of flights, but what will it be like onboard? We get one clue from the press release. “The combination will accelerate the upgrading of existing international aircraft with lie-flat seats and personal on-demand entertainment.” Now I’m not sure if they consider Northwest’s angled lie-flat seats to be “lie-flat” but I’d bet those seats will be hanging around for awhile since they’re pretty new. As the Northwest-ordered 787s get delivered, however, I’d expect a true lie-flat product more along the lines of Delta’s new seats.

It will be interesting to see what else Delta plans to do here. It’s probably a safe bet that the current Delta onboard product will become the standard. Northwest currently has no inflight entertainment on their domestic fleet and Delta has been installing personal televisions on a pretty good chunk of their fleet. Will this change their installation plans at all? We’re getting way into the weeds here. This will all come out in time.

Customer Service
Oh no, this isn’t going to be good. If you thought Doug Parker over at US Airways had a tough job integrating labor groups, that’s now going to look like a walk in the park. Originally, Delta and Northwest said that they wouldn’t merge unless they could get the pilots to agree to an integration plan before the deal happened. Um, yeah, that didn’t work out so well and the deal fell apart a couple months ago because of it. Why are they so focused on the pilots? That is the only large employee group at Delta that’s unionized. Ah, now it becomes clear.

So what do they do? Delta goes to its pilots and gets an agreement with them that will go “through the end of 2012. The agreement, which is subject to pilot ratification, facilitates the realization of the revenue synergies of the combined companies once the transaction is completed. It also provides the Delta pilots a 3.5 percent equity stake in the new company and other enhancements to their current contract.”

Again, what the hell does that mean? It “facilitates the realization of the revenue synergies of the combined companies”? Please shut up. No, just stop talking. I can’t take it. What this actually means is that the pilots get good raises every year until the contract is done and they walk away with a stake in the new company. But what about those Northwest pilots? How about . . . nada. In fact, they’ve already said that they’re against this merger.

On the brighter side, “The company also expects no involuntary furloughs of frontline employees as a result of this transaction and the existing pension plans for both companies’ employees will be protected.” Well that’s good, but that’s also dependent upon them getting enough voluntary furloughs to make up for the job cuts they’ll need to make this work. I’d guess that they’ll be successful on that front. Northwest employees will probably run away in droves.

So, you can expect all kinds of customer service hiccups as this thing goes through. Just hold on tight and try not to cry too much.

Summary
Let’s see, what else can I say? This has been a long time coming. Is it as necessary as everyone claims it is? I wouldn’t say that, but I’m not going to say it’s bad either. It all depends upon how well they execute. If the combined airlines can trim Cincinnati and Memphis at the very least, the industry will be better off. Will fares go up? They should. There, I’ve said it. Hate me if you like.

The airline industry has been an unstable roller coaster ride for 30 years. If this allows airlines to better match capacity to a level where they can actually fly profitably, then it’s a good thing. Though low fares are always nice for the customer, it’s better to have a stable airline industry that can actually survive the ups and downs.

Oh, one more thing before I go. A lot of you have written me over the last few months asking why I hadn’t said a word about the rumored merger. The reason? I’ve seen way too many rumors and barely anything actually come to fruition. So, I won’t speculate on the rumored Continental-United merger. For those who don’t know, Northwest holds a “golden share” in Continental. That means they have the ability to block Continental from merging with anyone. This stems from a deal they made years ago, but when Northwest enters a merger agreement, Continental can buy that back for a hundred measly dollars. We know Continental and United have been talking. If it turns into something more, then I’ll be back with another post.

Until then, I’m going to continue to digest this avalanche of info, and I’ll update you when I find something interesting.

AirTran’s long-awaited assault on Milwaukee is now in full force. Just this week, they announced twice daily flights to LAX and Boston as well as once daily flights to Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco. Lastly, they’ll add a second daily nonstop to Vegas. How nice of them to announce this just as the Northwest/TPG acquisition of Midwest gets approved. These new flights all start in May. For more details, read the press release.

Now the fun begins. After AirTran was spurned by Midwest in favor of a Northwest/TPG combo, everyone was waiting for them to enter the market on their own. They’ve slowly built up service there, but this will be the biggest increase yet.

Will Midwest fight back? Will newfound-uncle Northwest step in to fight for them? Does AirTran have any chance of making this work? I’d say it’s definitely unclear, but you know there’s some response in the making.

What we do know is that this will mean looooow fares for Milwaukee until it all gets sorted out. If you live in Northern Illinois (or Eastern Iowa, as I often like to call my friend’s place in McHenry), you might want to look north for some good deals. Enjoy it while you can.

As promised, here’s how those same airlines from yesterday fare when it comes to international baggage check-in times (except Southwest, which doesn’t fly internationally). The situation here is much cleaner than domestic.

As you can see, most airlines say you must check bags 60 minutes prior to departure regardless of airport. United gets the gold star for actually have a flat 45 minute rule instead. And then there’s Delta.

Delta easily gets the award for most painful rules here. They actually have five different times here, and two of the airports (Bogotá and Nassau) have different rules depending upon whether you use the contract of carriage or the website. Ugh. Why does Delta require two (or three) hours in Bogotá when American only requires 1 hour? No idea. This should really be cleaned up.

• If you don’t know these airport codes, you can look them up here.




• Anything that is bold in the table means that the airline has differing rules for that airport on its website when compared to its contract of carriage. I would recommend obeying the more strict of the two, but if you find yourself stuck, you can try to fight for compensation from customer relations after the fact. (You’ll never get anything resolved at the airport.)




• International travel includes all flights going from the US to another country or vice versa. Flights between the US and Canada do not count as international.




• American and Northwest are the two airlines for which I could not find the contract of carriage. American has their conditions of carriage, but Northwest has nothing for international other than guidelines on the website.




• Neither United nor US Airways actually specify this information in their contract of carriage. It looks like United just forgot to include international information in their combined Domestic/International tariff.

Whew. I’m glad I’m done with this exercise.

Is there anything more ridiculous than the various baggage check-in time cutoffs that airlines impose? It’s not the idea that bothers me; it’s the hodge-podge execution that drives me crazy. Delta added to the fun by changing JFK’s cutoff from 30 to 45 minutes before departure, all in the name of improving customer service. Please, give me a break. Yes, it improves customer service in that they’ll hopefully lose fewer bags, but it hurts customer service by requiring people to show up earlier.

Life could be much easier. “Bags must be checked in 30 minutes or more for domestic flights and 60 minutes or more for international.” That’s easy to understand and to communicate, right? But of course, a policy that starts out that way turns into a nightmare as carve-outs occur.

I understand that some airports could benefit from more time. In that case, I’d suggest standardizing around the more strict cutoff systemwide. I’d much rather know that it’s a 45 minute cutoff at every airport. Instead, airlines decide to make little exceptions all over the place. The worst offender is easily American Airlines. They have an unbelievable 4 different cutoff times for domestic flights depending upon from which airport you depart. How are you supposed to keep that straight? If your standard is 30 minutes, does Minneapolis/St Paul really need to be 35 minutes? Come on.

And if that’s not confusing enough, some airlines have different rules on their website than they do in their contract of carriage. The contract of carriage is the document with the final say, so stick to your guns if you met the guidelines in that document but not on the website.

Who is the best at making this easy? Well, JetBlue has a flat 30 minutes domestic and 60 international. And they fly to some of the most painful airports around, so the temptation to make JFK earlier than Portland (Maine) has to be there. While they get thumbs up for making the policy simple, they get thumbs down for making it extremely hard to find this info on their website. I’ve linked to it (as well as the others) below. Here are the baggage cutoffs for domestic travel on select carriers.

*Edited 2/4/08 to add RNO/SMF for United website policy

• If you don’t know these airport codes, you can look them up here.




• Anything that is bold in the table means that the airline has differing rules for that airport on its website when compared to its contract of carriage. I would recommend obeying the more strict of the two, but if you find yourself stuck, you can try to fight for compensation from customer relations after the fact. (You’ll never get anything resolved at the airport.)




• US states and territories as well as Canada count as domestic here




• American is the only airline for which I couldn’t find the full contract of carriage. The conditions of carriage are close enough for this purpose.




• US Airways does not actually specify this information in their contract of carriage, and that is strange. What it does mention is that “If a customer with a seat assignment on US Airways does not obtain a boarding pass at least 30 minutes (60 minutes international) before the scheduled departure time, the customer’s seat assignment (including those seat assignments on continuing or returning flights) may be subject to cancellation. This policy does not apply to US Airways Shuttle flights.
  Passengers departing ATL/DEN/DFW/HNL/IAD/LAS/OGG/PHL/PIT/SEA must present themselves at the US Airways ticket counter no later than 45 minutes prior to departure. Passengers failing to comply will be re-accommodated on the next available US Airways flight.” That’s not the same thing.

You thought this was fun, just wait until tomorrow when I show the international policies for these airlines.