Do babies and first class mix? – CNN Out of the Office
I brought the babies in first class debate over to CNN this week, and I used comments from a lot of you to add to the discussion.

Staying Power: In a mobile world airlines and passengers are still keen on kiosks – APEX Magazine
This month I wrote a feature on the future of kiosks. There is a future, but it’s not just about checking you in for flights.

In the Trenches: Considering the Shark Tank – Intuit Small Business Blog
I love watching Shark Tank on ABC, but it’s not because I wish I could be in the shoes of those small business owners by any stretch.

One-On-One With Brett Snyder, President and “Chief Airline Dork” of Cranky Concierge – ExpertFlyer Blog
After my two small city guest posts, ExpertFlyer did an interview with me.

Five tips for getting a better airplane seat – CNN On the Go
CNN doubled up with me this week. The second was for their On the Go series (which will apparently run on HLN all weekend). I wrote a companion piece that CNN put up here.

All the talk this week has been about United’s massive reservation system transition, but that wasn’t the only move of this type in the last couple weeks. Cape Air made the switch recently to a brand new airline reservation system made by none other than Google’s ITA Software. While United’s transition was bigger in scale, Cape Air’s transition is potentially the most important of the two.

For those who don’t know Cape Air, you might think it’s just a rinky-dink airline. A reservation system couldn’t have been that difficult, right? Not so fast. Cape Air has all the complexity of most major airlines. Believe it or not, Cape Air flies more than 60 airplanes; mostly 9-seat turboprops. The origin of its network is in New England and that remains a big piece of the business today. It also has a sizeable Caribbean operation out of San Juan, a growing number of small city service out of St Louis (and scattered elsewhere), and it operates as United Express in Micronesia.

This means that the airline needs international capability (for its Caribbean flights). It has a strong interline agreement with JetBlue which requires systems to talk, and it has a codeshare with United and American that adds complexity as well. Cape Air also sells through the GDSes so that’s another layer of communication. These may be on a smaller scale than at many larger airlines, but the level of complexity is still quite significant. As Jeremy Wertheimer, ITA Software founder and now VP of Travel for Google since his company’s acquisition, said to me, it’s easy to build a system that stands on its own, but then you have to make it so it can talk in some pretty archaic languages to ancient systems. In this case, it all worked, and that’s why this reservation system transition matters a great deal.

The one thing that Cape Air does have that makes this easier is that it sells its tickets in just a couple of time zones. (The Micronesia flying is United Express so you can’t buy via Cape Air directly.) That meant that Cape Air could shut down the old system at night, put the new system live, and then be ready to go by the time people woke up in the morning. I spoke with Trish Lorino, Director of Marketing at Cape Air, explained that the call center and website were offline at the same time for a brief period of time. The website was offline by itself longer, but everything was up in a matter of hours.

Once it came up, it appears that the transition was flawless. The data ported over and there were no customer issues. (If any of you flew or booked with them in the last couple weeks, let me know down in the comments how it’s been.) In fact, there wasn’t even a big customer notification effort – it all just worked right away. Not too shabby.

What’s so great about this new system besides the fact that it’s new? Jeremy explained that the system was built from modern architecture, instead of adapting over the years as has been the case elsewhere. That means there is no patchwork of multiple systems and databases. It all works together easily and provides a unified solution for an airline to use.

The example he gave of why this matters was a good one. Let’s say you make a reservation with one airline and use a new phone number. That won’t be updated in your frequent flier account or in a marketing database because those are all separate from each other. With this new system from ITA, everything resides in one place so it’s easy to make changes across the airline. It’s also easier for the airlines to analyze their data and make good use of it.

Possibly most importantly for some airlines, it makes training incredibly easy. Agents were trained up in 2 to 3 days and haven’t had any trouble using it. Something tells me the pre-merger United agents wish they had an easy system to learn right about now.

ITA built this system to be scalable and flexible. That sounds like marketing speak, but what it means is this. Since the system doesn’t run on mainframes, it’s easy to add more computing power as you grow or vary it depending upon the airline that’s signed up for it. And since everything was built with modern protocols, it’s very easy to just add on new functionality or change it as you go.

I asked Jeremy for some examples of what ITA can do that others can’t, but he didn’t want to let any of that out yet. The initial goal was to just replace the functionality of the existing system at Cape Air, and they’ve done that. Now they can start building on new pieces continuously. We can expect to see more functionality roll out over time as it becomes available. It’s not very difficult to make changes, it seems, so we should see more frequent changes than you would expect to see elsewhere.

If this system can do what it seems like it can, then it may end up being a viable competitor to the big guys. Jeremy said that ITA continues to talk to multiple airlines but there is nothing to announce just yet. I imagine it may take some time, but we will see ITA’s solution at other airlines soon. That can only be good for the airline industry and it’s only going to be good for travelers. The easier it is to make changes, the better chance we’ll see more customer friendly options coming from airlines.

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.