Lufthansa
How do you make sure a whirlwind trip round the world in just a week doesn’t wear you out and affect your productivity? Things went surprisingly well for me last week, as I flew from Washington to Munich to Paris to Bangkok to Islamabad, back to Bangkok, on to Seoul and back to Washington, so I thought I’d share the experience.
The first thing I have to say is that I don’t drink coffee or take sleeping pills. My only medicine when it comes to air travel is securing the best comfort and luxury I can — I need my flat beds, gourmet meals, lounges with showers, and sometimes even chauffeur-driven cars to connecting flights. I certainly can’t pay for them, but we’ll come to that momentarily.
Second, if you are going to circle the planet in a week, fly to the east, not the west. As much as I dislike those overnight flights from the U.S. East coast to Europe, because they are too short to get decent sleep, moving in that direction is much better in terms of adjusting to time differences. I was never jet-lagged during or after my journey.
The trip, which was blessed by the State Department, was part of the final research phase for my upcoming book on the U.S. Foreign Service, “America’s Other Army,” during which I visited the U.S. embassies in France, Thailand and Pakistan. Overall, I’ve visited almost 60 diplomatic and consular missions for this project, which began with my 2004 newspaper series, and interviewed more than 600 diplomats and other officials.
I used frequent-flier miles, but instead of getting what would have been a very expensive and restrictive round-the-world ticket, I issued two one-way tickets: One in First Class from Washington to Asia over the Atlantic, with a 24-hour stop in Europe, and another one in Business Class from Asia back home over the Pacific.
As I wrote in my first book, “Decoding Air Travel,” the best use of miles is for premium cabins. But why did I book First Class on the outbound for 80,000 miles, and not Business for 60,000? When I use miles, I make an effort to fly on the world’s best airlines. Of those, on my departure date Lufthansa was the only option, but it has some of the worst Business Class seats in the civilized world. First Class, on the other hand, is quite good, except for the small TV screen — that’s not the case with a few aircraft that have the new First seats with much bigger screens.
The more important reason for choosing First Class, however, was Thai Airways, which operates its Paris-Bangkok flights on planes leased from India’s Jet Airways that have private cabins with sliding doors in First. I had flown in one of those cabins from Tokyo to Bangkok a couple of months earlier and wanted to experience a much longer flight in such luxury. In addition, Thai Airways offers First Class passengers complimentary full-body massages in its Royal Orchid Spa at the Bangkok airport.
My Lufthansa flight from Washington to Munich was excellent, as expected, with top-notch flight attendants, which can’t be said of the ground staff at Dulles airport. I liked the new design of the pajamas they give First Class passengers. The food was consistent with my previous experiences, including the signature black caviar and several other appetizers. Although the seats are rather old by now, I always found the bed very comfortable.
I broke my habit of not having breakfast on overnight flights to Europe so I could have enough time for a shower in the First Class lounge in Munich before my connecting flight, since I had a full schedule as soon as I arrived in Paris. When it was time to board, I was whisked to my Paris plane in a Porsche.
The ambassador to France, Charles Rivkin, one of the best non-career ambassadors I know, couldn’t have been a better host, opening the doors of both his embassy and residence, and having a dinner in my honor, according to the elegant menu, with some of the top French journalists. My 24 hours in Paris were very productive, thanks to everyone I met, and especially spokesman Paul Patin, who put together my schedule at a very short notice.
It was time for the 11-hour flight to Bangkok, which didn’t disappoint, except for turbulence during most of it — and a 90-minute delay because of a flight attendant who fell ill just as we prepared to take off. After great meals, three films and a few hours of sleep behind closed doors, I was met by a Thai representative upon arrival in Bangkok and driven in a gold cart to the First Class lounge, where I took a shower before heading to the embassy.
Another full day of meetings and interviews followed, including two sessions with Ambassador Kristie Kenney, a career Foreign Service officer and one of the most capable, according to her colleagues — I hadn’t met her before. With the help of embassy spokesman Walter Braunohler, I covered enough ground with employees in several embassy buildings. The only slightly unpleasant part of the day was the 90°F temperature, especially after 20°F in Paris just hours earlier.
There was no time for a massage at the airport in the morning, but I managed to squeeze one in just before I flew to Islamabad in the evening. Unlike my plane from Paris, most Thai aircraft have old unimpressive seats in Business Class — and no First Class. Still, the food and service were up to standard, and I got some sleep before my 10:30 p.m. arrival in Pakistan.
My visit to Embassy Islamabad was the longest part of the trip — two full days and nights — and I was hosted by Ambassador Cameron Munter, whom I’ve known for eight years and consider one of the most brilliant serving U.S. diplomats. I also think he has possibly the most challenging job in the Foreign Service. He has assembled an outstanding team at the embassy, which actually surprised me, given the perception in Washington that few good officers volunteer to serve in Pakistan.
Munter went out of his way to accommodate my research needs, as did his chief of staff, Scott Kofmehl, with help from embassy spokesman Mark Stroh and many others.
On my flight back to Bangkok, I managed to get one of the embassy employees on a coach ticket into Business Class, thanks to an oversold Economy cabin. I had a long enough layover in Bangkok for a light breakfast in the lounge, some work and a foot massage, which is offered to Business Class passengers.
Then my Thai flight to Beijing had a significant mechanical delay, causing me to miss my connection to Washington on United Airlines.
While the Thai staff in the Business lounge scrambled for two hours to find an alternative way to get me home, I decided to apply in practice one of the things I preach in “Decoding Air Travel”: How to turn a negative airline situation into a positive one. In any case, I was looking at an arrival in Washington more than 12 hours later than scheduled, so the goal was to minimize my delay and stay in Business Class — preferably on an airline that has fully flat beds.
Korean Air met those requirements, and I added to my list a very good airline I’d never flown before — in fact, the 52nd carrier on that list. Korean Air is not in the Star Alliance, but to their credit, the Thais agreed to pay the Koreans a full Business Class fare in order to accommodate me, even though I was on an award ticket. They also agreed to let me spend the remaining 10 hours before my flight to Seoul in the First Class lounge, where I had a great lunch, did more work and slept for a few hours in a real bed, in one of their sleeping rooms.
Of course, they wouldn’t have done any of those things had I not been insistent — actually, a pain may be a better description. But I felt it was their fault, and they were responsible for rectifying the situation. I also knew they wouldn’t offer any compensation — Asia doesn’t have the rules Europe, and to some extent the United States, have — so I had to get whatever I could in other forms.
To sum up, my weeklong round-the-world trip didn’t wear me out — and now you know why.
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The Indian government is engaging in apparent blackmail of the Star Alliance, following the global airline group’s rejection of Air India’s membership application. New Delhi’s threat to take away traffic rights from Star members is about to test the diplomatic skills of both the affected carriers and the alliance leadership.
As I wrote in August, Star really, really wanted to add Air India to its network, because of the large and fast-growing Indian market. It spent more time, effort and money on helping Air India meet the membership requirements than it has with any other candidate. At the end, however, Air India’s entrenched corporate culture and internal Indian politics became unbearable, and the alliance gave up.
New Delhi wasted no time devising retaliation. Within weeks of Air India’s rejection, the government informed Austrian Airlines and Swiss International Airlines that their traffic rights are in danger, as reported extensively in the Indian press. The official reason was the two carriers’ ownership, in which Germany’s Lufthansa has controlling stakes.
That, of course, has been the case for years, and no one believed this was the real reason for India’s threat. It made another move, refusing to grant landing rights in New Delhi to Lufthansa’s Airbus 380. This time, Indian officials didn’t even try to hide the linkage to Air India’s failed Star application, accusing Lufthansa of sabotaging the Indian bid.
A couple of weeks later, reports appeared in Indian newspapers that Star and Air India had resumed negotiations. That sort of made sense, given India’s multiple threats, but the only sources in those stories were Indian officials — confirmation from Star was suspiciously missing.
So I did a little digging, and it turns out Air India has had no official contacts with the alliance since talks broke down in the summer. There may have been unofficial contacts, but a resumption of negotiations doesn’t happen unofficially.
It’s high time the Indians rethought their priorities and tactics. Blackmail is not the best strategy to earn international respect and recognition for your national carrier.
In the very first column I wrote about Star in 2008, I argued that leading an airline alliance is essentially practicing international diplomacy. The main subject in that piece, then-Star CEO Jaan Albrecht, recently became CEO of Austrian Airlines, so one of his first orders of business was dealing with India again. As if he didn’t have enough of that in the last four years.
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Air India’s entrenched corporate culture and internal Indian politics cost the carrier membership in the global Star Alliance. Although Star’s leadership went out of its way to help the airline meet the group’s more than 200 requirements, it finally gave up the futile effort last week and suspended accession talks.
Not surprisingly, Air India has been trying to assign blame to anyone but itself, pointing a finger at Lufthansa and accusing it of sabotaging the Indian carrier’s potential membership. Regrettably, it appears the airline has learned little from the nearly four-year experience. It needs to do some serious soul-searching if it wants to survive.
Star showed remarkable patience and continued to hope against hope that Air India would live up to its promise and achieve the necessary standards in safety, customer service, on-board experience, operations, etc. The alliance makes decisions based on consensus, and all its members voted to invite Air India in late 2007. The accession process is rather costly for both the candidate and the alliance, so no member voted lightly and fully expected the invitee to become to join the group.
They all underestimated the problems they would encounter. Air India was initially supposed to come on board in March 2009, but Star agreed to extend the qualification period. It really wanted its carriers to gain broader access to the large Indian market.
Star CEO Jaan Albrecht, about whom I’ve written several times, has been saying for years that one of his top priorities is filling the three major “white spots” in the alliance’s network: Brazil, India and Russia. Brazil’s TAM joined in 2010, though its merger with Chile’s LAN has created uncertainty about the new airline’s future allegiance. There is no obvious Russian carrier to be seriously considered at this time.
So it was very important for Star to full the big South Asia “white spot.” Albrecht himself made repeated trips to India in the last year in a tortuous effort to save Air India’s faltering bid.
However, the reality is that Air India never truly had a chance with the oldest and largest global alliance. I felt several times during this process that having Air India as a member anytime soon was more wishful thinking than a realistic expectation. In fact, many frequent travelers feared that Star might lower its standards to accommodate India’s national carrier.
To the alliance’s credit, that didn’t happen. Rejecting Air India’s application was the right decision, no matter how the carrier tries to spin the outcome. The group’s attention in India is now focused on Jet Airways, which is already a code-share partner of several Star carrier, and possibly Kingfisher Airlines — they both have a much stellar reputation than Air India’s.
Star was founded by United Airlines, Lufthansa, Air Canada, Scandinavian (SAS) and Thai Airways. Today, it has 27 members from 25 countries, which have more than 4,000 aircraft in their fleets and fly over 600 million passengers a year on 21,000 daily flights to 1,160 airports in 181 countries.
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One of this column’s goals is to point out nuisances in the air travel system and help you avoid them or minimize their negative impact. As I welcome the many readers who have become subscribers since my book, “Decoding Air Travel,” came out, I’d like to tell you about one such nuisance.
As my regular readers are well aware by now, I always know in what booking class a future ticket will be issued. I search for availability in that booking class and choose flights with available seats. That’s why, even if I have to make a reservations with an agent on the phone, I know how much the ticket will cost before I make the call.
The only time when this strategy fails is when I need an airline to book a seat on a partner-carrier, and the ticketing airline’s agent can’t “see” availability in the respective booking class in the partner’s inventory. I’m not talking about award seats, so comparisons with United’s StarNet blocking practice would be misplaced — this is about revenue tickets fully paid for with money, not miles.
So why don’t agents see availability in a certain booking class or fare bucket on another carrier? It usually has to do with the Global Distribution System (GDS) they use to book tickets. For example, United currently uses Apollo and Lufthansa Amadeus. Although most of the time the two systems show identical data, there may be occasional delays, and a United agent may not see a Lufthansa seat displayed as available on Amadeus.
I can explain most things in the airline world, but British Airways and Iberia posed a new challenge last month that left me utterly perplexed. The two companies and Oneworld alliance members merged last fall, and they both use Amadeus, which would mean that their agents should see the same data on their screens — at least it would mean so to a logically thinking person. That person, however, would be wrong.
I was booking a trip for a friend, who is also a client, from Washington to Africa in Business Class. He has Gold status with BA and wanted to fly BA to London and connect to Madrid and on to Africa on Iberia.
According to the BA website, his destination doesn’t exist — many airline sites don’t show cities they don’t fly to, but it’s high time BA added the airports served by Iberia now that they are one company. Fine, I thought, what’s the other option? Naturally, the Iberia site, as the Washington-London BA flight could be booked as an Iberia code-share. There was one problem, though: Iberia priced the desired itinerary almost $4,000 higher than BA.
Clearly, the only thing left to do was to call BA — an exercise I don’t look forward to because of the long waiting time. When I finally got an agent at BA’s call center in Jacksonville, Fla., she said there were no available seats in Business Class on Iberia’s flight from Madrid to the African destination, which I’m not revealing on purpose.
I thought she was joking. Amadeus was showing seven open seats in the full-fare Business booking class I needed, which is J class on Iberia. BA doesn’t code-share that particular flight, so it had to be booked a “true” Iberia flight number.
I started scratching my head. How was it possible for BA’s Amadeus-powered computers to show no seats at all when there were seven? Perhaps it had to do with the point of sale (POS) — I’ve seen airlines alter the inventory on the same flight, depending on where you view the data. But both the BA agent in Florida and I were in the U.S. Still, I changed the POS from the U.S. to Europe, but there was no difference. I also called Iberia to verify the seats were indeed available, and Iberia’s agent in Miami saw exactly what I did.
The BA agent tried to explain the discrepancy by telling me that Iberia hadn’t “given” BA any seats, but I immediately asked her to stop making stuff up. There is no such thing as one airline “giving seats” to another — anyone can book a seat if the operating airline has published it in its inventory, even if the second carrier is not a partner of the first.
Despite all the mystery and frustration, that wasn’t the end of the world, I thought. I asked the BA agent to waitlist the segment in question. My plan was to call back in case another agent could find a way to “see” the seat I needed, and if that failed, I would call Iberia and have them clear the waitlist, since their agent had confirmed availability earlier.
I’ve done just that with Star Alliance carriers several times. For example, Singapore Airlines tends to be stingy with D class availability on intercontinental flights. Star uses D class on round-the-world Business Class tickets, and Singapore deems those fixed fares too cheap. If I issue a ticket with another carrier, it might waitlist a Singapore segment. I’d then call Singapore and ask a supervisor to clear the waitlist if he or she found it appropriate. I’ve also done that with Lufthansa, Japan’s All Nippon Airways, South Korea’s Asiana and others.
However, that simple procedure proved too hard for the merged BA and Iberia, both of which use Amadeus, as mentioned earlier. When I called Iberia back, the agent saw available J seats but said that only BA could clear the waitlist. Except that BA couldn’t, because its agents saw no seats. The Iberia agent’s claim sounded odd, because Iberia controls its own inventory, and I thought it had a way to indicate electronically to BA that a waitlisted seat can be confirmed. So I called back but got the same response from another agent.
Then I phoned BA again and asked the agent to call Iberia, hoping the waitlist could be cleared that way. After keeping me on hold for about 20 minutes, the agent hung up without coming back on the line.
I’d had enough of both carriers’ nonsense, so I took matters in my own hands. I called Iberia yet again and asked the agent to book just that one segment in question separately from the original booking. He gave me the new record locator, and I called BA again, explained the situation and asked that agent if she could incorporate the second booking into the initial one and issue the ticket that way.
She couldn’t but a supervisor was able to do it. Part of me was grateful, but the other part was frustrated that the previous BA agents I’d spoken with never offered me the option I eventually thought of, and wasted hours of my time.
What sort of a merger have BA and Iberia created if they can’t perform the most basic airline function — booking available seats on each other’s flights?
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The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) seems semi-serious about false airfare advertising. It fined several airlines this week for violating its rules of disclosing taxes and fees, but it still tolerates the disgraceful “one way based on a required round-trip purchase” manipulation practiced by some carriers.
Continental Airlines was fined $120,000 for failing to include fuel surcharges in fares listed on its website. US Airways and TACA, the Central American company, must pay $45,000 and $55,000, respectively, for the same wrongdoing — indicating that fares didn’t include taxes and surcharges, but not disclosing actual amounts.
“Consumers have a right to know the full price they will be paying for airfares,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “We established airline price advertising rules to protect the consumer, and will take enforcement action when these rules are violated.”
Starting on Oct. 24, DOT will require airlines to include all taxes, surcharges and government fees in advertised fares — not just using asterisks and fine-print explanations.
However, advertising only half of a ticket price will continue. As I’ve written before, I have nothing against listing one-way fares — when they can be truly bought as such. To this day, American Airlines, Delta, British Airways, Lufthansa and others promote only half of mandatory round-trip purchases on their websites.
In fact, Lufthansa doesn’t even bother to spell out the words, using instead “OW based on RT purchase.” The German carrier doesn’t do those gimmicks on its European sites because of strict European Union rules.
In March, I wrote that United Airlines became the first major U.S. carrier to begin advertising predominantly round-trip fares on its site. Continental has since followed suit. US Airways still uses a mixed method.
One would hope this item will be next on DOT’s agenda.
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