A better way to buy a cruise
Carol Scott and her husband, Jeffrey, wanted to get out of town for a few days last Thanksgiving. A Caribbean cruise sounded like a great idea. She checked with a travel agent but didn’t like any of the prices she was offered. “I knew I could find a better deal online,” says Scott, of Carson City, Nev. So she clicked on the Internet and found a Web site called Cruise411.com. Within a few minutes, Scott says, she’d tracked down the right itinerary: a trip on the Royal Caribbean Voyager of the Seas that included stops in Haiti, Jamaica and Mexico for $2,400. That price was $2,500 less than what her agent had offered for the same vacation, so she snapped up tickets.
Protect yourself from repricing
Before you take your next cruise, take a close look at your ticket. Notice anything peculiar? A blacked-out section here, a sticker there? If you do, then you may be a victim of one of the fastest-growing scams in the travel business - something known in the trade as repricing. It starts when you book a cruise vacation months in advance, at a time when rates are relatively high. The agent takes your deposit and then waits. Over time, the price may sink as the cruise line scrambles to fill empty staterooms. When the balance is due (usually 75 days before sailing), the agent cancels your full-priced ticket, and buys a cheaper ticket.
Managing content the smarter way
Reaction to last week’s column was as predictable as it was disappointing. The travel sites accused of surreptitiously recasting their news sections into electronic ads expressed bewilderment, indignation, and finally, fear. They were scared that I would identify them in a follow-up column.
Stop the presses - but not the clocks
We interrupt this week’s regularly scheduled column for your comments. Seems quite a few of you were ticked-off at last week’s story suggesting that airlines had turned their clocks ahead in order to rush passengers to the gate and achieve an on-time departure. “Weak, weak, weak!” fumed reader Dave Lutz. “I guess it just shows that ground crews aren’t the only ones that race a clock and sometimes produce less than their best work.”
United squeeze
Q: United Airlines is treating the ordinary passenger worse and worse. On many of its aircraft it now offers “Economy Plus” seating that is for frequent fliers, leaving the middle and back of the cabin for everyone else. When I wrote to complain, they sent back a form letter.
I think that for those people who [...]
New content could destroy sites’ credibility
Two prominent travel sites are quietly adopting new content strategies that put profits ahead of principles and set a dangerous precedent for the industry. No longer satisfied to serve a mix of objectively reported destination features, consumer advocacy stories and travel tips alongside their “buy” buttons, these leading industry dot.coms have jettisoned all pretense of serious journalism in favor of a more commercial mantra: Don’t post anything unless it sells tickets.
Genesis deal gives birth to alternate GDS
“This is our Boston tea party,” says Bruce Bishins, maverick president of Genesis, on the eve of an announcement that his company tapped Atraxis Group to create its reservations, ticketing and settlement platform. The Revolutionary War metaphor is appropriate, considering the agency-owned distribution system’s struggle to break a virtual monopoly held by industry giants such as Sabre and Galileo. Bishins’ plan to introduce a new distribution system that isn’t based on proprietary technology that he says makes agents dependent on GDSs - and turns GDSs into “technology nannies” - is itself quite possibly revolutionary.
Lies, urban myths and airport standard time
Can technology lie? If you travel, you bet. Two recent reports that airport clocks had been set up to ten minutes faster in order to corral passengers to their departure gate early made that abundantly clear. In the wrong hands, even seemingly incorruptible technology can be manipulated to mislead us.
Delta doubletake
Q: I read Down on Delta, and wanted to share a couple of thoughts about Delta and airline deregulation in general.
I am a frequent business traveler based in Atlanta, so Delta is my airline of choice - or my travel captor depending on how you look at it. I make 40 to 50 domestic business [...]
Saying sayonara the dot.com way
It seems as if the growing number of terminally ill online travel ventures have taken a page out of Al Gore’s campaign strategy book: They concede defeat reluctantly and in a way that serves no one. Consider TravelBids.com, the innovative ticketing site that quietly went under at the end of last year. There was no announcement about the company’s demise - only a terse e-mail from its founder that “TravelBids is not operational” and a notice on its site that “a date has not been set for resumption of service.”
Real road warriors use satellite phones
Six newspaper internships didn’t do it. Neither could a graduate degree in journalism, an academic fellowship, or jobs writing for marquee media outlets - including, of course, this one. It took something considerably smaller to make me feel like a real reporter: a phone.
Down on Delta
Q: What should airlines do for passengers they’ve inconvenienced? I know there are rules for bumping, but should there be rules or even just policies when the airline screws up?
This question comes after a weekend trip to Boston on Delta Air Lines. The outbound flight was delayed about three hours due to weather problems in [...]
A tech checklist for every traveler
Think you know everything there is to know about traveling with technology? Think again. Just when you’ve encountered every computer, telephone, and power-related challenge on the road - and solved it, thank you very much - fate throws you for a loop. Or a short-circuit.
The lure of luxury adventure online
Can adventure travel be luxurious? Can you rough it and be pampered at the same time? Are activities like deep-sea fishing and tennis compatible? Can hiking through the jungle be followed by a five-course meal or a massage? Is it possible to conclude a hard day of Scuba diving with a cocktail reception? For years, luxury adventure travel has been a favored pastime of trust fund kids and eccentric overachievers and the almost exclusive domain of high-end tour operators like Abercrombie & Kent - in other words, a niche within a niche.