The 511 system, created by the federal government in 2000, delivers traffic, weather and tourism information directly to a telephone. At least it is supposed to.
Power Trip
So just how uncomfortable is the average seat in economy class? Ask a business traveler like Richard Wong, who endures countless hours in steerage class, and it is clear that conditions in the back of the plane have never been worse.
The average corporate traveler is overcharged $11.35 a night, according to a new analysis of more than one million hotel room rates by Corporate Lodging Consultants, a provider of lodging-management services based in Wichita, Kan.
New technologies, including airport check-in kiosks and Web-based reservations systems, have been heavily promoted by the travel industry as conveniences for customers. Unfortunately, they are not convenient for all customers.
Larry Bradley switches credit cards an average of once a year, but not to rack up extra frequent-flier miles or to pin down a lower interest rate. Mr. Bradley, a small-business owner from Tyrone, Ga., swaps plastic to escape rising currency-conversion fees.
As a million-mile frequent flier on United Airlines, David Fink is used to being treated with deference when he travels. So when he arrived five hours early for a recent flight from White Plains to Washington and asked a ticket agent if he could to go standby on the next plane out, he was taken aback by the curt reply.
Dust collectors. That is what employees at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers call their new automated check-in kiosks, as one guest who has repeatedly tried to use them found. “I was checking in, and try as hard as I might, the kiosk wouldn’t cooperate,” Henry Harteveldt recalled. He flagged down a staff member and said, “This doesn’t seem to work.”
Joe Beane reserved a Dodge Intrepid from Dollar Rent a Car in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., recently. Or so he thought. “At the rental counter, the associate aggressively tried to sell me an upgrade to a convertible for an additional $20 a day,” Mr. Beane said. “When I refused, she said the company had no full-size cars available and that I would have to wait for a car to be returned.”
On a recent flight from Denver to Las Vegas, Michael Silber was assigned a dreaded middle seat in the back of the plane. But when Mr. Silber, an executive with the Harman Consumer Group, an electronics company in Woodbury, N.Y., checked in at the ticket counter, a United Airlines employee not only upgraded him on the spot but apologized for the lapse.
The $39 parking charge at San Francisco’s expensive Westin St. Francis hotel did not faze Veronica St. Claire, a business traveler who is instinctively wary of extra fees wherever she goes. But when the hotel added a $5.46-a-night bed tax to the parking charge on a recent visit, she felt ambushed.
The Ford Escape that Karen Anderson recently returned to Budget Rent a Car in Bend, Ore., looked “squeaky clean” to her. But perhaps she did not look hard enough.
On a business trip to Bismarck, N.D., David Godfrey flew into town two days early to qualify for a cheaper airline ticket. His total savings were $300. He stayed at a friend’s house instead of checking into a hotel, knocking an additional $100 off his expenses. His friend even picked him up at the airport.
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 [...]
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.”
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
On a recent stopover at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, I flipped open my laptop PC, hoping to chip away at the 7,000-some e-mail messages that had accumulated since leaving Anchorage, Alaska, four hours earlier. “Don’t even think about it,” my laptop screen flashed back at me contemptuously (I’m paraphrasing the error message a little here). “I’m [...]
The e-mail messages land in my inbox, one after the other, with the relentlessness of a tropical rainstorm. Most of the e-mails are junk, and with subjects like “A humour game” and “Re: Hi,” they drain straight into my spam filters. It’s an unusually heavy morning. Since I started writing this column about 15 minutes [...]
