Want better airline service? Power up your smartphone

Ricardo Miguel Silva Saraiva/Shutterstock
Liz Owen needed help, and she needed it fast.

She had rescheduled a flight from Washington to Los Angeles on Virgin America to avoid superstorm Sandy, which was about to slam into the East Coast. But she’d forgotten to order a wheelchair.

Owen, who works for a nonprofit organization in Washington, had recently broken her foot, which was in a cast. “I had been on the phone on hold with Virgin America for well over an hour,” she remembers. Halfway to the airport, she decided to send Virgin America a tweet — a message on the microblogging service Twitter.

Read more

Do you trust GPS directions?

If you have a driver’s license, chances are that you also have an amusing story about GPS directions.

Here’s mine: A few weeks ago, my family and I were driving from Cayucos, Calif., to Prescott, Ariz., when I noticed that the needle on the fuel gauge was pointing to “empty.” Not a problem, I thought. There must be plenty of service stations between here and Bakersfield.

Read more

What’s your favorite way to communicate when you’re away? Here’s ours

You can never be close enough to one of these. / Photo by Paul McCord - Flickr
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been on the road a lot lately. I’m traveling across the country with my family and we’re documenting every moment of the trip on our family travel blog, Away is Home. Staying in touch with the ranch back in Winter Springs, Fla., can be a challenge, it turns out.

Read more

What autocomplete says about your airline preferences

Don’t you just love Google’s “autocomplete” — the feature that tries to guess what you want while you’re typing?

Autocomplete’s algorithm offers searches that might be similar to the one you’re entering. Here’s an explanation.

After seeing this clever map of autocompleted states, I wondered: What does it say about travel?

A lot, actually.

For airlines, the results are telling. Hotels and car rental companies? Not so much. The algorithm tries to pair you with a location in your own area, which makes it difficult to tell what others are typing.

Read more