Greece
Air travel is one of those topics that no radio or TV show can go wrong with — it’s certain to touch a nerve with many people and provoke numerous comments and questions. That’s what happened yesterday on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, which I was on for the first time.
I always thought the reason to be invited would be to talk about foreign policy on the Friday news roundup, where Diane has three Washington journalists discussing issues from the passing week. That never happened, but a couple of weeks ago I suggested to one of the show’s producers that the summer is a good time for a program on travel.
The Diane Rehm Show is widely considered the best talk show on NPR, with more than 2 million listeners a week. It’s produced by WAMU, the NPR station in DC, and airs in dozens of markets across the U.S. Diane is on vacation this week, so the guest-host was Frank Sesno, a former CNN bureau chief in DC who now heads the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.
There were two other guests except me: from Dallas, Scott McCartney, who writes “The Middle Seat” column for The Wall Street Journal, and from New York, Susan Stellin, a New York Times contributor.
You can listen to the show and read some of the comments left by listeners on its website. We actually got hundreds of comments and questions by phone, e-mail and on Facebook and Twitter.
We talked about various familiar topics, such as airline fees, seats, delays, the proposed Passengers’ Bill of Rights, re-regulation prospects and others.
Since the show’s topic was “Navigating the not-so-friendly skies,” I wanted to offer some advice on how to do that. The main point I tried to make was about the need for travel education, realizing that most people don’t see such a need because they think they know how to travel. But if that were true, we’d be hearing many fewer complaints and horror stories about air travel.
It’s convenient and popular to blame the airlines all the time — and they often deserve much of that blame — but there is a lot travelers can do to make their own experience less stressful and more seamless.
The airlines have made the system very complex, confusing and frustrating. It is what it is, and we can’t changed it that much. However, we can find ways to make the system work for us — and to do that, we need to know it really well. That’s why I believe every traveler can use a bit of education.
My other main point was about the importance of elite airline status, which is the only decent way to travel today. The reality is that airlines don’t even pretend to try taking care of you if something goes wrong unless you are a loyal customer. More practically, elite passengers are exempt from luggage and other fees.
Unfortunately, most people don’t even try to achieve elite status, because they only travel a couple of times a year. As I wrote last month, you only need 4,000 miles on Greece’s Aegean Airlines to get silver status on the Star Alliance, and Aegean gives you 1,000 miles just for signing up. You don’t have to fly on Aegean — just to credit your miles from flights on any of the 28 Star carriers to that program. Silver status waives baggage fees on United Airlines, US Airways and Continental Airlines.
I was amused to read in the comments on the Diane Rehm Show’s website that a listener accused me of being unpatriotic for recommending membership in a foreign airline’s frequent-flier program.
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Continue reading about Talking air travel for an hour on NPR
A new survey by the Consumer Travel Alliance released this week found that luggage and other additional airline fees increase the average ticket price by up to 50 percent. The truth is, there is a relatively easy way to have most of those fees waived — if only travelers were better educated and more open-minded.
My impression during almost constant global travel for most of the last decade is that people think they know how to travel — but then they complain about being “scammed” by the airlines. My approach has been to learn as much as possible about rules, restrictions and fees, and then to look for ways to waive them and generally make the system work for me.
One of the reasons I started the “On the Fly” Seminars was to educate people how to be better travelers — and to change negative attitudes toward travel. In fact, my FLY 201 class covers exactly how to get those extra fees waived: by achieving elite airline status.
Many people think they don’t travel enough to get elite status or it’s cheaper to fly a different airline every time. I find both of these arguments valid in very few cases.
First, you don’t need to fly 100,000 miles a year. The first elite level in most frequent-flier programs will get your baggage fees waived. Moreover, because of elite benefits offered and recognized across global airline alliances, a silver membership with one carrier will secure those waivers on every member-airline. You can fly on any Star member and credit your miles to any of the Star loyalty programs.
However, mileage requirements to achieve status vary greatly. For example, you need 25,000 miles for Premier on United Airlines, which will give you Star Alliance silver status — but you only need 4,000 miles on the alliance’s newest member, Greece’s Aegean Airlines. Not all fares on United earn 100 percent mileage in Aegean’s program, but right now it gives you 1,000 miles just for signing up. I’m sure if most of you looked at your flight history in the past year, you’d see that you could have qualified had you kept your miles in the same place.
Second, relying on Travelocity or Priceline to tell you which airline has the cheapest ticket and go to a different carrier every time is not the best way to fly in the current environment. Even if you had to pay a bit extra to stay within the same alliance — but if you managed to secure elite status — at the end of the year you most likely spent less money because you didn’t pay luggage fees.
There is no question that airlines should make all those extra fees more transparent earlier in the booking process. There is also little doubt that their frequent-flier programs were created to make money. But they do reward their loyal customers, so if you are going to give them your money, why not learn how to benefit from your loyalty as much as you can?
Continue reading about Avoiding luggage and other airline fees
How easy is it for an airline to make its loyal customers happy? Just ask United Airlines. The members of its Mileage Plus program have been happy campers for 10 days, spending their frequent-flier miles like there is no tomorrow.
Many of those travelers waited for that opportunity for months, if not years. They had joined Mileage Plus and mounted sizable accounts with the assumption that they would be able to redeem their miles for flights on the Star Alliance, the global network of 24 carriers of which United is a founding member.
But often in the past few years, when they tried to book “awards” on Singapore Airlines, Germany’s Lufthansa or Asiana of South Korea, among others, finding availability was a Herculean task. Many travelers were angry, but United reservations agents blamed their partners for not providing enough seats…
Arianna Huffington says that she’s had a “political conversion” — not from right to left, but “beyond right and left”. Disillusioned with the “degradation” of US politics, the outspoken Greek-born author and columnist has broken with her conservative past and, apparently, opened up to the sufferings of the poor and underprivileged. She denies she’s become a liberal, but believes that the political system can be changed “through a movement throughout the country, along the lines of the civil rights movement”.
She is also frustrated with the money flooding into US politics; ironic, some say, since her former husband, then-congressman Michael Huffington of California, spent nearly $30m on his unsuccessful senate run in 1994. But that campaign was an “eye-opener”, says Arianna, who is now a staunch supporter of Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign finance reform efforts…
