• What's elliott?
• About elliott
• Contact us

t o p i c s

• Business
• Commentary
• Destinations
• Help
• Leisure
• Technology
• Vault

Copyright Elliott Publishing. All rights reserved. For more information, call (305) 453-4781 or send e-mail to us.

Travel's Bad Reputation Not Entirely Deserved
The Travel Critic · March 29, 2000

What's so good about travel these days?

Not much, it would seem. Complaints to the federal government about airlines more than doubled last year. A recent Gallup Poll suggested that only 85 percent of Americans are confident in the aviation industry's safety standards down from 92 percent in 1996.

Ditto for hotels and car rental companies, which have hiked prices recently. Consumer attitudes aren't tracked as closely in those industries as in the airline business, but it's easy to do the math.

Average daily room rates during the last six months of 1999 rose 4.4 percent from a year ago, according to PKF Consulting in San Francisco. Car rental rates were up about 3 percent last year, JP Morgan Securities reports. Meanwhile, inflation remained pretty much flat.

So why would I want to write something nice about travel?

Two reasons: first because no one else is (except maybe my colleagues in the trade press); and, second, because for the better part of the last three years, writing as The Crabby Traveler columnist for ABCNEWS.com, I've been, well, crabby.

Believe it or not, this industry isn't entirely deserving of its awful reputation. Just when you think there's nothing redeeming about it, along comes a supplier with a completely unexpected amenity or service. For example:

Buy you a bubbly? On a Silversea cruise, the champagne is on the house (or, in this case, the boat), as is the caviar. The Renaissance Orlando Resort at SeaWorld greets guests with a complimentary glass of champagne at check in. At the Bernardus Lodge, a small inn on the estate of a Carmel Valley, California, winery, visitors are welcomed with what else? -- a glass of wine. And Air Jamaica operates nothing but champagne flights.

Whether the alcohol is anesthetizing you from a bad travel experience or underscoring a good one is irrelevant; the bubbly is a nice touch, either way.

Have a cookie. If you like chocolate-chip cookies, you're in luck. Midwest Express Airlines bakes fresh ones on board. The Doubletree hotel chain parcels them out to arriving guests. So do properties like Carmel Valley Ranch in Carmel, California, and The Boulders in Carefree, Arizona, although you have to wait for bedtime to get yours. At the Summerfield Suites Hotels, the free chocolate-chip cookies are topped with powdered sugar.

The baked goods may not seem like much, but they send travelers a reassuring message: We care.

You're not just a number. I never thought I'd actually write this, but to some suppliers, you're more than just a credit card number. Guests at Grace Bay Club in the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas, are issued aloe lotion and lip balm for that inevitable sunburn. The Inn At The Fisher Island Club near Miami Beach gives its visitors a golf cart so they can zip around the 220-acre property. At one of my favorite hotels, the Pan Pacific in San Francisco, you get a card with the weather forecast slipped under your door.

In a business where your well-being is usually considered secondary, it's great to see some folks rediscovering the idea of customer service.

Get comfortable. Singapore Airlines offers its passengers turn-down service in its first class "SkySuites." The Hotel Nikko in Tokyo gives its guests not only robes and slippers, but pajamas too. The Melia Reforma hotel in Mexico City even has a pillow menu where travelers can choose anything from a magnetic cushion to feather pillows. New York's Avalon Hotel goes even further, offering a special body pillow which is said to afford you a better night's rest.

Most of the travel industry may not give a damn about customer comfort, which makes these exceptions, well, exceptional.

We love our job. In a business where angry gate agents, irritable air hosts and disgruntled hotel employees are par for the course, the exceptions really stand out. I'm not just thinking of the five-star luxury resorts run by the likes of Ritz-Carlton and Rosewood, where you almost expect obsequious service.

Even lowly Southwest Airlines, a one-class carrier that specializes in short-haul flights and offers no meal service, has a reputation for happy employees who go above and beyond the call of duty. Southwest customer service agents once chaperoned teenagers stranded at the Jackson, Mississippi, airport. They delivered pizza to them and then escorted them to their flight the next day. Another time, the pilot of a delayed Las Vegas-to-Reno flight bought cold sodas for the waiting passengers. And a Florida gate agent personally drove a passenger back to a hotel to pick up keys that he'd left behind.

I know what you're thinking. He's going soft on us. Well, let's not jump to any conclusions here. Southwest still does plenty of things wrong and so do the rest of the suppliers I mentioned in this column. But every now and then you've got to hand it to them for doing something right.

Like, maybe once every three years.

I'll be back to my critical self next week.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.