A tortured walk in the deep freeze
I was delivering a speech at a company’s annual sales meeting in Edmonton, Alberta, home of the infamous Alberta clipper storms that were responsible for most of the snow dumped in the northern Midwest of the United States this winter.
My assistant warned me it would be very cold when I arrived. “Bring long underwear and [...]
Denied boarding on Spirit
Q: I booked a flight with Spirit Airlines to fly from Detroit to Las Vegas to see our family. About three weeks before our scheduled departure, I got a phone call advising me that my originally scheduled flights had been canceled and that I was going to be on different flights. The dates were the [...]
Getting a view with your room
Most agreements between travel websites and a hotel stipulate the room must meet specific requirements. Priceline’s contracts, for example, say the accommodations must be for double occupancy. The hotels are careful to follow the letter of their contracts, but many also set up unofficial classes of rooms, ranging from best to worst. (At one hotel, the rooms are assigned a letter grade.)
Slow posting of mileage credits
It is not only delays and stopovers that have taught frequent fliers like Mark Kukucka to be patient when they are traveling. Getting mileage credit can also be a character-building experience, especially when it involves airline partners like hotels, car rental businesses or credit card companies. Many travelers are finding that their mileage credit is being awarded at a glacial pace.
A Cadillac - or a Kia?
Q: We attended a wedding in New York recently, and because it was a special event, we wanted to rent a luxury car. Enterprise offered some pretty decent prices, so we decided to reserve a car with it. The description was for a “Cadillac DeVille, Lincoln Towncar or similar.”
We arrived at the airport [...]
A quiet moment gets out of hand
I was recently at a convention in Palm Beach, Fla., and my schedule was tight: power breakfasts at 7 a.m., long presentations, even longer workshops, much-needed evening cocktails and six-course dinners.
There was no opportunity to see the sights. I couldn’t even enjoy my beautiful suite, much less read the paper. I just grabbed it on [...]
Hello, where’s my cello?
Q: Our daughter is a cellist. When she has flown with her instrument in the past and checked it in, it has been damaged. So it is cheaper for her to buy a ticket for the instrument and carry the cello on board with her.
She flew from Austin, Texas, to Champaign, Ill., yesterday on Northwest [...]
Does the travel policy cover death?
Companies often go to great lengths to help employees who fall ill on the road. But what happens when a business traveler dies? That was the predicament Moog Inc. faced recently. An employee who was attending a business conference in Phoenix, hiking in the mountains with a colleague during their off time, ”got out of breath, had a heart attack and died,” said Kathy Hall-Zientek, the travel manager for Moog, an aerospace manufacturer based in East Aurora, N.Y.
Strange British customs
Q: My wife and I were scheduled to fly from Miami to London on British Airways recently. But as the plane pushed back from the gate it collided with a van parked behind one of its engines. Needless to say, we didn’t fly out that night.
Shortly after announcing that the flight was [...]