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.

Last time, the suspense was great. Who would win the China flight awards? It had all the drama of a good telenovela. (Um, ok, without the attractive people and infidelity.) This time around, however, it wasn’t nearly as much fun.

The announcements came out yesterday for 2008 and 2009 flights and they were mostly as expected. Let’s look back at my post from July 17 to see how I did with my guesses.

Conventional wisdom says Delta will get this year’s award with Atlanta-Shanghai flights. Next year, United is expected to get San Francisco-Guangzhou while the other spot, which can only be used to second tier airports in China, will likely remain unfilled.

I was right about those. Delta and United both got their flights for next year. My luck wasn’t quite as good on the 2009 awards.

If I had to put money down, I’d say Continental (Newark-Shanghai), United (LAX-Shanghai), and US Airways (Philadelphia-Beijing) pick up three slots for 2009 with Delta (Atlanta-Beijing) and American (Chicago/O’Hare-Beijing) fighting for the last one.

Yes, US Airways and Continental won their flights and so did American. But I missed on United getting LAX-Shanghai. Northwest actually snuck in there and won Detroit – Shanghai instead. Maybe the DOT was being sensitive to the fact that they kept giving United awards while Northwest walked away with nothing. I suppose it was about time they got one.

But they tried for Detroit – Beijing as well and didn’t get that one. You know what happened? A day later, China Southern announced they’d begin Detroit – Beijing flying in 2009 with a 787. Since they’re both SkyTeam members, I imagine this is a good opportunity to feed traffic to each other. I was surprised to see China Southern running out of Beijing though. They’ve generally focused on Guangzhou in the past.

So, now we have just about every airline flying to China that wants to be there, with the exception of MAXjet, who really didn’t have a shot this time around anyway. See, not nearly as much fun.

Enjoy the weekend, that is, unless you’re a Colorado Rockies fan. If you are, I hope you have a miserable one. Yes, I’m a Diamondbacks fan. Who could have guessed at the beginning of the season that this Rockies-Dbacks series would be such a big one.

Over the last couple years, Midwest has been quietly changing its model to the point where they’re becoming just like every other airline. Sadly, I’d say the transformation is now almost complete.

Back in the day, Midwest was head and shoulders above the rest. While most airlines served meals in coach, Midwest served things like lobster on china. As airlines began to pack more seats on planes, Midwest stayed strong with wider, more comfortable seats throughout. Service was excellent and yes, it was finished off with a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. Today, the cookie and the good service are about all that’s left.

Meals are now buy-on-board and the china is long gone. Even the seats, the biggest differentiator have started to disappear. A couple years ago, Midwest decided to have two levels of service. Their 717s would continue to have “Signature” service with the nice wide and cushy seats. But on longer routes to leisure destinations, they started flying MD80s in “Saver” service, configured just like every other airline with a bit more legroom.

Earlier this year, they decided to standardize the fleets to have a little bit of both onboard. Yeah, that made me think that Saver = Coach and Signature = First Class, but that’s not exactly the case. Yesterday, they put out a press release trumpeting that their MD80s now all have Signature seating on board. Somehow I doubt we’ll see the same release when they put a bunch of Saver seats on the 717s by the middle of next year.

If you’re on an MD80, you’ll have the option of paying $60 extra per segment just to sit in the nice seats. Keep in mind, all you get to do is sit in those seats. Like Spirit, there is no difference in service when you’re up there. It’s just a bigger seat. And though I haven’t seen it confirmed in print, it appears that the seats will also have the same seat pitch as the ones in back as well. Right now, the MD80s in all-Saver configuration have either 143 or 147 seats an 33 inch pitch. The new configuration will see 12 in Signature and either 127 or 131 in Saver. Each of the three rows in Signature will have 4 seats instead of five, so I understand losing 3 seats here, but I’m not sure where the fourth has gone. Either way, seat pitch shouldn’t change.

Oh, and if you want to sit in those seats, you can only buy them at the time of check-in or at the gate itself. You can’t do it in advance. So, if you really want those seats, check-in early or you might be stuck in the back.

With Northwest taking a 47% stake in the airline recently, we should be happy the product hasn’t started to get even worse than this.