May 2008

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.