It’s now official: After months of working individually with readers of my column and participants in my “On the Fly” Seminars on various travel issues they had, I’m officially launching the travel advisory services of Kralev International LLC.
This is not a travel agency — there are plenty of those, and most have fallen behind the times. They rely on computers to tell them what to do. We rely on creative thinking and our extensive knowledge and experience buying airline tickets and actually flying around the world. We advise you how to make your travel as cost-effective and comfortable as possible. In fact, having received our specific advice, you can continue to use your travel agent to issue tickets.
Here are the initial services we offer to both companies and individual travelers:
Budget management
We can help you stretch your travel budget by reducing costs by 10% to 30%. We can design strategic plans based on little-known airfare intricacies and booking techniques and assist you in their implementation. This service includes a big-picture year-long plan and detailed monthly plans covering specific trips — with an emphasis on achieving the best combination of the lowest fares and the most efficient and convenient itineraries. Between our monthly meetings, we will be available to provide ongoing advice to your employees who book concrete trips as needed. We can also advise them how to resolve unexpected situations during travel most effectively.
Executive privilege
This service is designed to provide exclusive travel care to senior executives and other corporate managers, who greatly value convenience, comfort and luxury. We can book business and first class tickets at prices significantly lower than what you can find online or through a travel agent — between 20% and 40% in savings on average. We can build itineraries reflecting your specific desires: truly flat beds, luxurious on-board amenities, high-quality meals and wine, most convenient connecting airports and best business lounges. We can also keep an eye on your flights and rebook you in case of delays or cancellations. Think of this service as your elite travel concierge.
Corporate training
If you have employees who book air travel in-house, we can train them how to use our unique, comprehensive and highly effective booking process. That process is based on directly accessing and understanding real-time airline data without the filters of third-party online booking engines and travel agencies. Our courses also provide strategic planning techniques and specific creative tools, which could save your company thousands of dollars a month. In addition, we can teach your employees how to react quickly and efficiently to any flight disruptions experienced while on the road.
These client services are separate from and not to be confused with the “On the Fly” Seminars, which are open to the public.
If you are interested in discussing any of the services — or any combination or variation of them — you can contact our sales team.
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Three major travel-industry organizations begin a campaign on Tuesday to compel the airlines to disclose all fees not included in the ticket price at the same time as the actual fare — and before the ticket is issued. But will such a campaign succeed?
The groups — the Business Travel Coalition (BTC), the American Society of Travel Agents and the Consumer Travel Alliance — want consumers to sign a petition to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The text urges him “to require airlines to fully disclose their fees, whether airfares are purchased on an airline’s website or through an online or brick-and-mortar travel agency.”
The organizations plan to deliver the petition to LaHood on Sept. 23, which they have designated as “Mad As Hell Day.” They have created a special website and a YouTube channel.
“It is imperative that we, as consumers, have the ability to comparison-shop and know the full cost of a trip before committing to a purchase,” BTC Chairman Kevin Mitchell said in an e-mail message on Monday. The “airline hidden fees can surprise us at the airport, ruining our holidays, or vanquishing our business travel budgets. For example, check baggage fees can add 30%, 40% or more to the price of a ticket.”
The campaign is in support of the Department of Transportation’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making, regarding airline-passenger protections, Mitchell said.
What’s the likelihood that this initiative will be more successful than previous attempts to extract similar disclosures from the airlines? How long has the battle over false airfare advertising been going on? To this day, you see examples like this one on most U.S. airline websites: $199 each way, based on a required round-trip purchase, plus taxes and surcharges.
If a round trip is mandatory, why on earth are they quoting half of the price? It’s actually less than half, given the extra taxes. As I’ve written before, such deception is not tolerated in Europe and most other parts of the world.
If you can’t get the airlines to be open and honest about their fares, how are you supposed to force them to disclose additional fees? While everyone has to pay for the fare, many passengers are exempt from luggage, standby and other fees — an argument the airlines will no doubt use against the new campaign.
Getting those fees waived is easier than most travelers think. As I wrote in July, all you need is the lowest level of elite status on any member of one of the three global airline alliances — Oneworld, SkyTeam or the Star Alliance — to have your bags fly for free alliance-wide. And sometimes, it takes as little as 3,000 miles to achieve that.
As often happens, my advice has to do with travel education. Air travel has become a maze of rules, fees and restrictions that’s hard to keep up with. So travelers need to invest time to learn the system and find ways to work around it. My experience so far with “On the Fly” Seminars shows that most people don’t think they need to get educated. How many more fees and other frustrations will it take to change their mind?
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U.S. carriers have made major progress in listening to direct customer feedback in recent years, while foreign airlines have been less aggressive in pursuing new creative approaches. Finnair, however, is trying to change that. It’s looking for “quality hunters” — fliers who will spend two months on flights around the world and report their findings.
Product-testing and sampling is certainly not a new concept, but the scale on which Finland’s largest carrier plans to implement the program is rare — as is the public way it has chosen to recruit the four travelers it needs.
Finnair, which is a member of the Oneworld alliance, calls them “independent advisers, whose task is to travel to various destinations in Europe, Asia and the U.S. to investigate the elements that determine quality in travel.” They “are expected to communicate their impartial views and recommendations to the company on a regular basis throughout the two-month period” in October and November, the airline said in a press release this week.
In an attempt to improve its products and services in a very competitive environment, Finnair has launched a new project and created a website called Rethink Quality. This is where you can apply for one of the four slots by Sept. 26, if you can make yourself available for the duration of the exercise. That same site will feature blogs by the “quality hunters” once they begin their travels.
“The recruitment of the quality hunters is one means for Finnair to focus more
closely on issues that are important to today’s travelers,” Antti Nieminen, global marketing communications manager at Finnair, was quoted as saying in the press release.
As often happens, the release didn’t answer some of the obvious questions about this experiment: How and by whom will the winners be selected? Will they be compensated? Will they earn frequent-flier miles for the flights they take? Will they fly in economy or business class?
So I asked Nieminen and quickly received the answers. A 10-member panel of judges from Finnair and its PR agency will choose the “hunters” based on “creativity, excellent writing skills, ability to use modern technology, no-fear attitude and open mind to explore quality and provoke conversation.”
“The hunters will be paid compensation,” he said. “The exact amount is confidential contract information but can be compared with an average salary. No miles are granted to the hunters as they are flying on duty. They will be flying in both business class and economy class, since we want them to blog in a versatile manner from all angles related to flying.”
Nieminen also said that “Finnair staff will not be warned about them in advance,” so they shouldn’t receive special treatment.
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