Happy New Year, readers! I apologize for the lack of updates, but it's been crazy busy with the holidays. Let's start off 2012 with an infographic compliments of FlightStats.com on where the various airlines ranked across several key categories.
The interesting highlights:
- Southwest, the only airline where "Bags Fly Free" was 2nd to last in baggage handling, but also ranked the best with the lowest percentage of customer complaints.
- jetBlue had the most delays and lowest percentage of on-time arrivals.
- United didn't do so well in with customer complaints and bumping passengers - no doubt the high number of frequent flyers affecting the later
- American had the most cancellations, lost the most bags, and ranked the worst overall - part of this due to their aging fleet
Here's hoping you have a wonderful start to the 2012 new year!
Hipmunk has put together a nice visual (with a touch of humor) highlighting the changes to baggage fees since the year 2000. I didn’t realize the IRS allowed baggage fee revenue to be tax free. It’s no wonder travelers are being gouged. Kudos to Southwest for not imposing baggage fees like the other airlines.
As a frequent traveler, I can immediately tell when I've been given a sub-standard room, especially when visiting the same location several weeks in a row. Rooms on the same floor with the same amenities can provide totally different experiences due to It's one of the primary reasons to get to know the receptionists who work the Monday morning & afternoon shift. They're really your only guarantee to getting a decent room week after week.
Some aspects of a poor room experience include small things like an alarm clock which doesn't work, lights which need replacing, a poorly working themostat, a sink which doesn't drain, a weak shower head, a broken phone, or a poor wireless signal. Now imagine if you could specify more than a "high floor", "extra pillows", or "king-size bed" when reserving your room. That's the aim of Room77, a start-up focused on guaranteeing a better room experience based on experiences from frequent travelers.
Mashable provides some background and insight into Room77:
Years ago, Brad Gerstner, now the founder of hotel-search startup Room 77, would maintain a running list of his favorite hotel rooms on his BlackBerry. Friends got wind of the list and started asking for copies, and Gerstner started thinking about the larger problem, a problem of information asymmetry: Hotel front desks have all the information on rooms, while the consumer has nothing.
It took years — and countless hours with Gerstner and friends walking through hotel hallways and gathering floor information — for the full Room 77 concept to materialize into a functional hotel room database and search engine. Today, travelers can turn to Room 77 to get the run-down on nearly half a million hotel rooms in 18 different cities.
Why might a traveler want access to this data? For starters, any frequent hotel visitor knows that each stay can vary drastically depending on room size, bed quality, balcony or view. Consumers often demand higher floors or rooms with views to circumvent bad experiences; but most often, guests are slotted into rooms as hotel clerks or computer algorithms see fit.
It's a great idea and hopefully it works out for Brad and Room 77 because we'll all benefit from a better room experience and perhaps spur hotels to do a better job of maintaining individual room experiences versus managing to an aggregate experience - perhaps by providing incentives to the maintenance folks to proactively resolve room issues.
A frequent traveler gave this review on RideCharge.com:
I’ve been using this website/iPhone app to book and pay for taxi’s in Chicago, and it works great so thought I’d pass it along. It provides the ability to reserve online and pay for the ride through your phone (linked to a credit card), and once the payment is completed, they send you a .pdf receipt with all the details about the trip (no lost taxi receipts). Also available on the Blackberry.
I’m sticking with my trustworthy cabbie, but if you don’t have a regular driver you may want to think about giving this service a try. The iPhone and Blackberry application and the ability to receive receipts in PDF seems like a big win for frequent travelers.
Jaunted.com has put together a useful reference chart for Airline WiFi costs and availability. Check it out. Here’s a quick snap-shot but make sure you visit www.jaunted.com for the latest and greatest.
A fellow flier supplied the following template for making complaints to your airline for non-weather-related inconveniences.
Complaint Template:
Dear <<Airline>>:
I was on Flight <<>> leaving <<>> on <<>> when <<>> difficulties forced us to exit and change planes and delayed our arrival by over <<>> hours. This resulted in me missing several extremely important meetings in <<>>. I am a frequent flyer with <<>> (FF: <<>>) and am extremely upset that the <<>>. I trust you will provide a refund or similar compensation for this incredible inconvenience.
Thanks,
<<>>
Along with the an example of a response from the airline:
Thank you for contacting us.
Use it, but don’t abuse it.
I’m a huge fan of Mint.com so when I heard AwardWallet.com mentioned in the same sentence, I decided to take a look. The concept is straight forward. Enter your login credentials and AwardWallet.com will track your balances and notify you of events such as expiration of points/miles.
The Good:
- The interface is clean
- The website had no issues gathering my balance information; I tested 2 hotels, 2 airlines, 2 car rentals, and my corporate card
- I really like having all my membership numbers in a single location
The Not-So-Good:
- I got a email telling me about my travel itinerary as soon as I entered my airline information; I did not ask to track my travel plans.
- Instead of displaying my Hertz balance, it had a link asking me to upgrade to AwardWallet Plus; I haven’t had a chance to see the value in the service and I’m already being asked for money?
- A connection section; No I’m not interested in sharing my travel plans with all my connections
Suggestion to AwardWallet.com: You need to focus on being awesome in a single space. Stop trying to compete with TripIt. Build a great service, then ask for money. Asking me to upgrade before I can truely understand the value is wasting both our times. Not everything needs to have a social networking component to it (Mint.com did not and look how well they did). Some of us think Facebook is a waste of time (and frequent flyers don’t have alot of time). Understand your target customer and get some of them on your board. Your website is called "Award Wallet", not "Travel Itineraries" or "Travel Connections" - either change your name or stop trying to be all things. FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS
I plan to report back after I’ve given it a few cycles. Let’s see what happens.
Every so often, I’ll introduce a new feature available through the More Than Points Personal Travel Assistant. This post introduces the flight status command. Using this command, you can see if you’ll be home on time. It also displays FAA-provided gate information in case you have an unexpected gate change. Since the MTP PTA lets you send commands through any jabber-compatible client (e.g. Google Talk) or any email client (like your BlackBerry), you can use it anywhere you have data service.
The flight command only requires the the two-digit airline code followed by the flight number:
Remember: To use the MTP PTA just send an instant message to morethanpoints@gmail.com OR send an email with NO SUBJECT and the command in the body of the email to the same email address. Why bother with pulling up a website when a simple email or IM will do the trick.
More Than Points is all about saving you time so you can spend it on yourself and your family. Enjoy the rest of your week.
MTP is proud to announce the availability of your Personal Travel Assistant (PTA). You can access the PTA through email or through a Jabber-compatible client such as Google Talk . Just add morethanpoints@gmail.com as a friend and type ‘help’ for available options. You can also send an email to morethanpoints@gmail.com without a subject and your command in the first line of the email body.
Weather can be the bane of our traveling experience. Bad weather is the cause of delays and canceled flights. As travelers, we sometimes need to pack in preparation for the entire week. Forgetting a warm jacket or umbrella in bad weather dampens our already weakened immune system.
Getting the weather through your PTA using a instant messenger client like Google Talk is as easy as typing:
weather SDF
This returns:
You can also just send an email from any device to your PTA as follows (remember – do not put anything in the subject line):
This returns:
You can use airport code, zip code or a city,state to identify the location. If you put a number at the end (1 through 5) it will forecast the number of days specified – the default is 5 days.
Going forward I will continue to highlight another useful command made available through your PTA. MTP is always looking for ways to make life easier for the road warrior. If you have comments or suggestions on PTA or anything else relevant to frequent travelers please send them our way.
Kayak has an excellent reference for fees across all airlines which is updated on a regular basis. I’ve attached a snapshot of the table as an example (Click on the thumbnail to get a readable picture).
It’s always a good idea to stay up-to-date on the fees so you can make the right decision for yourself and your clients.