I haven’t written about Cranky Concierge much lately, but we’re humming right along, helping all kinds of travelers with everything from travel planning to urgent assistance. It’s that urgent assistance work that has earned me a spot on the Condé Nast Traveler’s list of Top Travel Specialists for 2011.

There are 133 specialists on the list. Most of them are destination specialists that can arrange incredible travel experiences in their geographic region, but there are three of us that focus on air travel. Gary Leff, who you probably know as the author of View From the Wing, is on there for award redemption and Sara Habib is there for round the world tickets. And of course, I’m there for urgent airline assistance.

I’ll let Condé Nast take it from here:

Ever found yourself stranded in a foreign airport, praying for a guardian angel to swoop in and get you on the next flight home? Meet Snyder, whose air travel assistance service finds you the lowest fare and then keeps an eye out for snafus such as delayed flights, missed connections, and bad weather at your destination, and rebooks you even before the airline informs you there’s a problem. Even if you booked your ticket yourself and disaster strikes—an Icelandic volcano erupts, or a Christmas-week snowstorm hits, shutting down airports for days—he’ll get you on the earliest flight out ($150 for urgent assistance).

With the holidays coming up, we can monitor your flights for as little as $15 each way (and that’s per itinerary, not per person). You can email us at info@crankyconcierge.com if you have any questions or just sign up directly at crankyconcierge.com/signup.

I haven’t written about Cranky Concierge much here lately, but things have been going quite well. We’ve just finished a banner week where we followed near 50 people heading to a conference, we’ve added more discounts for clients, we’ve made some website changes, and, what I’m most excited about, we’ve added a small business program. Oh yeah, and our newest concierge, Nicole, has joined the airline dork crowd. Like I said, we’ve been busy.

If you work for a big ole’ monster of a company, you undoubtedly have a managed corporate travel program, and we aren’t going to compete with that. We’re still happy to help when things go wrong, but where we think we can really add value is for small business.

There are a ton of small companies out there that are either paying too much for their travel programs or not using one at all. We can fill that gap and save money along the way while also providing excellent flight monitoring.

Small business clients do not have to pay each time they fly. Instead, we will bill you monthly. That not only makes it easier for you, but it allows us to apply small business volume discounts depending upon how much you use us during any one month. There is no contract required, so you can even give us a shot for a single month.

For more, go to crankyconcierge.com/smallbusiness.php or call us at (707) 797-7474 and we can tell you all you need to know.

We’re happy to add two new discount partners to the site this week. As you know, you can already get discounts on things like GoGo inflight internet (25% off), TripIt Pro, and more. Now we welcome our two newest partners.

• AwardWallet – I’ve written about AwardWallet before, and now Cranky Concierge clients can take advantage of the premium features of the frequent flier balance monitoring service for free. Yep, Concierge clients will get a free upgrade to AwardWallet Plus. We’ve also been working on a Cranky Concierge frequent flier program monitoring and management service, but that’s still in the works.
• On the Fly Seminars – You might know Nick Kralev from his days at the Washington Times. Many know him as the one to shed a broad spotlight on United’s Starnet blocking practice which prevents you from using awards that might be available on Star Alliance partners. After many, many years of traveling all over the globe, he’s now created the On the Fly seminars to help you maximize your travel budget, grow your mileage balance, reduce the hassle, and get upgrades. His seminars are all over the US and Cranky Concierge clients will get 15% off.

One of the more consistent problems we’ve seen is people not signing up for the right plan for their trips. It’s not your fault, it’s ours. So we’ve gone ahead and combined our pricing and details page into something much easier to understand. It starts with this:

Easy, right? We’ve also made changes to how you can send us your info when we’re helping you plan a trip. Once you complete payment, you’ll be taken to a thank you page that now has a form you can fill out with all the info we’ll need from you to get started. No more going back to your email to do it. You can just take care of everything right there.

Lastly, I’d like to welcome Nicole to our stable of airline dorks. Nicole actually signed up for Cranky Concierge for a trip to Indonesia, and after she ended up coming up with a more creative and cheaper route, I started talking to her about becoming a concierge herself. Sure enough, she’s onboard and will add a welcome female perspective to the crew. Nicole started training this week, so you can look forward to getting her help next time you sign up.

Welcome onboard, Nicole!

New Tokyo Haneda Flights: Some Strange Choices, Courtesy of the Feds – BNET
Flight awards were handed out by the feds for the four coveted slots at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. They made some odd picks.

How to Get Home When Disaster Strikes – FOX News
Stuck when disasters happen? I talk about what Cranky Concierge did to help.

Alaska’s New Flights Put Its Relationship With American to the Test – BNET
Alaska is stepping on American’s toes in California. Is this a test?

Three Years Later, American Airlines Is Still Getting the Runaround in China – BNET
American will finally start China flights, but the Chinese aren’t making it easy for them.

Airlines Filled More Seats in April, but That Can’t Continue Forever – BNET
April traffic numbers continue to see increases in loads. This just can’t continue forever.

Now that European airports are open and (as far as I know), no planes have fallen out of the sky, it’s time to look back on the aftermath of the Icelandic volcano. We worked on some pretty crazy itineraries at Cranky Concierge, so I thought I’d share some of them with you, because, well, it’s just fun to dork out on itineraries like these.

Perhaps the craziest one we found was one that wasn’t actually used. We had a client, let’s call him Doc, stranded in London when his flight canceled last Monday. Doc had to get to Toronto by Wednesday. So what happened? We came up with this:

*Eurostar from London to Paris Tuesday morning
*TGV from Paris to Irun (at the Spanish Frontier)
*Overnight train from Irun to Lisbon, arriving Wednesday morning
*SATA from Lisbon to Toronto via the Azores on Wednesday afternoon

Anyone ever flown SATA? I’d love to hear what that’s like, but Doc decided not to go and instead just wait it out in London. (He made it out last Friday.)

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The very first call we received about the volcano was at 230a PT on Friday, April 16. A new client, his name will be Thor, called from Halifax saying he was heading to New York and then was on Delta to London that afternoon. He fully expected the flight to be canceled, so he asked us to help. (It canceled soon after.) We were able to snag the very last seat on the New York – Keflavik (Iceland) flight that night on Icelandair connecting to Glasgow in the morning. At that point, Glasgow was still open.

Thor made it to Iceland, but the airspace closed in Glasgow before he was able to get there. Fortunately, Icelandair put him up for the first night and paid for his meals. That was far better than he would have received from Delta in New York. Icelandair started to send airplanes anywhere they could fly: they sent several flights to Trondheim, Norway. (And now that Keflavik is impacted by the volcano, they actually just started operating flights via Glasgow instead – amazing flexibility which you can read more about on BNET today.)

Thor didn’t want to mess around with visiting Norway and not having a way to get out of there, so he hung out in Iceland where the high speed internet gave him everything he needed. He spent three nights in Iceland before finally being booked on Tuesday to go to Heathrow. When Heathrow didn’t open, they sent him to Edinburgh and he hopped a train home.

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The toughest challenge we faced was a client, we’ll call her Oksana, heading to the first Theatre on Ice world championships being held in Toulouse. She wasn’t going to watch; she was there to compete. When her British Airways flight on Monday canceled, she had to find a way to get there.

After looking at several different options that involved everything from Dubai to Tripoli, we settled on the best option and it wasn’t going to be easy.

Oksana was in San Diego, but she ended up buying a ticket from LA to Tel Aviv on El Al on Wednesday connecting to another El Al flight to Madrid on Thursday. From there, she booked an overnight train from Madrid to Barcelona, arriving Friday morning. Then she would rent a car and drive the 3 hours or so to Toulouse, getting in just in time for her mandatory practice.

Unfortunately, British Airways wasn’t nearly as flexible as Icelandair and refused to simply cancel her outbound and let her keep the return. So we had to find Oksana another return. This one was easy – Swiss from Barcelona to Zurich and then on to LA. Then it would just be a short hop on American down to San Diego.

As you can imagine, this combined option wasn’t cheap (in fact, if you’d like to help defray the additional cost, they’re accepting donations via Paypal to helpctoi@gmail.com), but it got them there, and that was the name of the game throughout this entire couple of weeks.

Now that the backlog is clearing out and airlines are starting add flights, people are finally getting where they need to go. It’s incredible to think about how many special occasions were ruined because people couldn’t get there. These are just a couple stories out of a sea of hundreds of thousands, if not more. Just imagine how many didn’t turn out this well.

Ash Wednesday: Icelandic Volcano Impact on Airlines Worse Than 9/11 – BNET
You all know how ugly it’s been in Europe with the volcano, and now they’re saying the initial impact is worse than 9/11. Fortunately, the recovery won’t be nearly as painful.

Social Media Turns Tiny Mistakes Into Big Headaches for Delta Airlines – BNET
Delta made a small mistake online erasing the fee for last minute award travel. Normally, that would be easy to fix, but people find things like this so fast, it creates problems.

what to do if a volcano ruins your wedding – antibride.com
Lots of posts about what to do with a volcano. Here’s mine.

Flights from Boston to Europe nearing normal levels – Boston Globe
I spoke with the Globe about how we’ve been helping Concierge clients.

6 Trends to ask your IFE&C provider about – digEcor
The inflight entertainment manufacturer asked me what I wanted to see in inflight entertainment. #1? I just want it to work.

Delta’s Capacity Cuts Show Why Less Is More – BNET
It’s earnings season and that’s kind of boring. But here I looked at the correlation between capacity cuts and revenue gains at Delta.

Cranky Concierge Helps Customers Pull Travel Plans Out Of The (Volcanic) Ashes – Things With Wings/Aviation Week
Things With Wings covered some of the successes we’ve had helping people at Cranky Concierge.

To Fly Or Not to Fly: Airlines Slam European Regulators Over Airspace Closures – BNET
Now that planes are flying in Europe again, it’s time for the blame game. I actually side with the regulators on this one.

United and US Airways Merger: A Bad Idea That’s Now Dead – BNET
I can’t say I agree with the title on this (they pick them, not me), but it is true that talks have been called off.