I’m tired of all the “low-fare tips” in the media — both hearing and reading about them, and giving them myself. Yes, I’m guilty of feeding the media’s hunger for quick “Top 5 tips,” and not happy about having to dumb down a very complex airfare system, which is actually more misleading than helpful.
Those of us who are trained and experienced journalists know very well how to make a specific or even technical topic accessible to a large general audience. I’ve been doing that during my entire professional career.
So it’s understandable that editors and producers across the United States want to write stories or produce TV and radio segments that are easily understood by most of their audience. That’s why I was hardly surprised the first time I was asked for tips on shopping for airfare in a five-minute interview.
While I usually warn listeners and viewers that I’m about to make generalizations, I tell them that, on average, the lowest domestic fares are published on Tuesday and typically last through Thursday. Also, on average, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays are said to be the cheapest days to fly.
Why? If you’ve read my book, “Decoding Air Travel,” you know that domestic fares are filed four times a day during the week, and once a day on weekends. You also know that each fare is published with its own rules, one of which is day-of-the-week validity. Some fares are valid on any day but Friday and Sunday, others only on Tuesday and Wednesday, and yet others have no day restrictions at all.
So if I have to generalize, based on all my knowledge and experience, I’d cautiously say that Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday may be cheaper to fly on than other days.
Unfortunately, some travel writers are taking those generalizations to the extreme. The most recent radio show I was on just yesterday was NPR’s “On Point,” where a guest before me said you should never buy airline tickets on weekends.
Well, I’ve bought plenty of cheap tickets on weekends, ranging from $150 to $250 round trip, including transcontinental ones.
Then last weekend, I read an article about how to get low fares on a website called venturebeat.com, which was based on information provided by Kayak.com. “Don’t buy plane tickets more than 30 day in advance or within 14 days of your trip,” it advised.
Really? I currently have about 10 tickets booked for future travel, and all of them were purchased months ago. The cheapest was less than $150, and the most expensive just over $300. A couple of years ago, I bought a one-way ticket from Washington to San Francisco for $110, only three days before travel.
The article also said that “the best time to buy a plane ticket for the December holidays is the first week of December, up until the 10th.” I realize they didn’t say “the only time,” but I thought I’d mention that my Christmas ticket to Phoenix was bought last spring and cost $240 — that was the actual total price, no discount vouchers included.
So I think very carefully these days before accepting an invitation to appear on radio or TV. I declined one just last week. I initially declined “On Point,” too, but I reconsidered when they agreed to give me a 17-minute segment without another guest, for which I’m immensely grateful.
The other reason was the guest-host, NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, who also guest-hosted “Weekend Edition” when I was on in August. She has been the only journalist so far who really understands the complexity of the system and doesn’t make me dumb things down and offer questionable tips. Even in the four-minute segment on Weekend Edition, she let me explain the basics of airfares — and that was by far my most effective media appearance in terms of audience response and book sales.
The media should never underestimate the public’s intelligence and curiosity.
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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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Many people, including famous ex-KGB spies, were shocked this week that Russia is still spying on the United States. Really? Did we forget that even Washington’s allies have been known to engage in such activities?
As I said in three radio and TV interviews, the real surprise in the latest case is that those people were willing to risk so much to gain so little. It appears that they sent no classified information or any other intelligence secrets to Moscow in the decade they operated.
In fact, most of the information they were tasked with collecting can be obtained in perfectly legal ways. What will President Obama’s agenda be during his trip to Russia? What will the U.S. negotiating position be on the new START treaty? Those were among the questions I was trying to answer at the time, along with my colleagues on the diplomatic beat and analysts at various think-tanks. Of course, we all wanted to know the answers before they were made public — no matter whether we intended to publish them or not.
I still don’t fully understand why the Russians had to resort to such complicated and sophisticated methods from the golden age of spying. The best explanation I could come up with is that they didn’t comprehend the rules of the U.S. policy community, or perhaps they were too paranoid to have diplomats at the embassy in Washington try to get the information they needed.
Why do you think foreign diplomats invite U.S. journalists to lunch? Sure, they have their own propaganda to spread, but they also try to learn things, since many Washington reporters are better plugged-in to U.S. policy-making and personalities than the average diplomat.
The main difference in the purpose of the Russians’ activities in this case compared to the Cold War is that, back then, they were trying to harm U.S. interests. Now their goal was to use the collected information to protect and advance Russian interests. A legitimate goal but certainly an illegitimate method to achieve it.
If you’ve traveled overseas in the past few years and watched CNN International in your hotel room or at an airport, you must have seen the commercial promoting travel to Croatia that runs several times a day.
More recently, newly independent Montenegro, another part of former Yugoslavia, has been showing off its tourist attractions on the air. It’s only natural for small countries to do that, but even Germany has promoted its tourism on National Public Radio.
When was the last time you saw or heard an ad campaign aimed at foreign visitors to the United States? For many years, both government and travel industry officials assumed that Brand USA was a sufficient incentive for millions of foreigners to flock to the new world and spend even more millions of dollars here…
