I received an email from a subscriber yesterday asking why she couldn’t book premium seats on Virgin America for her trip in October. (Premium seats are defined as the bulkhead and exit row in coach, and they’re currently sold for a few bucks extra.) Apparently, the seats are all blocked in the system and reservations agents were telling her that they were in the middle of making some changes. Needless to say, this had me intrigued, so I sent a note over to the airline’s spokesperson Abby Lunardini and received the following response.

We’re currently evaluating a restructure of our main cabin seating selection, so in the interim we are holding select seats and guests will be unable to buy seats in the affected areas for travel past October 1.

We will announce the new offering later this month at NBTA [National Business Travel Association Convention the last week in July] and the affected seats will open up for sale in mid-September for October travel (travel dates prior to October 1 should be as normal right now and open for booking). We apologize for the inconvenience to guests, but hope they will be patient and appreciate the improved offering we will soon announce.

Very interesting. Let the speculation begin. Why would you block off these seats until the middle of September?

I can think of a couple reasons. The one that I find most interesting is that the airline is finally planning on defining their frequent flier program. You may not have noticed, but while you can earn frequent flier miles on the airline, you can’t actually redeem them for anything. They also haven’t told people how much will be necessary to redeem for free flights. Helpful, right?

Well, NBTA would be the place to define your frequent flier program, because the attendees are the ones who will be earning the most miles. This makes me wonder if there will be some sort of elite program where seats are blocked for the best customers. This would be a very interesting development, and it’s one that no low cost carrier has taken on before. I think this would actually be a very smart move on their part.

Of course, there are other possible reasons. Maybe they’re looking at adding more first class seats, so they’re blocking these off since they may disappear when the plane is reconfigured. That would actually be another good move on their part.

Or there’s always the more boring reason. Maybe they’re having technical problems they need to work out. (That wouldn’t be surprising at all.)

All kinds of interesting possibilities, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see the real story at the end of July.

I rarely write about hotels or vacation packages, but a recent press release from Priceline touting their Sunshine Guarantee caught my eye. At first, it seems great for a traveler. The brief explanation says “Book your summer vacation today and automatically receive this exclusive guarantee. If your vacation is rained out, your priceline vacation is free.”

Yeah, sounds great, right? But when you dig in, there are some pretty onerous conditions here. It can still be good, but if it causes confusion, it might end up angering more people than it helps. The biggest problem? It has to rain for at least half of the days on your vacation, and it has to rain 1/2 an inch each day. Wow, that’s a lot of rain. And a quick two day weekend package that gets one day of rain won’t work either. It has to be between 3 and 8 days.

Let’s say you decide to try for the free vacation and you fly to Maui and stay on the rainy side, you know, near Hana. Uh, no. The rain is measured at the airport, so that won’t really help. And besides, it’s only good July 1 through September 7 and that’s not exactly the rainy season over there (though it’s always rainy I suppose).

So is there much value here? Well yeah, there can be some. If you happen to get stuck in a slow moving hurricane, then it’s a good deal. But most other rain events might have you out of luck.

It’s funny that I bring up all these caveats. I mean, there was absolutely nothing there before this guarantee, so it’s all gravy. According to their 8K, Priceline is paying a flat fee to a company to use this service, and that company, WeatherBill, will pay out the claims. So it’s really just a good marketing campaign. But, if people misinterpret the campaign, then it could potentially backfire. If you have a weeklong trip that gets more than a half inch of rain for each of 3 days and then, say, 1/4 of a inch per day for the rest of the time, you won’t be able to collect. So, keep that in mind when you book. Don’t get your hopes up for a free vacation, but realize that if it’s truly a soaking experience, you won’t have to pay.

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.”

I know, I know. I promised a review of Virgin America’s website over a month ago, and I’m just now getting around to it. Sorry about that. But, better late than never . . . .

What do I think? Overall, the site is pretty good, but of course it’s not perfect. Today I’m focusing on the booking process. Let’s look at the home page first.

Just like Southwest originally did on their redesign, Virgin America does not make the reservation search accessible without clicking to open the window. Southwest ended up caving and defaulting to showing the search box, so I wonder if Virgin America will come to the same conclusion. The fewer clicks it takes to sell a ticket, the better.

After playing around for just a few seconds, it’s obvious that this site is Flash and Javascript-heavy, and that makes me nervous. Usually that means that someone thought it needed to be pretty without seriously considering functionality. In this case, the functionality is there, but there are some quirks.

The basic search is just as it should be . . . basic. I was a little annoyed to see that multi-city was limited to two segments (not very helpful). Everything else looks like any other search box except that they don’t give you a choice of class of service. That’s a good move. You can see why when you search for flights.

They don’t let you pick your class of service because they display both First and Coach prices on the next page. Airlines always complain that air travel is a commodity and all people buy on is price and schedule. I’m convinced that a lot of that is because that’s exactly how the airlines sell their product (except for an increasing number of exceptions that have followed Air Canada’s lead). Virgin America is at least making a small attempt at upselling.

Strangely, the First class upgrade is their only real attempt at merchandising on the website. They do really like that one though, because if you choose coach, they try to upsell you again on the seat map. And when you get to the seat map, please make sure you choose your seats yourself. When I tried to let them choose my seats for me, it kept kicking me back to the home page where I had to start over. Grrrrr.

So, overall, the site is good. I’m surprised you can’t buy a meal beforehand or pay for excess baggage fees, but I’m sure they’ll add it over time. In the end, they give you a lot of information on the flight results page, and that’s the key to helping customers make the right decision.

First there was Southwest’s Ding!, then there was Ryanair’s Bing!, now there’s . . . American’s Dang!? Enough with the ridiculous punctuation, please!*!@#)&*%)!!!

Ok, so it’s not actually called Dang!, but according to Sky Talk, some people internally referred to it as just that. It’s actually called DealFinder. So guess what it does? Um, finds deals? Right!

But it’s not really much like Ding! at all. There’s actually more to it than that, and despite it’s slowness on my machine, I still like what they’re doing. Like Ding!, DealFinder sits in your system tray, usually at the bottom right hand corner of your Windows-based computer. You’ll see a little AA logo there. When you click it, you’ll see the application come up on your screen. It looks like this:

The main part of the application is the “saved searches,” which are nothing like Ding! and more like the Orbitz DealDetector. You pick routes that you want to fly and set a maximum price. It will alert you when you get below that level. As you can see, my quick trip to Hawai’i for under $500 isn’t looking likely, but the sub-$500 Christmas run to Indianapolis is available now.

The other, potentially more interesting piece of this application is the RSS reader they’ve built in. If you aren’t sure what RSS is, this quick summary from Wikipedia will help. I know RSS readers are gaining in popularity, but I’d guess that many people who book travel at aa.com don’t use them yet. That’s why this is a good idea.

First, they have feeds from American that offer deals and news from the airline. That can be helpful, of course. But you can also subscribe to your own RSS feeds in here. As you can see, I subscribed to the Cranky Flier (great blog, I hear) and it loaded my most recent posts on the left. Just below the saved searches, you can see a small window that has the text of that post for you to read.

Now, this isn’t a full-featured RSS reader. You can’t see pictures and it truncates long posts, so if you use Google, My Yahoo, or anyone else, this won’t replace it well. But if you don’t have a reader, this could be a good way to get quick news updates, sports scores, anything else you might want to catch at a glance.

This may have nothing to do with American Airlines, but that’s why it’s a good idea. If American can get you checking the application for your news and sports throughout the day, that’s more opportunity for them to get your attention and potentially get you thinking about taking a trip. That’s why I like it, because there are plenty of people who don’t have an RSS reader and might find this to be an interesting way to get started with one.

So the RSS reader is nifty, but what is going to draw people in? Low fares, of course. If my Hawaiian trip still shows the same fares I can find anywhere else, I’m more likely to use Orbitz DealDetector, because at least then I can check other airlines as well. But, if American starts telling you that they’ve found a low fare that you can only get through DealFinder, then it’s going to do very well.

Can the airline do that? I’d think that the GDS contracts might prevent them from posting fares there that they don’t post with the reservations systems, but there could be a loophole. If anyone knows more, please write a comment below.

A Note to Virgin America . . .

Yesterday was a huge day for you guys. You must be ecstatic to have received oral approval from the DOT to begin selling tickets.

So why aren’t you selling tickets RIGHT NOW?!?

All you say in your press release is that you plan “to begin service this August, with specific dates for tickets sales and first flights to be announced in the weeks ahead.”

August is NOT very far away. You’ve had years to plan this thing and now you get approval but you aren’t ready yet?!? What’s holding you up? Let’s get this show on the road.

When are you starting? What route are you flying next after JFK-SFO? The more time you have in advance of the launch next month to sell tickets, the better chance you’ll have of making money on those flights. I really don’t need to tell you this, do I? So, what’s the hold up?

I’d say this one falls in the “Why didn’t this happen before?” category. Last week, Delta announced that they’ve implemented the ability to book airline, hotel, and car rental from a single shopping cart. This is the first time I’ve seen it from a US airline, and it makes a lot of sense.

When I travel, I generally make airline reservations first. I’m not sure why, maybe I just think that there will always be enough hotel options at different rates while airline tickets could fluctuate so much that it could make or break the trip. So if I’m booking airline tickets first, that means the airline sites may have the first opportunity to sell me on hotels and car rentals.

Airlines have offered the ability to book hotels and car rentals for some time, but it’s not done well. The way it is now, when you book your ticket, you then have to do a completely separate search for hotels and pay separately. I’m not going to bother, because I can just go to other sites that I use frequently.

But now, as soon as you have your ticket reserved, Delta will show you hotels and car rentals before you buy the ticket. When you pick one, it puts it in the shopping cart with your ticket and you check out by entering your credit card only once. Online travel agents learned this was lucrative long ago. Any time you go to Orbitz, Expedia, or the like, you’ll notice they push you pretty hard to buy a vacation package. So why has it taken so long for the airlines to get onboard?

Who knows. But once again Delta is doing something smart online. I’m impressed to see them leading the pack with things like this, Siteseer, and the Change site (even if that implementation wasn’t done very well. Keep up the good work.

Southwest just decided to start participating in the Galileo Global Distribution System (GDS), and the media is running around like it’s the biggest news in the history of mankind.

• Travel Weekly (subscription only) says it’s “a sea-change for Southwest”
• The Star-Telegram says that this move, along with a couple others, marks a “retooling” for the airline.
• Ebert and Roeper gave the move “Two thumbs up,” or not . . .

The problem is that this isn’t as big of a deal as people are making it out to be.

Right now, if you, Joe Customer, want to book a flight on Southwest, you have to go directly to Southwest or you can go to a travel agent. This will not be changing. If you go to a travel agent, they either have to make the booking directly with Southwest or they can use the Sabre GDS, which they’ve participated in for many years.

Now, travel agents that use the Galileo GDS will also be able to book with Southwest without having to go direct, but they’ll have to pay for the privilege. This agreement is a bit more robust than Sabre’s in that it will eventually have real-time availability and fares, but that does absolutely nothing for you as a passenger.

You still can’t book on any website other than Southwest’s. Even if Galileo powers an online travel agent (eg Orbitz, Expedia, etc.), Southwest won’t let the agent sell their fares online. So the only people who have access to this will be travel agents and corporate travel managers.

And that’s exactly why Southwest is doing this. They’re trying to be more friendly to the corporate market by letting them search fares and availability and book directly in their own system, even if they will be charging them extra to do so. It’s one of many efforts they’re making to be more business-friendly, including a far more exciting development that they hope to have onboard wi-fi by early next year (happy, happy, joy, joy).

So unless you’re a corporate travel manager or a travel agent, there’s nothing to get excited about here.  Even if you’re a corporate travel manager, it may still be worth it to book directly with Southwest to avoid the additional cost of booking through Galileo.

I downloaded Bing on the first day it came out hoping to see some of the great deals they were promising. I mean, if they already offer GBP .01 deals, how could it get any better?

Since I don’t live in Europe, I picked London/Stansted as my city of choice since I figured that would have plenty of deals rolling through. So far, I haven’t seen one. Not a single alert has come through.

Now to be fair, I don’t log on until about 730a or 8a in the morning so that’s 330p or 4p London time. If they’re only doing these in the morning, I’ll never see them. But are there actually any deals being pushed through Bing yet?

If anyone has seen some actual deals, let me know if the comments below.

I’m guessing that most of you who read this blog know about Southwest’s “Ding!” application. In short, you download a program that stays open on your computer. If you’re connected to the internet, you will receive an alert when Southwest publishes special sale fares. These can sometimes be up for only a couple of hours, and you’ll only be able to access them by clicking on a link in the application. The last couple of weeks, Southwest has made a splash with a lot of $25 to $50 one way fares throughout the US and you could only find them on Ding!.

It’s a great program because it enables Southwest to keep in constant contact with its customers. If they keep it up with compelling content, they have a very captive audience that acts like Pavlov’s dog any time they hear the ding alert. So it was only a matter of time before others followed the same strategy. I just didn’t know it would be such a blatant rip-off. Behold, Ryanair’s Bing! application.

Um, yeah. It’s the one on the left, looking eerily similar to Ding! over on the right. And it works the same way too.

The application sits in your system tray (in your start bar on Windows) and then a little envelope shows up when deals arrive. Click it and it opens those windows with a link to see the deals.

It’s definitely unreal how little effort Ryanair put into this thing in terms of creativity. Nice work, Southwest, for creating a program others want to steal so badly that they can’t even be bothered to tweak it.