No one likes to spend time stuck at the airport on a stopover or, worse yet, a mechanical or weather delay of unknown duration. But the wait can be made more bearable if there’s an easy wireless Internet connection to help you stay productive. The question is: Given your druthers, which airport would you prefer [...]
2004
Q: I recently booked four nights at a Spokane, Wash., hotel through Hotwire. When I checked in, I was told that it was the day after Hoopfest, a weekend basketball competition for young adults. As I walked from the lobby to the elevator, I notice that the carpet was filthy, as was the elevator. It [...]
All the talk about crowded flights and sold-out hotels this summer didn’t make Sharon Hodgson feel optimistic when she started planning a fall trip to Florida. “I’m always on the lookout for a deal,” says retired nurse from West Union, W. Va. “I thought I’d have to do a lot of looking.”
Q: I am in a sticky situation with Northwest Airlines, with which I have booked my vacation flight to India. I would appreciate your help. I went to Houston airport to get checked in for my first flight, but while I was standing in the economy-class line, a ticketing agent (who refused to give me [...]
To this day, I don’t know how I got infected. Maybe I picked it up on our flight from Newark or on the layover in London. But by the time I boarded the riverboat in Mainz, Germany, I had a full-blown case of the Norwalk Virus: chills, diarrhea, nausea, and stomach cramps. Gastrointestinal viruses such as Norwalk are becoming increasingly common among cruise ship passengers. They’re caught by eating food or drinking liquids that are tainted, touching contaminated surfaces or objects and then putting your hand in your mouth or coming into direct contact with someone else who is sick. The cruise industry is quick to point out that infection can happen anywhere – in a plane, a restaurant, an airport terminal. And that may be true. Equally true, however, is that the reports of cruise ship passengers spending part of their voyage in the infirmary are on the rise. So whether they catch the stomach flu before they board – as I did – or on the journey is probably academic to most passengers.
Q: On a recent trip with my family from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Boston, we encountered a problem with Hotels.com and the Hilton Boston Logan Airport. When we arrived in San Francisco from Tokyo, we were told that our connection to Minneapolis on Northwest Airlines would be slightly late. As it turned out, we missed our [...]
Listen to business travelers like Michael Kolsky, and you might be left with the impression that the travel industry has forgotten the basics of customer service. ”I check into a hotel, and I’m given the worst room,” said Mr. Kolsky, the president of Mikol Ltd., a beverage consulting company in Blaine, Wash. ”I board a plane, and the flight attendants ignore me. It used to happen occasionally. Now it happens constantly.”
Q: I booked a room at the Castle Creek Inn Resort & Spa in Escondido, Calif., through Priceline. The reservation was for four nights at a total cost of over $200. When I arrived in the afternoon and tried to check in, I was told that I needed to pay an additional $70 per night [...]
There’s probably no such thing as a perfect vacation. That’s because travel rarely goes as you planned it. Your hotel bill is slipped under your door with a surprise surcharge. Your luggage is lost. Or your cruise is ruined when you’re infected by a painful gastrointestinal virus. Believe me, I know. Not only have I [...]
Q: I made a reservation through Orbitz for a night at The Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. It ended up being quite possibly my worst hotel experience I’ve ever had in this country (there was one in Venezuela that will forever hold the spot of very worst ever hotel – [...]
When it comes to travel, the entertainment industry has never really bothered separating fact from fiction. Turn on your TV if you don’t believe me. Or catch a summer movie. See the film ‘The Terminal,’ for instance, and you might wonder if getting stuck at the airport is such a dreadful thing. (In fact, most experienced travelers would do anything to avoid spending even a few hours in a terminal).
Q: I booked a hotel through Travelocity in February. I entered my credit card number to hold my reservation and my credit card was billed. I decided to go home two days early from my trip. When I checked out at the hotel, I got charged a rate that was $30 a night less than [...]
When Timothy Placek tried to cash in his miles to fly his daughter from St. Louis to Houston last year, Continental Airlines told him no seats were available. Disappointed, Mr. Placek, who is a Silver Elite member of Continental’s frequent-flier program, asked whether he could use his points to travel to Omaha, to visit his parents in January, four months later. No award seats were available on any of those flights, either.
At first, the 802.11b hotspot I sprung for in 2003 seemed so frivolous that I didn’t bother mentioning it to clients who visited my office. And since my PC remained wired to a high-speed land connection, I nearly forgot I had installed it. Then one day I caught an editor who was visiting me as [...]
Q: My husband flew from London to Newark on British Airways last summer. On his way back, the guitar he had checked in was damaged. It was a $4,000 Langejans guitar, and it had a crack running down the neck. My husband is a musician and his guitar is his work. He had to send [...]
Getting lost isn’t an option when Joe Eisenberg hits the road. A field engineer in Lincoln, Neb., he relies on accurate directions to find his service calls. A typical workday may involve multiples stops, a task too complex for the average Web-based mapping service to efficiently plot. “I have to plan my order of service [...]
For most Americans, this summer is the first opportunity for a long-overdue vacation. With worries of war, SARS and terrorism fading into memory and the economy on the rebound, more travelers are expected to be out and about than in any other summer since 2001. But for the American travel industry, this summer represents an opportunity of a different kind: a chance to make us pay for the many mistakes and missteps it’s made during the last three years.
Q: My husband and I took my nephew to the Amazon in Brazil last November. We booked all of the hotels and ground transportation through a travel agency in Rio de Janeiro that we had used twice before. We wired a payment covering all charges to the travel agency prior to taking the trip. We [...]
Locating information on a laptop PC can be a pain. But tracking it down while you’re on the road – between sales meetings, on a plane or at a client’s office – can double the suffering, to hear businesspeople like John Mangiagli talk about it. Mangiagli, a senior technical service engineer for a machine-parts company [...]
Serving itself
July 11, 2004
Travel is still thought of as a service industry. But someone must have forgotten to tell Craig Kobayashi, the Hawaiian Airlines pilot who recently refused to fly his plane from Honolulu to San Francisco with Joshua Gotbaum on board. Kobayashi said he was “uncomfortable” having Gotbaum on his plane, even though he posed no security risk to the flight. It turns out the passenger, a court-appointed trustee overseeing the carrier’s bankruptcy reorganization, had tried to make changes to the pilots’ pension plan. Gotbaum ended up taking another flight.
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