Category: travel

I heard about SeatGuru from this thread at MetaFilter: “Seatguru has not only seat maps, but reviews of most seats on the big 6 US airlines.”

Of course, I’ve already booked (and arrived) in Pittsburgh for Christmas, but this could be handy for future travel bookings.

From Fred Langa’s LangaList — a weekly newsletter on upcoming technology and software — is this InformationWeek article on traveling with electronics. One suggestion there is to buy neon luggage tags for sensitive items (so that they’re less appetizing to thieves).

It can be smart to use a generic, nondescript carry-on that doesn’t scream “electronics inside!” And no matter what case you use, make your bag stand out in some way so it can be identified even across a crowded concourse, so a thief will think twice about trying to lift it. Luggage stores and online travel sites carry personalization/identification straps, handle wraps, and (my favorite) oversized, high-visibility fluorescent luggage tags that can help you spot your stuff in a crowd and also make thieves seek less-conspicuous stuff to steal. […]

It sounds like a simple idea, but it makes sense to me.

I had quite an adventure with airlines over the past few days. The result: Airtran considered harmful. It all started a few days ago...

I had flights for Sunday through Saturday with Vanguard Airlines. But, of course, Vanguard went bankrupt on me. To make things more interesting, I had already used one leg of my trip at the time of the bankruptcy.

At the time of the bankruptcy, Vanguard had arranged special deals for stranded-travellers with Frontier and National airlines. However, I quickly found out that neither Frontier nor National flew to both Pittsburgh and Dallas :-/. So, that’s where Airtran comes in.

I had checked the usual sites, but Airtran consistently had the best fares for one-way trips from Pittsburgh to Dallas. Of course, “best” is all relative, as the one-way flight that I ended up booking with Airtran cost only $10 less than the two-way flight that I had booked with Vanguard.

The flight with Airtran was for Saturday evening, via Atlanta (so far, so good). The flight to Atlanta was scheduled to leave Pittsburgh at 8:05pm EST, but it only ended up leaving at 9:30pm. So, even though the Atlanta-to-Dallas flight was running an hour late, that didn’t cover the difference — I missed my connecting flight from Atlanta to Dallas.

Of course, Airtran arranged for hotels for us. But, because virtually everyone on the Pittsburgh-to-Atlanta flight had a connecting flight (that he or she ended up missing), there were a couple hundred people in the line for the Airtran customer service counter. So, two hours of standing-in-line later, I had a voucher for the local Crown Plaza. The customer service agents were handing out vouchers for various local hotels, and the Crown-Plaza-bound bunch of us boarded the shuttle to the hotel.

Upon arriving at the Crown Plaza, however, they informed us that they had no vacancies (“The airlines don’t always keep track of how many vouchers they hand out&rdquo, we were told). Luckily, the Crown Plaza was able to arrange for rooms for us at a nearby Holiday Inn. Frickin Airtran.

The morning flights were mostly uneventful. I had asked for a later flight (around lunchtime), as I wanted more sleep than a first-thing-in-the-morning flight would have afforded me. The flight was scheduled to leave at 12:05pm. And, we boarded the plane about 20 minutes before scheduled takeoff (fairly normal).

After boarding, though, we sat on the runway for about an hour. At that point, one of the crew members came over the intercom to let us know that “We’re just waiting on one more crew member. Once he gets here, we can head off.”, to which he added sarcastically “Welcome to the airline industry”. So, it wasn’t even weather-related or even mechanical — they just couldn’t keep their appointments. The AWOL crewmember did eventually arrive, about 20 minutes after that announcement.

As such, I will hesitate in flying Airtran ever again.