What will 2012 bring in air travel? – CNN Out of the Office
CNN asked me to do a look at ahead at 2012, so I got some smart people to tell me what will happen.

Is CrankyConcierge.com’s real-time airline travel management service worth it? – Airline Crazy
MrSkyGuy gave our service a shot recently and he was pleased. Of course, since his flights went on time, he didn’t get to see us doing what we do best, but he still found it valuable for the price.

Holiday Card Is So Nice, American Sent It Twice – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw that American decided to recycle an old card for the holidays this year.

If you’ve flown Virgin America any time since October, there’s a good chance that your experience has been sub-par. No, it has nothing to do with the onboard product but rather the fragile technology infrastructure, which is still suffering after a reservations system change made back in October. That’s right, we’re talking well over a month and there are still widespread issues.

A reservation system change is a major undertaking. That system is the heart of the airline, and it talks to just about every other system in the company. So it’s not an easy thing to just switch on a whim. That’s why airlines prepare for a reservation system switch like they’re preparing for the apocalypse. Airlines have lately even shut down booking for a weekend, ramped up call center employees, and thinned flight schedules in order to deal with the pain. Virgin America did that as well, but it still wasn’t prepared.

Were it anyone else, people would be crucifying the airline. Virgin America, however, just doesn’t serve as many cities and doesn’t have the exposure that others would get when there’s a major failure like this one. Remember when US Airways transferred over to the pre-merger America West technology? For a couple of days, people were angry at what a mess it was. But that was just a couple of days. JetBlue and WestJet have also made reservation system transitions but none have seen the painful, persistent problems that have plagued Virgin America customers.

We’ve seen this first hand at Cranky Concierge with customers who still cannot check in online for their flights. They just have to wait until they get to the airport, unhappily. One frequent Virgin America flier reached out to me with a laundry list of problems that have made him miserable since day one of the switch. He couldn’t check in, change seats, or make changes online and call center waits for well over an hour. Frequent flier numbers bounced out of reservations, itineraries had incorrect billing information (terrible for those who need to submit expenses), and refunds have gone unprocessed. He even submitted a challenge to a charge for a ticket that should have been refunded, and Virgin America never responded to the credit card company’s inquiry. The credit card company just issued the refund.

So what the heck is going on here? This is just a mess.

The problem really centers around Virgin America’s IT strategy. Like many new entrants, Virgin America thought it could do things better than the existing carriers. Its Chief Information Officer at the time, Bill Maguire, was profiled in CIO magazine explaining how he was going to save the airline a ton of money by using newer architecture and by outsourcing just about everything. Maguire is long gone – left in 2008 and is at San Jose State University now – but his legacy remains.

Virgin America patched together its systems on its own, sometimes using open source software. For its reservation system, it went with a system called aiRES that never lived up to its promises. In fact, the launch customers WestJet and Virgin Blue, got so fed up with all the money they had thrown down a hole trying to get it working that both walked away. (WestJet is on Sabre, and the now-called Virgin Australia has announced an intention to do the same.) Virgin America also apparently quickly realized that aiRES wasn’t going to cut it and announced earlier this year it would switch to Sabre.

This was particularly important for Virgin America as it moved forward with a strategy to build tighter partnerships with other airlines. While a new and cool reservation system in a vacuum might function just fine, it’s a lot harder to get it to properly interface with airlines on other systems. And Virgin America was tired of waiting, so it opted to jump to Sabre.

The problem, however, is that its other systems were not very well suited to talk to Sabre, and that’s the problem we continue to face today. How these problems were not picked up in testing is unclear, but I’m sure Virgin America wishes it had done this differently at this point.

According to the airline, the number of problems have been diminishing and it says “we hope to have full resolution soon.” But this is still getting on toward two months after the new system went live. Virgin America continues to have a little blurb linked from the top of its homepage with an apology, but the text never changes. The only thing that changes is the date at the top.

So is there a way to know if you’ll be impacted by this mess? I asked, and there isn’t. I wondered if the problems came from reservations that were made before the switch, but that wasn’t it. While issues are more likely for older reservations, problems are plaguing new ones as well.

Hopefully we’ll see this fixed soon, but in the meantime, Virgin America is trying to at least compensate people.

We continue to waive all change/cancel fees for flyers having issues and Elevate members flying during this period have received a direct apology from our CEO and a free flight (5000 points) credited to their accounts.

That’s a nice gesture, but it still is not a substitute for just getting the problem fixed. This never should have happened the way it did, and Virgin America’s customers continue to pay dearly for it. With any luck, this will finally be fixed in the near future.

One of the big complaints people have about airline fees is the ability to figure out exactly what’s being charged. It can be confusing but most of the sites that try to aggregate fees seem to only give you long lists that don’t really help that much. Now there’s a new site that takes the next step toward calculating fees for you. It’s better than most of what’s out there today, but it still has a ways to go before it’s truly a great option. Still, it’s the best we have so far, so if you have bag fee questions give iflybags.com a shot.

The site lets you enter your flight information and it spits out what bag fees will be. Here’s the advanced search screen:

You can enter your flight info and it will spit back how much your bag fees will be. It even lets you enter if you have elite status or not, so you can check to see if you’re exempt (though you likely know you’re exempt if you’re an elite). Where is all this data coming from? The airlines.

Most airlines file their fares and fare rules with a central clearinghouse called the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO). ATPCO created a new category that lets airlines file their bag fees in a standardized manner, and this new site is just putting a pretty face on that data. So if the data isn’t filed correctly or isn’t filed at all, this site won’t help. But for the vast majority of trips that Americans take, this will work quite nicely. (Even Southwest participates.)

You can use the site two ways. You can either look up the fees for the number of bags you’re planning on checking, or you can just use the site as a reference to look up the airline bag fee policies. It gets pretty deep into the weeds – if you need to check a bow and arrow, this will help. Though the reference guide is really just a long list of bag fees and isn’t the most user-friendly.

This all sounds good, right? So why do I say that it has a ways to go? Because this is really only helpful if you know the flight you’re taking. If you bought that ticket on Delta and you want to know how much you’re going to have to shell out, that’s great. But what if you’re shopping around, looking for flights to a city and a lot of airlines pop up as options? Are you really going to look up every single flight’s bag fees after you find the fares for each one? I think not. If you do, you have way too much time on your hands.

What really needs to exist is a site where you can search for flights and then specify the number of bags you’ll check. That will be married with the price for each flight so you can make an informed decision.

The ability to do this is there – ATPCO has an XML feed that could be integrated by developers. It just has to happen. The company behind iflybags is Farelogix. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Farelogix is one of the companies that provides direct connect technology to help airlines bypass the Global Distribution Systems (GDS). You can be sure that Farelogix has a good reason to do this. It will once again help prove that direct connect technology doesn’t hide fees and make shopping more difficult. This is one example of that, but it’s a visible one and it’s good for consumers.

So, if you need bag fee info for your trip, this is the place to go. Hopefully we’ll see it integrated into a booking site soon enough.

Travel apps that really help – CNN Out of the Office
CNN is doing a lot of mobile stories this week so they asked me for some of my favorite travel apps. Here they are.

In the Trenches: Slowing Down – Intuit Small Business Blog
With a baby on the way, it’s time to re-set priorities and try to slow things down a little.

The Price You Pay For An Airline Ticket Is All In The Timing – CBS 2 Los Angeles
I was interviewed for one of those stories on when to buy a plane ticket and I turned into the center of the story, it seems.

Last week at the APEX expo, Virgin America announced plans for its next generation inflight entertainment system. Wait, doesn’t Virgin America already have one of the best systems around? Why would the airline be doing this? It just posted yet another quarterly loss (no surprise) so why is it messing around with introducing a new inflight entertainment system?

Actually, this one should bring costs down while even improving the experience for passengers. Anything that helps the airline bring its costs down is good, and since it’s good for the passenger experience, that makes it even better.

The buzz about the new system is that it’s wireless. That was the big buzz word this year at the APEX expo in general, but this probably isn’t what you think. The airline isn’t ditching seatback entertainment but instead is just changing the way that content gets to the seats.

The system that Virgin America uses now requires a lot of wiring throughout the airplane. The content comes through the wires from a “head end” system through the airplane until it gets to each seat. The systems are pretty expensive, especially when they’re from one of the existing titans of IFE, Panasonic, as is the case with Virgin America.

This new system from Lufthansa Systems will see content come from the same place, but that’s where things change. From there, the content will be wirelessly transmitted to each seat.

So when you get on the airplane, you’ll still see a monitor in each seatback as you do today, but the content will get there in a different way. You shouldn’t care if you just want to watch a movie.

Remember, this isn’t like streaming video from the internet. It’s still content stored on the airplane, but it’s just sent wirelessly. So transmission speeds and quality shouldn’t be an issue. Each access point should support about 60 devices (but could do more), and each Virgin America aircraft will have 3 access points.

But here’s where it gets cool. The content that you see on the screen is now super flexible. Would you rather watch TV on your own device? Go for it. The movies, TV, etc can all be watched on any device, not just the seatback. Want to watch on your mobile phone? Sure. It doesn’t matter. The only restriction is that if you use your own device, you can’t see the newest movies.

The movie industry has what it calls “early release” content, which is really just movies that aren’t on DVD yet. This is offered for airplanes but not if you use your personal device. The studios are afraid you’ll steal it. Eventually they’ll hopefully get over that, but until then, that should be the only difference.

Likewise, the system will also work with the internet that Virgin America currently has through Gogo. That system is getting a big upgrade as well with Gogo’s new ATG-4 system.

This new system will help Gogo deal with speed issues. That means adding directional antennas that will not just look for the closest tower but also at ones further away that might have more bandwidth available. And in those ground towers which transmit the signal, there will be an upgrade to EV-DO Rev. B technology, which will help speed things up. Lastly, there will be two modems instead of one on the airplane. The upshot is four times more capacity on the airplane than what’s there today.

But this does bring up a question. If Virgin America is sticking with Gogo for internet, then why not use Gogo Vision to stream content instead of going with the competitor Lufthansa Systems? The answer to me seems simple. Gogo Vision doesn’t have a seatback solution – it’s just streaming media and it seems Virgin America wanted more.

The only downer about all this? It’s a LONG way off. The first install isn’t until the end of 2012. Virgin America decided to talk about it because testing of equipment has begun, so the airline knew someone would find out. New deliveries starting late next year will get the system. Current aircraft will be evaluated on a case by case basis to see if they’ll bother to configure with the new system or stick with what they have today.

Virgin America continues to show that it can innovate with the onboard product. Now, if only the airline could just find a way to make money. . .