For months, we’ve heard airlines go back and forth with wifi announcements. One airline says it’ll test wifi. Another says it’ll put it on the entire domestic fleet. Another says it’ll test it on aircraft made in odd-numbered years (or not). But you get the point. Airlines like talking about this a lot . . . except for AirTran. They hadn’t said a word about wifi until today. Now they say the entire fleet will be outfitted by the end of July.

How are they doing it so quickly? Well, they started doing this stealthily about a month ago. Now I guess they have enough critical mass that they’re ready to start talking about it. And they’ve made a heck of a splash – if you saw the Today Show this morning, they were broadcasting live from above, taking a page from the Virgin America playbook.

Delta has to be a little pissed off right now. They’ve been the most proactive of all and it was just yesterday that they announced they were nearly half done with their installation on their domestic fleet. They’ll finish up in September, and I bet they hoped they’d at least have a short competitive advantage over their chief competitor in Atlanta. (That’s AirTran.) They won’t since AirTran will be done with their fleet in July.

But let’s be honest. None of these competitive advantages are going to last very long. We’re in the transition phase where airlines are jumping all over each other to try to make the biggest PR splash. Broadcasting from above is just one example of the lengths airlines are willing to go to get it stuck in the public’s heads that they have wifi onboard. But this phase won’t last very long.

I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of planes flying domestically will have some form of internet up and running in short order. American, Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America will all have wifi on their whole domestic fleets soon. Southwest and Alaska are testing it. United will be soon. JetBlue and Continental are both sticking with narrow band email solutions for now, but I wonder how long it’ll be until we see that change.

So while some airlines will get a nice PR jump now, a year from now it’ll be standard equipment, and only then will this actually be good for the customer. I don’t know anyone who enjoys the guessing game right now. Will my plane have wifi or not? You won’t know until you get onboard, unless you’re flying Virgin America which does tell you in advance. Soon, we won’t have to worry about that. Every plane will have it.

But back to AirTran. I have to say that it’s nice to see an airline not talking about this until they actually had something to show for it. The compressed timeline for installation means their customers are not going to have to suffer with the guessing game as long as they have with other carriers. There is still, however, one problem.

On AirTran’s wifi PR flight this morning, there were a lot of dead batteries. (Remember, I brought this up recently.) Benet Wilson was twittering until her laptop died. (Then she switched to her iPod Touch.) And Ben Mutzabaugh at USA Today saw his battery die as well. He asked AirTran about power outlets, and they said “it’s a priority to address, but concedes it likely won’t happen soon.”

So a year from now, I’m hoping that wifi will be standard and the next race will be for power outlets.

I really should avoid booking flights at all costs, because if I can’t do it online, it ends up being incredibly difficult. This time, it was Southwest making my life difficult, and man, do they have a problem in the way they process unused credits.

We were looking at a simple one way flight in June that was going to cost us just shy of $98. I had two different confirmation numbers on unused tickets that I wanted to apply to cover the total cost of the ticket. Of course, Southwest lets you do this online, and I’ve always found that they’ve made this easier than anyone else. Not this time.

One of the credits had about $90 from one ticket and it expires in September. The other one had about $115 and expires next April. Naturally, I wanted to use up all the funds that expire in September and pull the remaining $8 or so out of the one that wouldn’t expire for a year. But when I went online, it didn’t let me. I put the $90 credit in first and that worked. But then when I went in to put the other confirmation #, it then pulled all the credit from the newer one and wouldn’t let me use the one that expire soon.

I tried it a few different ways, so I called Southwest for help. They weren’t very helpful. It’s not that they didn’t try, but the system apparently has some screwy logic that wouldn’t let them help me. Here’s how it works, according to the reservation agents I spoke with.

The $90 credit that expires in September is a partial credit. It used to be around $200, but we had used the balance for another set of flights previously. So the system views that as a partial credit which is a lower class of credit in the hierarchy. The $115 credit was actually two credits. There was one full ticket intact for $111 and then another $3 or $4 as a partial credit from a second ticket on the same itinerary. The full ticket is a higher class of credit, for some reason. Confused? Me too. I just wanted to use my f*&(ing credits.

Here’s the bottom line. The system will force you to use full credits that are on a ticket before you can use partial credits. So I had a choice. I could either pull the full amount out of the $111 or I could combine the $90 credit with the $3 credit and pay the rest on my credit card. I opted for the latter because I didn’t want to take a chance that we wouldn’t use that credit before it expired. Yes, it only cost me $4 or $5 on my credit card, but that’s not the point.

Clearly, this is a very bad setup. Southwest should let you choose which credits you want to apply instead of forcing some arbitrary logic that makes no sense for the customer.

Delta Bumps Up Los Angeles – Las Vegas Flying Again
First they were cutting back, now they’re growing. What’s going on here?

Airlines Respond to H1N1 Influenza A Differently
Reactions around the world to the “swine” flu have been very different depending upon the region. See what everyone is up to.

Continental Shows Weak Numbers, Easter Benefit
Continental’s April numbers looked better than March, but remember the Easter shift before getting too excited.

Frontier Shows April Traffic and Revenue Weakness
April wasn’t a great month for Frontier. It’s hard to draw conclusions just based on this month, but I’ll certainly be paying more attention as we move into the summer peak.

SkyWest Starts At-Risk CRJ Flying for United
Looks like SkyWest is doing what it has to do to place CRJs back into service. And now that means prorate flying.

April 2009 Airline Traffic Numbers
Traffic numbers are out for April and they weren’t too bad.