Business Travel

Last week British Airways sent the word out that they are planning to open a new section at Heathrow airport on March 27th called Terminal 5 (click link for promo site).

Unfortunately, the site copy and the e-mail focus more on how many passengers they can funnel through than on the productivity environment. I shot a few quick questions over to BA, and this is what I got:

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A lot of the copy on the terminal5 web site focuses on relaxing, security, and checking in for your flights. What kind of business productivity options are available in the terminal? Will there be free wi-fi in selected spots? Throughout the whole terminal?

There are dedicated work and entertainment zones in the lounges with computers,printers and outlets. Terminal 5 has six areas with internet kiosks. There is also high-speed wireless internet throughout the terminal for purchase, but is complimentary in all of the lounges.

What about stations where people can charge their electronics? Will there be outlets for European and US gadgets, or just the UK plugs?

At this time, there are no plug sockets for customers in the general BAA retail/seating areas for health and safety reasons relating to the need for all appliances to be PAT certified in the UK (Portable Appliance Testing).

I’m also curious about the “Flight Connections Centre” - most of the time I think it’s handy to be able to look up your next flight’s gate right when you exit the plane, rather than having to converge on some particular listings area. Most airports now have the arrivals/departures monitors scattered around near various gates so travelers don’t have to do too much accidental back-tracking. Is this something that terminal5 plans to do without?

Up to 90 per cent of British Airways transfers will take place through Terminal 5. The transfer channels will be highlighted with purple signs making it easy for customers to connect from one flight to another. An underground track transit system has been installed throughout Terminal 5 to transfer customers between the buildings. All passengers connecting through Heathrow Terminal 5 will be directed to the Flight Connections Center located at the center of the terminal building, just a short walk from the gate. In most instances you’ll simply have your boarding pass scanned, before proceeding through security and into our spacious departure lounge ready to board your next flight.

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I’ve griped about it before: I’m sorry to hear that Wi-Fi isn’t free and pervasive, but I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing that happen. In the meantime, stick to the lounges I guess.

And if you’re curious about the BA highlights, this is according to the e-mail I got:

Key highlights:

* With 96 self-service kiosks and 140 customer service desks, customers will experience little to no queues. Passengers will be through security in less than 10 minutes.
* The layover experience will be far superior with 112 retail stores and restaurants– the largest retail offering of any UK airport– among other amenities.
* The terminal will be capable of handling 30 million customers a year and will have one of the most advanced baggage systems in the world, capable of handling at 12,000 bags per hour at up to 30km per hour. This is possible through the unique system which recognizes where the bags are against the clock, allowing late running bags, in particular transfer bags to be delivered right to the aircraft side by the baggage system. No other major airport has such a system.
* The largest airport lounge complex in the world is made up of six lounges to accommodate 2,500 passengers. They will be available for British Airways’ premium customers and will feature a host of luxurious facilities including a gold leaf bar, private cabanas and Elemis travel spas.

The New York Times reported on the 19th that US Airways has decided to stop crediting the industry-standard minimum 500 frequent flier miles for its Dividend Miles program:

The change affects passengers who fly short-haul trips of less than 500 miles, including those who use the US Air shuttle between New York and Boston and Washington. Under the previous policy, passengers were awarded a minimum credit of 500 miles a flight, which is standard practice in major airlines’ frequent-flier programs.

In other words, if you’re shuttling on short business flights and racking up 500 miles a piece, you’re no longer going to be able to do that with US Airways.

The airline has also decided to charge a $25 “quick-ticketing fee” for anyone who uses miles to purchase a ticket within 14 days of their departure.

So if you’re planning to use your miles for a flight, make sure you’re planning far enough ahead.

Apparently the two airlines have decided to fit their new B777’s with 10 seats across each row instead of the 9 seats that have existed in the past.

Where does the room for extra seats come from? Business Traveller Magazine tells us:

This new configuration for the B777 is controversial, because although the B747 and the Airbus A380 also feature ten-across seating, they have wider cabins. A B777 has a width of 5.86 metres, whereas the B747 is 6.10 metres wide. On that basis, the A380’s cabin is positively luxurious, with a width of 6.58 metres.

What it means is that passengers occupying a ten-across layout on the B777 will find they have less elbowroom and narrower aisles. Indeed it means that it will be almost impossible for two people to pass each other when moving along the aisle.

Apparently neither airline has yet decided whether or not to retrofit their existing B777’s. I hope that they do not.

Business Travel Online reported Friday that BA and Virgin owe US and UK travelers for artificially high fuel surcharges. Apparently the two airlines decided to get together and raise the “fuel surcharge” for their tickets between August 11th, 2004 and March 23, 2006.

According to the article:

The firm said 8 million U.S. and U.K. customers are entitled to cash settlements. Through the settlement announced today, British Airways and Virgin are making available a total of $59 million for U.S. passengers and £73.5 million for U.K. passengers who were subject to fuel surcharges paid during the timeframe.

The details on how you get cash back are a bit muddy given that a lot of business travelers pay for tickets a lot of different ways (though a central office, personal reimbursement, etc).

The firm handling the case, Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said they would launch a web site to help people figure out the details. It’s not live yet, but when it is, it should be here.

[ Update: It turns out they decided to put the site here instead. ]

I discovered this list of tips for reducing the amount of luggage you need to carry with you because they linked to me. So with a little reciprocal linkage, I’ll point you to their list:

* Bring One Pair Of Tennis Shoes - …and keep them on your feet. Shoes are one of the biggest bag space hogs and heavy at that. Wear a single multi-purpose pair that will be easy on your feet - preferably in black to help you blend in.
o If you must bring an extra pair (or heavens two), tie them by the laces to your carry on.
* Buy A Sturdy Multi-Pocketed Backpack - Very obvious, but don’t just bring your old Jansport from school with you. One large pocket isn’t very efficient since you’ll be packing both small and large items. Also, school bags tend to have thin material and tear easily.
o I recommend the Wenger Swiss line of travel bags.

And so on. If you’re like me: male, and incapable of packing luggage efficiently, the list may well be worth a read through.

Apparently last week I missed the fact that United decided to add a $25 fee on the second checked bag for travelers with non-refundable advance purchase tickets (most people).

Personally, I tend to travel with one checked bag, and I know a lot of business travelers will shove bags into the overhead bins for the sake of expediency and not losing their luggage.

But be warned: if you’re packing some serious equipment and you need two check bags, United may not be your best answer.

There’s a piece in the NYT Travel section today about the difficulties many business travelers face when trying to make connecting flights:

The noon flight was overbooked, and the agent asked for volunteers who would accept a $400 travel voucher to be bumped to a later flight in the afternoon. Assuming he would be delayed only about an hour, Mr. Marasco volunteered.

But the later flight was canceled, and the afternoon stretched into evening, taking on elements of an old TV game show as agents and passengers haggled over potential prizes and penalties. A night flight had a seat open, but would arrive in Atlanta with only about 15 minutes to catch the last connection to Jacksonville.

One of the tips I posted last week for avoiding long travel delays and lost luggage was: only fly nonstop.

I realize that it’s not always an option to avoid flights with stopovers or connections, but it’s also sometimes a good idea to look at driving options.

If you’re flying in to Burbank on a connection, but you could fly into John Wayne direct and get a cab or rent a car, you’re only an hour’s drive away from Burbank (OK, assuming it’s not rush hour). In the end, that’s probably faster than missing a connecting flight…

According to the New York Times today, BA is planning to add a new, twice-daily business class route between London City Airport and either Kennedy or Newark.

The catch? London City Airport has a weight limit taking off. Which means on the way back to the States there’going to be a 40-minute stopover in Ireland to fuel up for the long haul. Not so nice.

The article has some interesting analysis of the placement and pricing of the new flight:

Two other things struck me as remarkable about the plan by British Airways, which already flies eight times a day between Kennedy and London Heathrow and three times a day between Newark and Heathrow.

One is the location: London City Airport. London City, which does not now have trans-Atlantic service, is six miles from the financial district and three miles from Canary Wharf, both home to rapidly growing international businesses.

Two is the audacity of the initial pricing. In recent years, three start-up all-business-class carriers — Eos and Silverjet (along with MaxJet, which is now defunct) — began offering New York-to-London business-class fares that were considerably lower than the major carriers. According to Mr. Harford, the new British Airways business-class service will charge the same as its existing business-class service, known as Club World, between New York and Heathrow.

In other words: this is where BA thinks there’s going to be international business growth, and BA thinks the demand for business class flights to London City is going to be inelastic. Given the recent trend towards low-cost, high-frequency airline flights, they could be betting the wrong way.

But crossing the Atlantic in style? That still has to be worth some dough.

According to the Wall Street Journal today, we’re now flying the friendly skies with the smallest number of fully certified air traffic controllers in years (…so we also use not certified air traffic controllers? apparently so).

The shortage is largely being attributed to the mass-retirement of air traffic controllers who were hired after the strike in 1981, and is also cited as a possible cause for delayed flights:

The FAA acknowledges that shortages in the control tower can cause delays, but that it happens infrequently. To stabilize the situation, the agency is hiring hundreds of trainees and offering bonuses of as much as $24,000 to retain wavering controllers. But the pace of departures is leaving fewer experienced eyes to watch over the skies.

The FAA, however, may actually be understating the issue:

Yet entry logs on FAA operations provided by the controllers’ union show the impact of short-staffed facilities on arrival times.

A Dec. 27 entry reads, “JFK GDP IN EFFECT DUE TO STAFFING,” indicating a ground-delay program was initiated because of a controller shortage. A Jan. 2 entry showing increased separation distances required between planes in Southern California bore this explanation: “OTHER: STAFFING.”

An interesting read, and if you’re flight is delayed for no apparent reason whatsoever, you might now have a good guess as to why.

photo ganked from severed dreams’ photostream on FlickR.

Peter Greenberg wrote an article for Best Life Magazine last November that’s got a hefty collection of useful tips for making sure that your travel goes as smoothly as possible.

Here are just a few:

Watch the calendar. Schedule air travel for the first 20 days of the month. That reduces the chances that your flight will be canceled because the pilot or crew has already hit the maximum monthly limit of 100 hours of work.

Avoid “direct” flights. The only good flight is a nonstop flight. Labeling a flight “direct” is an airline euphemism that means you’ll stop at least once, exponentially increasing your chances of being delayed.

Sign up for e-mail alerts. Many airlines offer this service, as do Travelocity and Expedia. Or you can go to flightstats.com, a free service that tracks flights and alerts you when things are going wrong. To have text messages sent to your cell phone alerting you to flight delays, sign up at flightstats.com. You can also find updates at fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp.

Several of these things I’ve already been doing accidentally - I like to fly nonstop whenever possible (who doesn’t?) so I usually check the details to see if there are any stops regardless of what the initial listing states.

The TSA recently launched a blog that seems to be aimed at covering common questions that travelers have, such as:

• Why do we have to take off our shoes?
• Why do they screen 80 year old ladies?, and
• What’s up with the restrictions on liquids?

Now, to be fair, the blog is “sponsored by the TSA,” not actually run/written by the TSA, so I wouldn’t expect them to know the answers to all of your questions.

But it’s a fair bet that if you’ve got some pressing and esoteric query, that’s as good a resource as any for getting it answered. The real question in my mind is, of course, will any of the feedback on the blog affect their service in the airport?

The December 2007 Business Traveler Magazine but its reader votes together to line up the Readers’ Choice Best it Business Travel Awards , which, conveniently, lists the airline awarded the title “best airline in the world.”

What airline, you ask? Singapore Airlines.

And if you’re wondering how they got that title, check out some of the descriptions:

For business-class customers, Singapore offers 34-inch-wide seats that can be converted to fully-flat beds, which have 15.4-inch LCD entertainment systems with USB ports and up to 1,000 channels of movies, music, and other programming. The KrisWorld entertainment system also includes basic word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software, so business travelers can work on projects stored on a USB drive. Seats are arranged in a 1-2-1 configuration, giving all passengers easy access to an aisle.

Yep, I think I might vote that pretty highly, too. The last international flight I took was on British Airways, which all in all is not a bad airline, but talk about leaping five feet above the bar.

And Singapore Changi Airport was named best business travel airport in the world.

Sounds like I need to go to Asia more often.

It seems like there are a few airlines who tend to “get it” more than others. For a while, I remember JetBlue being the savvy traveler’s airline of choice. There is also the highly-liked but not-as-often talked about Southwest Airlines.

And now there’s the newest contender: Virgin America. They recently gave out 80 free round-trip flights to geed gadget bloggers attending our CES It Won’t Stay in Vegas Blogger Party. I have no doubt that as bloggers start cashing in on those flights, we’ll be hearing about it on the internet.

While talking with the Virgin America people at our party, they were also excited about the fact that AirCell is going to equip their planes with wi-fi sometime in 2008. Couple that with their much-touted in-flight social consoles and it looks like we’re starting to see a plane company that’s trying to sell flights as an entertainment experience as well as a travel service.

Next order of business: make chairs that don’t make my neck cramp.

These things have probably been around for a while already, but I only just noticed them last Saturday when I traipsed through SeaTac at unbelievably early hours in the morning: Southwest Power Stations.

They’re this bar-stool toting fake granite slabs dotted around the Southwest terminal at probably most airports. All I know for sure is that you can find them in Seattle, Phoenix, and San Antonio.

I’m not sure why they decided bar stools were the best seat for computing, but I’m glad to find more and more places dedicated to sitting down and plugging in. I tend to do a lot of traveling where I have a layover that is at least 45 minutes.

A quick charge can go a long way, if you’ll excuse the pun.

The last time I flew, I flew Southwest. Up until recently this mandated a certain process: check in online (which I hate), get in the best boarding group possible, show up early, stand (sit) in line, board plane.

But, and this is probably not news to many of you, Southwest recently announced that if you feel like it, you can up the cost of your ticket, and get a guaranteed spot in the line to board the plane (you can also get the same treatment if you fly 16 or more round trips in one year):

NEW YORK, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Southwest Airlines Co (LUV.N: Quote, Profile, Research) is now courting frequent business travelers by allowing them to pay a higher fare to board planes first, the company said on Thursday.

The “Business Select” class represents another change to Southwest’s policy of not assigning seats.

This works out well for those with extra cash. I can’t decide if that bugs me or not. I suppose I’ll find out the next time I fly in group A, but end up boarding behind 30 other people.

For your amusement today: the reason I can’t wait to fly Virgin American.

I’m sure many of you have seen this photo of the new Dreamliner interior floating around the internet. It’s definitely one of those succulent pictures that just speaks for itself.

But as cool and futuristic as that interior looks, it’s not going to help me much unless there are outlets in every seat where I can charge my laptop. Battery technology keeps getting better and better, which is great because now I can really make use of a four hour plane flight, but anything much longer than that and I’m in trouble.

I don’t doubt that Boeing is smart enough to throw outlets onto their newest dream plane. In fact, I haven’t even Googled to see if they’re in the specs. OK, that’s a little irresponsible, so hang on… a cursory Google search in fact turns up that Airbus has power outlets in every seat on their A380, but nothing mentioned about power outlets on the dreamliner.

That’s disappointing. Come on people. This is like having an audio jack in a car. Oh wait, nobody does that, either.

This year has set a lot of air travel records, and not the good kinds. Records like most delayed flights, lowest customer satisfaction, most crowded planes, and highest number of passengers.

The last one is expected to be broken every year until we start using jetpacks. Which means the first three records are also going to be broken for many years. Forbes magazines disagrees, however, provided we take a few steps towards fixing air travel. The most significant are:

- Installing a 20 billion dollar global positioning system (most likely paid for by the US government)

- Adding billions of dollars worth of new runways and airports (also paid for by the US government)

- Allowing foreign carriers to fly in the US.

- Developing lighter jets.

- Passing the Passenger’s Bill of Rights.

I just returned from a relaxing and uneventful flight on Southwest Airlines. With this past week’s sewage and computer malfunctions, that seems to be saying a lot. I waited only a few minutes in the line for Southwest (thank god for self check-in kiosks), and only a few more in security. I am also a huge fan of Southwest’s self-seating; one might think it would make the process take longer, but in fact it goes much faster.

Southwest is a little low on entertainment or food. There’s no entertainment, 8 (tiny) pretzels, and 10 peanuts. But the flight left on time, and arrived early, so I’m happy. The only eventful aspect of my trip: I forgot to bring my Passport or my Washington State Driver’s License. Fortunately, my invalid Florida driver’s license was sufficient to get me through security. Four times.

The Department of Homeland Security has yet again proposed new rules for travel in the Western Hemisphere. Its original plan was to require a passport for all travel into the US. It relaxed these rules after it failed to keep up with the passport application surge. Here are the new rules.