What to do when 35,000 feet in the air.

Add "registering to vote" to the list.

You can now register to vote at 35,000 feet. Lauren Fox, USNews.com

Starting Tuesday, guests can register to vote on all of Virgin America's flights, about 1,000 flights a day.

The voter registration drive is in cooperation with "Rock the Vote," a non-partisan voter registration organization targeted at young voters, that hopes to get 1.5 million new voters engaged in time for the 2012 election.

This is something I would hope catches on at other airlines.  Sure, Spirit would charge a $10 democracy fee, Southwest would register people dozens of times and United voters would find their registration processed after the election but you need to start somewhere.

There is the problem of angering the "True the Vote" crowd, who would obviously demand voting monitors to ensure no registration hanky-panky was being committed by Sir. Richard Branson.  I agree.  As a matter of fact, I volunteer to staff one of those flights as a registration watcher provided it initiates out of IAH and allows me to spend a week in Hawaii during the Summer months.  I'm sure y'all can work out the rest of the domestic schedule yourselves.






Note: Hat tip to MilePoint for the link.

More bad news for United

The United States Department of Transportation customer complaint numbers are in for the first half of 2012 and they're pretty ugly:

United Airlines customer complaints soar in first half of 2012. Olivia Pulsinelli, Houston Business Journal.

United Airlines tracked the highest number of consumer complaints among all U.S. airlines during the first half of 2012, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report shows.

Between January and June 2012, United Continental Holdings Inc. (NYSE: UAL) logged 1,740 complaints, more than three times the number tallied by American Airlines, which ranked second.

That’s also up from the 502 complaints United logged during the same period a year earlier.

Ouch.

ChronBlog weighs in as well.

United Fliers Voice their Dismay, Kiah Collier, Chron.com

Both articles mention the change-over to the SHARES computer system in March, which was undoubtedly the driving force behind UA's race to the bottom.  Beyond that however was the decidedly customer unfriendly approach that UA took to the entire situation.  It was almost as if Smisek and company ignored the impact such a change would have on operations, and had no contingency planning.

In Houston, things are worse.  As UA continues to streamline operations at IAH, their largest hub, there's anecdotal evidence that Houston fliers are starting to lose it just a bit.  Over the weekend blogger, and frequent traveller, Stephen Seagraves tweeted that he was hearing complaints against United for weather delays, with fliers somehow suggesting things would be better if CO was still around.  To be fair, In-flight entertainment experiences notwithstanding, the flights that I've had with United this year have gone fairly smoothly.  Madrid was a mess (right during the switch-over) as the wife and I both had boarding pass issues which caused us to be shouted down by gate agents, but our trip to Santa Barbara was, really, just about what we expected.

In many ways I think United is starting to smooth things out and operations are getting back to something resembling normal.  On a perceptive level however I think they have a long way to go. This goes double for Houston, where UA is currently viewed as something worse than Bud Adams, a civic Benedict Arnold if you will.  Is there anything they can do?  I think probably so.

 - Smilin' Jeff Smisek needs to come out and publicly apologize to customers.  There have been reports that he's apologized in investor meetings and conference calls but that rings hollow to many.  United needs to make a mea-culpa television commercial and fess up to their short-comings, promise to do better, and then DO better.

 - United needs to shoot straight with Houston about their future plans for IAH.  I believe UA when they say IAH will continue to be an "important" hub for them.  What I don't believe is that IAH will continue to be their largest hub.  At least, not in the long term.  Logistically IAH offered advantages to South America, and UA is going to be facing tough competition for those routes.  There's nothing that UA can do to bring back the portion of Houstonians who think their inferiority complex is the most important thing in the world, because of this they've lost the Houston Chronicle, the Apple Dumpling Gang, and everyone who comments on ChronBlog travel articles.  The good news is I believe that to be a small, but vocal, travel minority in Houston. They can do a better job being honest with the fliers they are retaining.

 - Just straighten up and fly right.  This is the biggest thing.  People will forgive a lot of woes if the flights leave/arrive on time, the service is friendly and things work.  Stop telling us about how great the nightmare Dreamliner is going to be and work on making sure the 737/757(etc.) product is everything it can be.  Producing a good product is key. Besides, most airports are never going to see the Dreamliner in person, but they see the other planes multiple times every day.

 - Stop trying to placate the politicians. It's very clear that UA has lost support in the current administration. They shouldn't spend any time trying to get it back. Worrying about Annise Parker is a distraction from the goal of building their brand.  Let Parker be Parker, worry about making United a good airline again.

As I stated earlier, there are significant portions of their customer base that UA is not going to see on their planes for a while, but there are new travellers who will be willing to board UA metal provided the service is top-notch.  I consider the angry, bitter Houston traveller a lost cause, I think that UA should as well.  I've got a flight coming up to Anchorage later this month, I have high hopes for it because my expectations are where they should be.  With my status I should get econ +, I'm bringing my own food on board and I'll have my iPad loaded with two or three movies.  I'm handling the food and entertainment, I just want United to get me their safely and on-time.

That shouldn't be too much to ask.

The rapid erosion of lower-tier elite airline status

Good article yesterday in The Middle Seat, the Wall St. Journals travel blog....

Silver Status Loses its Luster for Frequent Fliers. Scott McCartney, WSJ.com

Airlines have cut and crimped perks awarded to the silver-level frequent fliers—the lowest and most populous tier of elite status, which typically requires 25,000 flying miles a year.

Both travel message boards have threads going as well.

Flyer Talk (not much conversation here)

Mile Point (A little more conversation, and where I first found the story)

Conversation around this has been bubbling up on message boards for a while now, especially with United Airlines who overhauled their Premier program post merger, although the changes weren't as bad as some feared.

My position on this for a while now is that anyone who is comfortable qualifying for Silver Elite would be better served getting a credit card and taking advantage of the benefits that way, instead of flying 25K miles or 30 segments to qualify through the airlines.  This also allows you the option of choosing another airline at a lower cost without the opportunity cost of lost qualifying miles.

That's for the Silver (or lowest) level, what about the levels above?  This little tidbit caught my eye:

Even gold has lost some value. Steve Heller has lifetime gold status on United but found that it wasn't high enough to avoid some of the pitfalls of weakened elite status. His travel agent found two first-class seats to Bangkok for Mr. Heller and his wife priced at 140,000 miles round-trip. But gold status wasn't high enough to book those first-class saver awards. He could get two business-class seats for 120,000 round-trip—still a bargain, he figured.

"I called and they said, 'Your level allows business, but you can't get first on that flight,' " said Mr. Heller, a retired scientist from the Washington, D.C., area. "I discovered what a low-level person I am."
United confirmed that it gives better access to business-class and first-class "saver" awards to its top two tiers—Platinum and 1K—of its four-tier MileagePlus program. "In developing the MileagePlus program, members consistently emphasized the need to create distinction between the Premier-branded levels. This is one of those distinctions," a United spokesman said.

I can't help but wonder which "members" emphasized the need to create distinction?  It certainly wasn't the Gold and Silver members who are now relegated to second class citizenship under the new rules, and I doubt many Platinum and 1K members were really all that put out about it.  I have a feeling the "members" that really mattered were on the executive floor in Chicago.

Of course, all of that exclusivity goes out the window (especially on upgrades) when a lower-level elite decides they're going to by a full-fare (Y or B) economy ticket and then try and upgrade.  With United the first qualifier is NOT elite status level, but the amount of money you're willing to spend.  So a Plat or 1K on a S fare could find themselves (potentially, not likely because they can clear earlier however) losing out to a Silver Elite on a Y or B fare.  For all of United's talk about distinctions, what this really boils down to is a slow creep by the airlines to revenue based Elite programs.

What the airlines have come to understand is that loyalty is not a profit engine.  In today's hyper-competitive world many FF'ers are looking for price and value and will jump for a status match once an offer comes along that's to their benefit.  There is no real loyalty these days in the airline business.

I think it will be a long time before the upper-tiered loyalty program members realize a serious devaluation in their plans however.  But it is coming.  I predict that it won't be long until a bank figures out there are people out there who want a card that pushes them up to a level of equality with the top elite levels.  Granted, they will probably have some pretty high annual fees but customers will be willing to pay those in return for upgrades, F class award bookings etc.

Some pundits have speculated that we're starting to see the beginning of a sea change in how airlines treat their customers, especially those who, in the past, have been courted as being the 'most loyal'.  I really think that we've moved past the beginning into the implementation phase of several of these changes.  We've already seen the devaluation of the Silver level, now the perks are creeping into the next (Gold) tier, and I don't think it will be long before you see the third tier (Platinum) start to be encroached upon as well.

Airlines will, for the foreseeable future, continue to operate their FF plans and they will still provide the customer some small advantage (they will still, inevitably, market these programs as being 'more valuable than ever before' this will be, of course, not true), but the size of that advantage is going to get smaller and smaller as airlines move away from a loyalty-based plan and toward a revenue-based plan.  It's possible that customer outcry could stem this tide for a small time but I doubt it.  The box has been opened, there's little chance of closing it again. The best strategy now is to figure out how to best position yourself for the coming change.

Short Haul Flights (08/08/2012)

Whether or not these are interesting is up to you.....

Chesapeake shuns gas, shrinks rig count. Zain Shauk, Chron.com  - The issue is price and profitability.  On the latter, there is none.

Texas fracking disclosure law leaves questions. Dan X. McGraw, Chron.com - It wasn't too long ago that this same publication was holding up Texas laws as a "model".  Amazing how quick the ecomental lobby can change their minds.

Report: American/U.S. Airways merger raises anti-trust, consumer concerns. Sheryl Jean, DMN - The same is "reported" on almost every merger. It rarely means much.  Probably the biggest argument against this is that American doesn't seem to want to.

American Express Gold Card 75,000 point bonus. Gary Leff, View from the Wing - There's been a LOT of talk on travel message boards about posts like this (for an extreme example, search 30,000 Starwood points and see how many hits you get) and questions of rather or not they "ruin" travel blogging.  To my mind these posts aren't the biggest problem with travel blogging today, which I've outlined here and here.

Belafonte: Mitt's not my cup of tea. Caitlen McDevit, Politico - A lefty, has been celebrity doesn't like Mitt Romney, in related news it's hot in Houston during August.  (The media has NOT distinguished themselves in election coverage this year, on either candidate.)

Dome vote is far away. Chris Moran, Chron.com - Not as far away as anything resembling leadership on this issue.  That's strike two for Emmett FWIW.

Texas executes man despite concerns over IQ. Allan Turner, Chron.com From the story:

Marvin Wilson, the two-time armed robber who fatally beat and shot a Beaumont police informer

I, for one, am glad that stupidity cannot be used as a defense for a heinous crime in Texas.

Bicyclist killed in NE Houston traffic accident. Carol Christian, Chron.com - Remember stories like these the next time you hear the idiots at Houston Tomorrow longing for more people commuting to work on their bikes.  Bike paths?  Yes. Bikes w/cars during rush hour?  Obviously not.

And finally....

Train Spotter. The Apple Dumpling Gang, Chron.com - You have to give the gang this, no matter how wrong-headed they are, no matter how large the price-overruns become, no matter how impractical or useless the toy train is turning out to be, they're willing to be wrong until the bitter end.  Much to be admired.

A concerning travel blog development

I admit my relative rookie status when it comes to travelling, and travel blogging, but I've noticed a couple of posts over the last few days by some of the large travel bloggers that leave me scratching my head.

1. Using hidden city and throwaway ticketing to save big money on airfare, Gary Leff, View from the Wing

Airlines often price tickets from one city to another through a hub cheaper than flights that terminate at the hub. Flying United New York to Milwaukee through Chicago is often much cheaper than just flying New York to Chicago.

But if you get off the plane in Chicago and don’t board your connection to Milwaukee, you’ve potentially saved yourself a lot of money. This is called hidden city ticketing.

The post goes on to say that this is in explicit violation of the contract of carriage.

2. How to game elite status matches. Scottrick, Hack my Trip.

As with all travel hacking, there is a range of ethical dilemmas. Using free status and a single hotel night isn’t exactly the same as earning that status the hard way. But if it works, it works. You could also *cough* outright lie. Adobe makes products that can be used for good and for bad. It would be difficult but possible to use Photoshop to digitally edit your account statement pixel by pixel. 

It’s even easier to just print your account statement to PDF and then alter it using Acrobat Professional. The PDF will be divided into art and text, and the text remains fully editable in the same font and size, making it not that hard to delete “Silver” and write in “Platinum” or turn 0 points into 100,000. I’ll leave you to decide how far you want to take this. For my part, I’ve been able to avoid such extreme moves thus far.

By any measure this bit of "advice" is shocking.

I've had (brief) discussions about this with "real life" friends and we all agree that both of these examples are beyond the pale when it comes to giving out travel advice.  In the first, you're explicitly violating the contract of carriage between yourself and the airline.  You may not like those terms, but when you purchase a ticket you explicitly agree to follow them.  In the second the blogger is describing a way to blatantly commit fraud.

To my mind there's a big difference between "playing the miles game" and engaging in behavior that you know is unethical or illegal.  When an airline mistakenly loads a $62 R/T fare from IAH to ORD, you know they've made a mistake, but it's not fraudulent to take them up on an offered price, even IF that price is ridiculously low.  If anything it suggests a need for them to add some redundancy into their price loads each week.   I feel the same way about fuel dumps, or 3rd strikes, which utilize a loophole in the airlines software to induce a lower fuel surcharge.  Unlike the 1st example above, these are NOT against the contract of carriage and (because of their ability to shave hundreds of dollars of Intercontinental flights) are a loophole that the airlines are working mightily to close.

One thing that neither blogger mentions are the potential ramifications that could stem from following their "advice".  In the first situation you could be banned from an airline.  Gary says this is not a big deal because many flyers have no loyalty anyway are are "looking for the best price".  This logic is flawed because, if you disqualify yourself from an airline, you lose an awful lot of pricing power.  Depending on your residence this could be disastrous. (getting banned from UA would be very detrimental to someone who flies out of IAH or EWR for example) Secondly, there's the problem of losing any frequent flyer status and the corresponding hard-earned (for the most part I'm assuming) miles.  Airlines are within their rights to shut down your accounts, revoke any and all status and strip you of your miles.  They remain (and always will remain) the property of the airline.

The last drawback is the most obvious:  Fraud, committed knowingly, is a FELONY.  I'm not sure of the actual jurisdiction but I would imagine if you cross state lines this becomes a federal felony. (Possibly one of my attorney readers could correct me in the comments?)  Are you sure you want to take that risk to save a few bucks?

Irrespective of the legal ramifications I find it incredibly unprofessional of these bloggers to write in this manner. Advocating for travellers (in some cases, novice travellers) to behave in this manner doesn't advance travel writing in any way.  If anything it erodes credibility.  On all levels this is worse than the "LOOK AT THIS CREDIT CARD DEAL" that travel bloggers are constantly posting (sometimes with very weak acknowledgement that they profit from these arrangements) because, at least, those posts are 100% legal.

I'm a firm believer in the art of leveraging miles and points to save money on travelling, and to work as hard as you can to qualify for the highest status possible while spending the least amount of dollars.  My one caveat is that you have to conduct your business in an ethical and legal manner.

What I'm seeing on the travel blogs lately does not clear either of those hurdles, and that's disconcerting.


After I wrote all of this (but before publishing) this surfaced:

Travelocity cancelling reservations made with $200 off coupon. Gary Leff, View from the Wing

Commenter Mad Mad Mad shares the text of Travelocity’s cancellation email:

Recently you booked a vacation package at http://www.travelocity.com using the promo code NFB2012. Based on our review of the details of your reservation, we have determined that you were not eligible to use the promo code and, therefore, we have cancelled your reservation.
If you received the promo code when you attended the 2012 National Federation of the Blind National Convention in Dallas, and feel you have received this message in error, please contact us at 1-866-211-1731.
Sincerely,
Travelocity Customer Care Team

Except that nowhere in the terms and conditions does it say that one would have to have received the promo code by attending a Dallas event.
And in fact, that wasn’t Travelocity’s position when the coupon was introduced. They even tweeted publicly about it! Here’s a Google cache of their tweet:

This certainly doesn't fall under illegal and I'm not even sure it's unethical, but it sure feels gross doesn't it?

Texas Run-off winners and losers

By now you've probably heard the news regarding Ted Cruz lopsided win over David Dewhurst and you might have paid attention to some of the other races as well.  Whether or not this was a "change" election I'll leave to others to decide.  For one, Texas is the tip of the conservative spear in America, so what happens here doesn't necessarily transfer elsewhere, for two, there is still a general election to get through and while I think many races were decided last night, there could be some surprises.

Winners:

Ted Cruz: Obviously. Anyone saying that someone else was the big winner of the evening has an agenda, or is pulling for Paul Sadler. The simple fact is Ted Cruz faced withering personal attacks from Dewhurst and beat him by double digits.  The overall vote count in the race was somewhere around 1.1MM w/ Cruz taking around 680K of those votes.

The Anti-Incumbency movement:  On the Republican side, incumbents were the real losers.  Medina, Miller, Wentworth.  If you were an incumbent Republican you had a better than average chance of getting voted out.  Some consultants are already trying to spin this as having nothing to do with the Tea Party but they're paddling outside of the water.  This certainly was the Tea Party election, time will tell whether or not this volatile group can sustain their current momentum.

Indy Media:  There has been much better analysis and tea-leaf reading by bloggers & alt-media professionals on this race than anything being written by the so-called "experts" of the MSM (more on them later.)  If you're still going to your newspaper or Texas Monthly (although that's about to change w/their recent hiring of Josh Trevino) exclusively for your political opinion you're missing out.

Losers: (more of these than winners)

David Dewhurst:  Any list not mentioning him first is just wrong.  The sexy pick (for the MSM) is Rick Perry, but these have to be taken with a huge grain of salt because of personal vendettas.  Dewhurst had every advantage going into this race and he, for lack of a better term, blew it.  Already the sharks are in the water.  Jerry Patterson sent out a text saying that he "respected Dewhurst" but was running against him in 2014.  When he fell behind Dewhurst went scorched earth.  If that resonates then a candidate can emerge stronger.  If the voters reject it then there are a lot of hard feelings and the candidate is weakened.  David Dewhurst is a weakened candidate right now.  That said, voters can have short memories.

Stan Stanart:  This is a Harris County specific issue granted, but no elected official took it on the chin during the night quite like Harris County's Republican Clerk. During election night, the Clerk has one job. Post the election results accurately and timely. On the latter part, Stanart's shop failed.  And his excuses saying that "Reliant gave us some garbage lines" ring hollow considering he was slow during the first round of elections as well.  Stanart is one of the growing ranks of County politicians running for local, technical jobs using sweeping national rhetoric.  Perhaps it's time for the Republicans to find candidates who are willing to handle the requirements of the job for which they're elected first, BEFORE trying to save us from the evils of DC?

Paul Burka:  Ah Burka the clown.  What else can you say about a guy who authored four "live blog" election posts and couldn't even get the numbering sequence right.  I, II, IV, V  It's also funny to see Burka try and re-cast himself as calling it for Cruz from the outset. If anything, Burka called this race wrong early and has been trying to back-track every sense.  His analysis is hackery, too often propped up by uncorroborated "staffers" and little else.  He's a Selectric talking head in a digital world.  Texas Monthly was right to go and snag Josh Trevino to increase the credibility of their political opinion.  One last note: In his post mortem Burka casts Rick Perry as the "big loser" of the evening  That's bunk.  I'm going to name four people here that were bigger losers than Perry, and I'm not even going to touch on Straus, who seems to have taken another hit in his power base.  It's one thing to hold a personal grudge against an elected official as Burka (And Wayne Slater) seem to have against Rick Perry.  It's another to allow it to color every inch of your analysis.

JayDave* Carney:  Perry's rough political campaign, now a failure in the Dewhurst for Senate campaign.  Rough year.  It remains to be seen whether attack ads are on the out, or if Carney's shop just did a terrible job with the attack ads in THIS campaign.

At least they didn't hurt themselves:

The Texas Democratic Party:  I could call this a "win" given the recent past of this group, but when your nominee comes out and calls himself the "only major party nominee" for the US Senate and says that his opponent is outside of the mainstream, despite losing in the vote count by a total of 5-1, then really it's not a victory at all.  "Radical", "Crazy" and vulgarities are all the Democrats have right now.  I had a brief Twitter discussion with a Democratic talker last night discussing whether Cruz left them room to make a case.  I think there is room, but the State Democratic Party doesn't have the intellectual firepower to make it right now.  To compete in Texas the Dems need three things that they don't currently have:  Competent candidates (these take time to grow), a winning message (They haven't learned to play to the crowd) and better campaign consultants. (Good luck)  Whoever decided that Sadler coming out in his first big minute in the sun and insulting 680K Texas voters would be a good idea needs to be summarily dismissed from the campaign.  That won't happen, which is why they're going to get trounced (again) in November.



















*Thanks to Kevin Whited for pointing out my obvious typo. (not that Jay Carney would ever be termed a "winner".)