A Golf Blog

A380 Debut

The monster jumbo A380 from Airbus made it's debut landing at a commercial airport in Frankfurt, Germany. For the airport to adequately handle A380 operations, a $120 million upgrade to the terminal will be needed.

Travelocity Splashes into RSS

Travelocity has sent out invitations to some of their customers asking if they would like to participate in Travelocity’s RSS beta. It’s really very easy – first select a trip type (beach, golf, etc.) then select your departure city, add in up to six cities you’d like to monitor fares for, chose a name for your feed and click create feed.

Next, click on the reader you use – the RSS icon gives you the native feed so you can paste the URL into your reader if it’s not listed. That’s it – how simple is that? Go ahead, give it a try.

Hat tip to Patty Hagar and her team at Travelocity.

A Cheap Recliner, Bad Food, and Plastic Cups

With things being what they are, you would think that anyone in the travel vertical would try to capitalize on any customer service opportunity. We all have horror stories about less than perfect travel experiences but what's often missed is the longer term impacts on simple screw-ups. Longer term in the sense that it's kept alive by folks like you and me writing about it, after the fact.

In this case, I think AirTran blew it big time.

Credit Where Due

This past Friday, I wrote about the deal United Airlines struck with a Sabre competitor, Amadeus. What I didn’t do was to give credit to the source of the information I used. An oversight on my part, for sure.

The author was Jay Campbell of the Business Travel Beat. If you are interested, they have a free, two week trial available. Otherwise, a paid subscription is required.

International Airline Service Surges

OAG reports that airlines are making better use of capacity on flights, especially in North America. If you have flown recently, you know that to be the case. Carriers have reduced domestic flights by two percent and scheduled 4,000 more international flights than there were in 2004.

Worldwide, flights operated by the LCC’s were up 5 percent which translates to about 13,000 more flights. Even though LCC operations in the US were down by 6 percent, the LCC’s still accounted for the largest number of flights.

Flights to and from Africa – Up 10 percent
Flights to and from the Middle East – Up 9 percent
Flights to and from Europe – Up 7 percent
Flights to and from Asia-Pacific – Up 7 percent

And you wondered why flights are so full?

United Unveils their Low Cost Legacy GDS

Earlier this month, United Airlines announced that they signed a low cost deal with a legacy GDS. This came shortly after they announced they were leaving Cendant’s Galileo GDS in favor of deals with G2 Switchworks and Amadeus.

The low cost deal United struck was with the Amadeus GDS. What they dealt for was new entrant pricing. Now that the GDS’ are fully deregulated, each is free to pursue distribution deals that can, and probably will differ between suppliers. Because these agreements can also include additional services, there is no way to gauge the effect this one will have on other distribution agreements between other GDS’ and suppliers.

Southwest Returns to Denver

Today, Southwest announced they will be returning to Denver after a 9 year hiatus. So, after thoroughly thumping US Airways in Philadelphia, they have re-set their sights on United Airlines in Denver.

More on the Southwest effect from the DOT http://ostpxweb.dot.gov/aviation/X-50%20Role_files/Southwest%20Effect.DOC.

Reagan National Re-opens to General Aviation

Early this morning, general aviation returned to National Airport after more than a four year absence. GA was banned after 9/11 because it was deemed a threat to government buildings and landmarks.

Even so, after looking through the restrictions placed on GA for operations at National, you have to wonder, why bother?

It’s capping operations at 48 – 24 planes a day. It used to be 122 daily operations back in 2000. Passenger and crew manifests have to be in the TSA’s hands 24 hours in advance and they will do background checks on everyone.

Each plane can only travel to National via a gateway airport where the TSA will re-inspect the plane, passengers, and the baggage. Flying into National has long been desirable because of its close proximity to the District of Columbia. Having to make a stop at a gateway airport eliminates the time and distance disadvantage that Dulles airport had.

The real kicker? The TSA will be charging $496 per flight and $15 per person to cover the cost of the inspections.

Link

New News Aggregator

There is a new news aggregator – Inform.com released their beta version. It categorizes news articles and blog posts, highlights the most relevant, and indexes associated content. There’s coverage in hundreds of channels and it look pretty comprehensive.

I’m going in for a longer look.

Sabre Inks Deal with AirTran Airways

Yesterday, Sabre and AirTran Airways signed a distribution deal for the next five years. Now, Sabre will have access to the same content (fares, availability, deals, etc.) that is posted on the Air Tran site.

One would have to conclude that AirTran sees value in doing business with Sabre rather than one of the new entrants like G2. Interesting – Although the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, you can be sure that other carriers are paying close attention to what’s going on.