This week’s featured link:
Get Ready to Binge-Fly With Unlimited Flight Subscriptions – Bloomberg
OneGo has an interesting idea. You pay a monthly fee and you can fly as much as you want… with limitations. You can only book 4 trips at a time, and you must book a week in advance. Not all airports are covered. Does this make sense? You’ll have to do the math for yourself. If you do a lot of expensive routes that they cover, then this could work. But the company has to be betting that it won’t make sense for you. That’s how they’ll make a profit.
Two for the road:
The Costs of Privatizing Air Traffic Control and How It Will Impact Airline Travelers – Delta.com
Before the bill was presented to privatize air traffic control this week, Delta put out a document explaining why it’s against the plan.
Dan Stands Up To Captain Airplane Douche – TheUnTicket.com
File this one under “the lighter side.” It’s a showdown in row 4. There’s something about Southwest’s open seating process that turns some people into jerks. Here’s one of those examples, and it’s funny. (It’s a podcast.)
4 comments on “3 Links I Love: Unlimited Flight Subscriptions, Privatizing Air Traffic Control, Southwest Seating Showdown”
Delta is against ATC improvements because
1) their old aircraft would require big technology investments to keep up
2) they benefit from congestion in New York airspace since they dominate in slots.
Plus they have a seat at the current table and a new organization might reduce their influence.
And so Delta’s report contains serious misrepresentations.
They write, “From 1996 to 2012, Canada saw ATC operation fees increase by 59 percent.”
Playing games with statistics. The fees went into effect in 1999, but they choose 1996 as a base year. Hah! Choose the correct year, and include two more current years which contained fee reductions (interesting they cut those off) and you get a 30% inflation-adjusted reduction in fees!
More Fisking of this dishonest report here:
http://reason.org/news/show/air-traffic-control-newsletter-130
One Go sounds like a deal. $3k/mo for unlimited flying? Heck, for business travel I spend that per month on one or two trips. Problem is since my travel is all billed back to clients how do I itemize or get an invoice for the trip? Telling the client to cover a month’s worth of service when some travel may not have been for their projects would be a tough sell.
A – But do you book all your business trips a week in advance? And would all the cities you need be on their list? It is definitely somewhat restrictive. And yes, you’ll have a billing problem.
OneGo sounds interesting but one major caveat is that connecting itineraries are excluded. Their terms and conditions at https://www.onego.com/terms-and-conditions/ say:
“All routes are for non-stop flights with no option to make a connecting Itinerary as part of OneGo’ Services. These routes will be serviced by Suppliers of OneGo’s choosing, but will only include scheduled flights on network commercial airlines, and may change without any previous notice to Traveler.”