Welcome to “premium economy.”

As business-class seats have consistently moved towards the luxury originally set aside for first class seats, European airlines have started phasing in a new level of ticket, often called premium economy.

The idea is to appeal to business travelers “on a budget” and people who are taking vacations but can spend a little bit extra on the tickets:

“It’s a smart business move because there’s been what I call class creep on an airplane,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel analyst with Forrester Research. “What’s now called business class is almost what first class used to be. So premium economy is more like what business class used to be back in the 1980s, akin in many ways to U.S. domestic first class in terms of legroom.”

I’m sure it will change over time, but I’ve made my list of what I need to keep me happy on an airplane. Super cushy seats and high-class cutlery are not on the list.

For now, it looks like I’ll stick to the main cabin. Of course, if premium economy came with free wi-fi…

The Wall Street Journal decided to test out some of the luggage services that have been gaining traction recently.

What luggage services? (you ask)

According to the Journal there are companies that offer to pick your bags up at your door and deliver them to your destination—the door, again—so that you don’t have to deal with airline surcharges, hassles of luggage claim, security, or anything else the FAA might invent between now and next Tuesday.

How did the tests go? Are the services worth it?

The good news: No service failed the point-A-to-point-B test. The bad: Prices were so steep, from $122.19 to $198.23, the services can’t really be considered practical for frequent fliers or families with lots of luggage. (Procrastinators should also take note: Even if you opt for the higher-priced overnight service, you’re still stuck with the issue of having to pack and ship your bags ahead of going to the airport.)

And the real surprise: Four out of the five companies sent Federal Express or UPS to pick up our bags. Which begs another question: Why not just call the carriers on your own instead of paying for a third party to handle the task? For example, for that same $198.23 fee that our priciest shipper charged for a suitcase weighing up to 55 pounds (and insured for up to $1,500), FedEx quoted us a rate of $38.58, and UPS, $70.08.

So if you’re thinking about skipping the $15 luggage surcharge, try a different airline first

One of the biggest hassles when traveling on business can be getting the Visas lined up for multiple country trips. It costs money, it takes weeks, and you usually end up having to give up your passport while everything gets approved.

For a business traveler going anywhere other than Japan, Canada, or Mexico, this can be a real pain in the rear. But it turns out that there’s a service for this, too:

There are about a hundred passport and visa agencies nationwide, most of them single-office operations and some family run, Mr. Smith said. The two biggest are CIBT, based in McLean, Va., and Travisa in Washington. Like all larger visa expediters, they court major corporate clients, offering double-digit discounts for high-volume foreign travel.

These agencies specialize in getting Visas lined up quickly and painlessly, although they can be a little bit pricey with the cheaper Visas costing around $150 and the more expensive ones on the order for $400.

But if you need it done quickly and you’ve got the cash, this could be a good solution.

It seems like just about every week there’s a new reason to avoid flying, and other industries are sniffing around for ways to take a chunk out of the market.

This week it’s the trains in Europe. Business Traveller reported recently that the York train station now boasts free Wi-Fi provided by National Express East Coast, which manages the station and also provides free Wi-Fi on all of its trains.

The quote from the station manager, Steve Soards, says it all:

“A major advantage of choosing the train over alternatives such as driving or flying is the ability to stay connected to the internet throughout the journey. For business passengers our wifi creates a productive mobile office, with the ability to send and receive emails as well as to access the internet. Staying online throughout a journey can mean the difference between clinching a deal or losing out.”

I’m think the airline industry needs to stop playing defense and start playing offense. Trying to tack little fees onto luggage and food is going to make people mad.

Offering productivity services, especially basic ones like free wi-fi (maybe you get to purchase extra or dedicated bandwidth?) is probably a much better approach to finding new revenue streams.

The New York Times just reported (like an hour ago - call me lightning fingers!) that tomorrow United Airlines will start charging passengers flying on their cheapest tickets for the first checked bag:

United Airlines said Thursday that it would begin charging many passengers on Friday to check their first bag, joining American Airlines in assessing a $15 luggage fee for passengers flying on the cheapest tickets.

It wasn’t that long ago that American announced the policy on their own airplanes, in an effort to recoup some of the costs of operating an airline in a sluggish economy with skyrocketing fuel prices.

While I certainly understand the sentiment (”we’re screwed! our costs are going through the roof and our revenue is not growing!”), there’s only so much to be accomplished by introducing “gotcha” fees to travelers.

The only way that’s going to work as a long term strategy is if the budget airlines follow suit, and I think companies like Southwest are savvy enough not only to avoid the $15 surcharge, but to use it as good fodder for advertising.

Apple’s announcement of the upcoming 3G iPhone (to be on sale July 11th) has me wondering: will Apple be able to take a bite out of the business market.

The new iPhone firmware is clearly aimed at co-opting a big chunk of the BlackBerry user base, with full ActiveSync and enterprise support that integrates with both Microsoft and Apple programs on Macs and PCs.

Essentially, Apple wants you to ditch the Blackberry and start carrying their phone instead.

I use an iPhone instead of a a blackberry or a Windows Mobile smartphone because of the web browsing. Most of the e-mail I send on my phone is short - the longer responses can usually wait until I’m back at my laptop and I can spit out a full response on a regular keyboard. And the iPhone is great for reading e-mail and checking out attachments.

But I know I’m in the minority here.

So here’s my question to you Blackberry touting road warriors - will faster network speed and full enterprise integration cause you to jump ship? Or are you sticking around for the keyboard?

It’s no secret that the experience of flying is, with the exception of the ultra-luxurious, getting more and more frustrating. But when travelers have a bad trip, it’s not just the airlines that suffer.

Many Hotels and travel services like Travelocity are starting to pick up the slack in the travel experience by offering additional services or trying to provide information where the airlines have dropped the ball:

Affinia Hotels, with properties in New York, Chicago and Washington, recently began maintaining guest profiles so that its hotels can have things like yoga mats, laptop chargers and other items guests may want in their room but don’t want to lug on a plane. In response to American Airlines’ plans to charge $15 each way for the first checked bag, Loews Hotels is reimbursing guests this summer with bag fee receipts up to $30.

Or check out what Travelocity is doing to make sure you have a place to sleep:

After discovering a pattern of dropped reservations at certain hotels, Travelocity hired a company in India to call the hotels ahead of customer stays to make sure they were prepared for the guests. The company says this has reduced the incidence of dropped reservations in two years to less than 1 percent from as high as 20 percent.

The lesson here seems to be: If you can spare the change to do your booking through a service instead of just grabbing a credit card and heading to yourfavoriteariline.com, you’ll end up with a little extra padding for the bumps and hassles that almost inevitably go with air travel.

Savvy business travelers should expect ticket prices to start jumping upwards soon as airlines start to conclude that charging $15 for checked luggage and selling in-flight snacks is not going to make up for the losses incurred from high oil costs and inadequate flight traffic systems.

I actually didn’t know, until I read in the New York Times today, that air traffic delays account for such a huge drain on the industry:

Last year, “air traffic delays raised airlines’ operating costs by $19 billion,” counting fuel, crew, maintenance and other costs incurred by planes circling and waiting to land or sitting at gates or on tarmacs beyond departure times, the report said.

Officially, about a quarter of all flights arrived late last year. But airlines routinely build extra time into the schedule for many flights, which “significantly underestimates the problem,” the report said.

Have you ever glanced at the screen when your ticket is scanned at the gate? It looks like a program running in Windows 95.

Upgrading the systems might be an expensive one-time cost, but if airlines could stop writing down a few billion dollars a year in red ink they might be able to better cope with the high oil prices and, coincidentally, stop asking us to pay these silly baggage fees.

Like many people, I do several stupid, inconvenient things “on principle.” Things like always checking my luggage because after all, if airlines wanted you to carry all your luggage with you in the cabin they wouldn’t offer to check your bags.

And beyond that, it takes time to shove overstuffed canvas into bins above your head (probably the un-cited cause of many a delayed flight), and everyone usually looks stupid doing it.

But I think I’m going to have to swallow my pride and look like an idiot the next time I fly on American Airlines: they’ve decided to charge $15 for one checked bag (with some exclusions):

Today, American introduced a $15 fee for the first checked bag, given the increasing costs of transporting checked baggage. This fee, which is effective for tickets purchased on or after June 15, does not apply to: American’s AAdvantage program members who have achieved AAdvantage Gold, AAdvantage Platinum and AAdvantage Executive Platinum level; those who have purchased full-fare tickets in the Economy, Business and First Class cabins; and those with international itineraries.

To be fair, American Airlines does cite ridiculous fuel prices and a sluggish American economy as reasons for introducing new fees and dropping a significant percentage of their “available seat miles flown.” And I’m sure they are hurting for those reasons. The real question is how much of their business the new fees will kill, given that other Airlines may not follow suit.

I’m attending the excellent Future in Review conference this week in sunny San Diego. This year’s theme focuses on climate crisis, and at least two companies are present that offer carbon offsets that travelers can take advantage of.

TerraPass has calculators for various flying scenarios and offers products to balance emissions. They leverage three types of projects: clean energy produced by wind power; farm power such as dairy farm methane digesters; and landfill methane capture.

EcoVerdance takes a different approach. Their primary method of carbon-dioxide reduction involves the purchase and donation of Accele-Gro-M, a plant growth enhancer that’s applied in developing countries with the help of non-governmental/charitable organizations.

The EcoVerdance folks have provided an entire year’s worth of registered carbon credits for each Future in Review participant, which means this reporter is covered for the next 364 days.

So, I’ve got that going for me…

Our team is significantly virtual. This means that pretty much all the time we are “on the road” (at least as far as file-sharing is concerned.)

Over the years we’ve tried numerous schemes that would enable us to work on documents at the same time (or at least share them without a lot of e-mail back and forth.) Apple’s iDisk showed great promise, and we have used it in a number of projects, but it has several significant flaws. The main issue with the iDisk has been that it seems to make many of our machines lockup at inopportune moments. Another is the latency problem. It seems whenever we want to access an important file we end up with a spinning beach ball that can last for several minutes.

One workaround for the latency problem is to arrange for the iDisk to sync to a local version on your hard drive. This solves one problem, but regrettably it forces you to keep an entire copy of the iDisk on your hard drive which can take up hundreds of gigabytes.

We were intrigued by SugarSync and decided to give it a try. The good news is that indeed, it has almost entirely replaced the iDisk as our file sharing platform. With SugarSync everyone possesses a copy of a shared folder on their hard drive locally. Via a web service these folders are synchronized as items within them change. It’s really a nice service in that when you put a new document into a folder or subfolder within the shared items directory, it almost immediately propagates out to the folders on the shared drives of your partners. It also does a reasonably good job of versioning files that may be open by multiple people at the same time.

This means you can be on an airplane and access a shared folder and work on files that will rapidly be synchronized to other peoples hard drives — when you can get a web connection that is…

The problem for Mac users is that not all of a files contents is actually synchronized. What’s missing is the data contained in an area called the “resource fork.” The resource fork contains a bunch of really cool stuff, such as comments, labels, and other meta information accessible in the “get info” dialog.

When I originally set up our shared folder, I assigned files to people using comments and prioritized them using labels. All of these meta items were stripped out when synchronized with other people’s folders. Sigh.

My feeling is that if and when these features are added, we’ll have an extremely compelling tool for Mac users in a workgroup. Currently it’s a nice alternative to the iDisk, but for many who rely on comments etc, it’s no solution.

Everyone knows that flights get delayed, canceled, moved, and now, airlines may also go bankrupt at a moment’s notice.

What’s the best way to make sure you aren’t caught with your pants down? Apparently the answer is to make sure you buy your tickets with a credit card.

What makes this different than a debit card, according to the New York Times, is that you can actually claim your money from the credit card company instead of from the airline:

Under the federal Fair Credit Billing Act, a credit card company is required to return your money for a service not supplied, like an airplane trip. Debit payment agencies are not.

In other words, by law, the credit card company can’t make you foot the bill for a canceled flight. This way they deal with the airline, and you keep your money and your time.

The New York Times has a recent story about how Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport is starting to roll out “enhanced customer service” to handle the massive numbers of travelers that stream through their hallways every year.

As more business travelers are getting stuck spending more time in airports, I think we’ll see a lot of American airports start to resemble the European “mallports” that seem to be all over the place.

Traditional fast food spots and magazine stands will probably continue to be supplemented with full service restaurants and clothing or accessories stores.

Enhanced customer service, like that practiced by Ms. Ellis, goes only so far. Airports have been adding amenities, too: more spas, massage centers, walk-in medical clinics, wine bars, lounges with showers, pet centers, art exhibitions, performances and free Wi-Fi. At Hartsfield, there are even places to buy stamps, mail a package and rent a cellphone.

As you know, free Wi-Fi sounds particularly interesting to me

When I fly, I usually show up to the airport REALLY early, so that I can get through security at whatever pace the line is moving on that particular day, and then spend the bulk of my time (hopefully) working at the gate. But I know a lot of people who are far less zen about their travel.

I was reading this piece in the New York Times about, roughly, how safe air travel really is.

The price of that safety is of course a combination of regulations (which have apparently been slack, lately) and travel security. I’m curious, as frequent business travelers, do you feel safer flying than you do traveling by other means? Do you think it’s worth the hassle of security?

Oblivion is such an attractive idea when you’re flying. Especially now that it looks like some airlines will start letting passengers use their cell phones on the plane.

Which is one of the reasons I was so sad when I broke my huge, ear-covering, audio-canceling Bose headphones last year. So far, I haven’t ponied up to replace them, but if I do, I might give this option a shot, spotted by Outside Online:

Here’s the deal: After a quick visit to an audiologist (included in the price), silicone casts of your inner ears will be on their way to becoming a new pair of nonpareil earphones that fit you and you alone. Turnaround time is about a week, and when you screw these rugged yet comfortable little numbers into your head, you’ll finally hear your tunes as the musicians and sound engineers intended.

Custom fitted headphones? Yes please. I can’t wear standard earbuds.

Obviously the correct answer is “free,” but let’s put that aside for a moment. According to C-Net, American Airlines and Virgin America are both going to be offering in-flight internet access to their travelers for somewhere between $10 and $13 per flight:

American Airlines will initially enable 15 of its 767s with broadband, and eventually it will offer Internet connectivity on 500 planes. Virgin plans to provide broadband on all its planes, according to a blog posted on GigaOm Tuesday.

The new service, called Gogo, will cost $12.95 for cross-country flights and $9.95 for flights lasting three hours or less.

As long as the service itself is fast enough to be productive, I don’t mind shelling out $10 for connectivity on a 2 1/2 hour flight. Especially if they manage to hook that deal in to any of the networks that cover airports - pay a fee at the terminal and it covers your in-flight wi-fi, too? Yeah, I’d probably do that.

Had a chance to sit down with airport guru Harriet Baskas today, and learned a lot about how airports are (or are not) catering to the needs of business travelers. One of the topics I wanted to get into with her about was the dearth of power outlets in most airports. I wanted to ask if any facilities have caught a clue and have installed ample power sources. Regrettably, we ran out of time.

Lo and behold in her current column in USA today she answers my question:

Travelers passing through Austin-Bergstrom International Airport have access to 900 electric outlets along the 24 gate concourse. In Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport there are currently 2,100 free power outlets, including those inside eight airline-club-inspired Samsung travel centers. More power is on its way.

According to the Telegraph.

The European Commission has apparently decided to approve the use of mobile phones and mobile phone equipment on planes in Europe, but most everything else is up to the airlines and the mobile phone carriers:

The final decision will be left to individual airlines, with Bmi, Ryanair and Portugal’s TAP planning to offer the service. Emirates and Air France have already launched trails [sic] on some routes.

However, not all airlines support the plans – Lufthansa have announced that it will not introduce the service. Surveys had shown that a large majority of customers were against it, said a spokesman for the German airline.

It’s not really a surprise to me that customers are unhappy with the addition of mobile phones to plane flights. Nobody wants to sit next to “that guy.”

Using solar powered luggage, this is completely possible.

Fortune Small Business wrote about various solar-powered luggage options available to travelers looking to spend about $150 to $250 on a messenger bag.

Their favorite option? Reware’s Juice Bag, which costs $170, and I snagged their picture for this post. It looks wonky to me, but hey, anything with solar panels designed by someone other than Jonathan Ive is unlikely to be very sexy.

The performance, unsurprisingly, was a bit mediocre on all bags. They’re probably worth more for geek points than they are for actual utility…especially indoors. Regardless, they are pretty good for geek points.

Not every business traveler is flying on a fat corporate account. For those of you running your own small business, or traveling on a fixed (small) budget, there are plenty of resources to help you snag the cheapest fare when you travel.

In the past, I’ve had pretty good luck just logging into Kayak and cruising the results, but there are a lot of options for the real deal-hunter.

Sally over at Travelhacker has compiled a pretty comprehensive list of the top 50 resources for finding cheap flights. I’ve never used many of them myself, but it never hurts to have options.