Category Archives: Travel

Travel truly sucks; So does Delta’s Customer Service

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I tried to post this while on the road yesterday and for whatever reason it didn’t post, so I’m re-posting today:

Yesterday I had a planning trip for SCIP’s 2007
conference at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. I had a flight up
Monday night that was cancelled so I was re-booked for yesterday
morning and the flight up was fine.  Unfortunately the return flight
last night was cancelled due to weather (along with at least a dozen
other flights) and in the typical fashion of modern airlines Delta
assigned exactly one person to their registration desk so re-booking
took forever.  They also offered no help in finding a room, but I was
lucky to find a hotel with the help of a fellow traveler who does a lot
of travel to NY.  Since this is peak tourist season almost everything
was booked solid.

So after four hours sleep and wearing the same clothes as yesterday I
sit in Atlanta waiting for my connecting flight (let’s forget that I
paid for a direct flight) and am feeling tired and smelly. The only
positive note is that they originally had me going through Cincinnati,
but when I showed up they  were oversold for that flight and they gave
me a $200 travel voucher to switch to the Atlanta flight.

I also feel fortunate compared to the woman who was in front of me in
the line to re-book; she was travelling with her 7-ish daughter and
wasn’t sure where she was going to stay.  She disappeared before I or
the guy who helped me find a room could offer help.  Hopefully she made
it home.

Conclusion: Delta’s customer service sucks. Not necessarily the people,
although the kid they had working the counter either wasn’t too bright
or very well trained, but the management structure that allowed them to
do such a poor job of staffing and a horrendou job of communicating
with the customers as flights were repeatedly delayed and eventually
cancelled.  There were a LOT of pissed-off Delta customers in NY last
night.

I’m Not The Only One Who Noticed the Enormous Caravans of Lazy People at Disney

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A couple of weeks back I wrote that during my family’s recent trip to DisneyWorld I noticed that there were a stunning number of perfectly able-bodied and LARGE people renting motorized wheelchairs (or scooters or whatever you call them) and creating traffic jams in the parks.  Well, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.  Check out this piece in the Guardian written by a bemused British travel writer.  Here’s a sample:

After a couple of days, though, I had begun to fear I could sense pure sugar coursing through the veins of everyone in the park. It was possible to hire buggies for toddlers. You could also hire motorised wheelchairs. Many enormous people wearing gargantuan shorts opted for the latter to propel themselves between fast-food franchises. It was,
on the plus side, a very long time since I had been on holiday and felt relatively thin and fit. As the week had progressed, I had become uncomfortably obsessed with the sheer scale of some of the sugar-seekers, slugging at their quarts of Coke, every bit as
extraordinary a sight as a six-foot tall duck or a pair of enormous chipmunks.

I had started fearing for the load-bearing capacity of the rides; the queues seemed to be getting longer because everyone was squeezing vast buttocks into two or three seats. The previous two evenings, in a bid to avoid fries and induce sleep, we had found ourselves mainlining plastic cups full of crudites in the hotel bedroom, and trying to sell the idea as a family picnic.

It gets better so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

About Disney

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Stephen Levitt of Freakonomics fame recently posted about his family’s experience at Disney.  He makes some valid points about the “Disney experience” i.e. you end up spending a lot of time standing in line and it’s expensive.  As I posted before we just did the Disney thing last week and although we didn’t experience many long lines, the benefit of visiting at a non-peak time of year and early in the week, I can definitely vouch that it IS expensive.

Levitt also asks two questions:

1) Why is demand for Disneyworld so great?

2) Why do they make you stick your fingers into some machine when entering Disneyworld? What is the point?

My take is that although Disneyworld is expensive and puts you through a lot of waiting they do the basics well:  the place is much cleaner than your average theme park, the staff tends to be more pleasant than at your average theme park, the food is definitely better than at other theme parks and they offer more than roller coasters and spinning rides with their “multimedia” experiences.  They also have an inherent marketing advantage with their cartoons, movies, networks, etc.

Yet with all that I don’t think we’ll go back until it’s time for the grandkids.  There really isn’t a lot of stuff for the kids once they get into the teen years (my oldest two definitely found the shows to be a little cheesey on this trip and they’re just 12 and 13) and as an adult I have to say you tend to suffer through the experience for the sake of the kids.

As for the finger thing I found out the hard way that they use the finger scanner to tie you to a specific access card.  I don’t know if they use fingerprints or some other biometric but I know it definitely works since I mixed up my daughter’s card with mine and they had to re-code my card to let me in.

The paranoid part of my brain also thinks maybe the Bush administration has something to do with it…nah.

NY Times Puts Google Maps to Good Use

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The New York Times has used the Google Maps interface to plot all of its "36 Hours" travel columns over the last three years.  Winston-Salem was recently featured and you’ll also find articles on Boone and Charlotte.

That’s a very nice, useful application of the Google API, not just another "Let’s do this just because it’s cool" application. I think it actually adds value to the columns since I could see using this a tool to find a getaway that offers something a little different.

Five Middle-Aged Men, a Minivan, and Four Days

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Last Friday, St. Patricks Day, I drove down to Savannah, GA to meet up with some friends for a long weekend of golf, poker and fishing.  You know you’re middle-aged when the prospect of having to tool around town in a mini-van (my marvelous Mazda MPV) didn’t scare anyone off.

I arrived at the Savannah airport at the appointed time, 6:30, only to find out that the flight was delayed.  Five hours later they arrived, but it wasn’t so bad because I got to watch some meaningless NCAA game in the Phillips Seafood bar while the score showing my alma mater George Mason beating Michigan State in the first round of the NCAA tournament appeared in the corner of the screen.  First victory ever in the NCAA’s for GMU, yippee!

The guys landed and I had a cooler of beer in the back of the van for them.  I labeled the very large cooler "Mike’s Beer" and the small cooler "Jon, Kevin, Dave and Karl’s Beer".  Mike does love his Bud Light.  An hour later we were at Dave’s house in Hilton Head (Port Royal) playing our first hold ’em mini-tournament.  Then it was off to bed so we could get some decent shuteye before our 8:30 tee time.  That was the second sign that we’re getting old; we actually slept between poker and golf.

After golf (very ugly for all involved except Dave who won 7 skins) it was back to the house to get cleaned up and head to Savannah for a night on a casino boat.  Silly us for cleaning up since the clientele was, uh, interesting.  First bad sign, literally, was the sign at the gangplank that said "Absolutely no concealed weapons allowed" quickly followed by a guy scanning everyone with a handheld detector.  Next bad sign was the overwhelming smell that was suspiciously like the worst fraternity houses I’ve visited.  Then we came across the first patrons decked out in bling that didn’t deserve the second bling to qualify for bling-bling and we were a little scared.

The boat’s air conditioner wasn’t working so within minutes sitting in the card room was like taking a sauna with 400 chain-smokers.  Things got a little better when the boat left the dock and hit the open water, but that’s because about 30 people instantly became nauseous and headed for the open-air upper deck.  We all entered a $100 no-limit hold-em tournament and were doing pretty well, especially since most of the other patrons apparently thought watching one night of poker on ESPN qualified as experience. And I’d say most of them didn’t get past third grade math. 

So what happened?  Well I got knocked out by a guy with two teeth who called my all-in (I had A-Q and my ace was paired up on the board) while holding a J-9 and then caught a gut-shot straight on the river. That’s poker though, and honestly I took out someone with a lucky card myself so I can’t say much.  Still we all were getting taken out by rednecks with horseshoes surgically implanted in their derriers.  Kevin was doing great until the conditions got to him and he went all in on a horrible hand, but that was because he felt so sick he could barely see straight.  Mike ended up finishing in the money (6th place) so it wasn’t a total failure.

Then we were stuck for four hours until the boat went back to shore.  In those four hours we were able to witness the fine spectacle of society’s Wal-Mart crowd getting increasingly drunk and rowdy.  Some guy called his wife a bitch and they started to have it out.  Then a white guy called his black friend the "n" word, which his friend seemed fine with but a woman from a black family sitting next to them took great exception to and a spat broke out between her family and his crowd. 

I escaped to the upper deck for some fresh air, but that didn’t last once the karaoke started.  An old, drunk redneck named Steve went up and requested some Credence Clearwater Revival and the DJ spent a minute finding it while Steve returned to his seat.  When the DJ announced "And now we’ll have Steve singing (I don’t remember what he requested)" Steve looked up and yelled "What the f— you talking about?" The DJ said, "Sir, you requested the song and you get to sing along with it."  Steve said, "I don’t wanna f—ing sing it I wanna listen to it."  The DJ told him that there wouldn’t be any words because the Karaoke version only includes the instrumentals since you’re supposed to sing along to it.  Steve asked him "What kind of f—ing DJ are you?" and the DJ just gave up.  When no one else requested a song the DJ put on a top-40 loop and when Steve heard words I thought he might fight the DJ for "lying to him about not having no goddamn words in the f—ing songs."  That’s when I got the hell out of there.

Thankfully we were back on land at 1 a.m.  We drove back to Hilton Head and then crashed.  The next morning, Sunday, we got up played some poker and then at noon took a fishing charter that Dave had set up.  It was probably 50 degrees with a 15-20 MPH wind blowing and we froze our butts off.  The captain didn’t want to but convinced him to try going to a spot offshore, and after weathering five-foot waves for 1/2 hour we saw his wisdom and had him take us back into the sound. We managed to catch four fish that had a cumulative weight of about four ounces, but I had the best time because my college roommate, Bobby, called me on my cell to do a play-by-play of the last 13 seconds of GMU’s win over Carolina in the NCAAs.  I might have jumped off the boat if my knees hadn’t locked into place hours earlier.

We got back to the house about six on Sunday and everyone took hot showers to try and warm up.  We ordered pizza and then played hours of poker…probably the highlight of the weekend.  Kevin and Mike played another round of golf Monday morning but the rest of us slept in and packed to leave.  That afternoon I dropped them off at the airport and had a great time driving home, laughing my ass off the whole way.  I kept thinking about five middle-aged guys driving around in a mini-van trying to cut loose and hitting every snag you can imagine.  It was a blast.

Flying, Flu and Cheerleaders: The Longest Day

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On Tuesday I had to fly to Orlando for a meeting and then fly home in the evening.  Here’s how it went:

  • Up at 4:00 a.m to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight from Greensboro to Dulles, connect to Orlando.
  • Meet up with client, go to Disney’s Coronado Springs, do the tour thing and have lunch, meetings.
  • Back to airport, catch stomach bug that seems to have gone around.
  • Flight
    to Atlanta delayed about 2 1/2 hours so I’m stuck (with stomach bug) in
    airport lounge with bitter travelers and the Moorehead State University
    cheerleading team.  Chipper and bitter/sick just don’t mix.
  • Thankfully, Orlando’s airport has relatively clean bathrooms (I’ll spare you the details).
  • Get to Atlanta, my connecting flight is four terminals away.  Long walk to train between terminals, surrounded by chipper cheerleaders talking incessantly about how much sex they’re going to have at their destination.  Know I’m sick when I use the words "incessantly" and "sex" in the same sentence.
  • Connecting flight is delayed an hour, which they didn’t bother to post on the status board so I wouldn’t have to run.  Thanks Delta.
  • Sit
    on puddle-jumper waiting for takeoff for 1/2 hour while they try and
    figure out how to get a wheelchair bound passenger on the
    plane.  Seriously wondering if it would be better to be dead,
    or at least comatose.
  • Miraculously don’t lose my lunch in the puddle-jumper as we do as near a proximation to dive bombing as I’d like to get.
  • Land, again miraculously, and drive home like a bat out of hell.
  • In bed at 2:00 and next thing I know it’s 10:30 and I’m still alive, although not by much.

This now makes two terrible trips I’ve had since Independence Air went out of business.  I think they’ve put a curse on all their old routes. Note that I’m not blaming the airlines since for the most part it’s just bad luck, but that’s what a curse amounts to, right?

Flying the Unfriendly Skies

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Yesterday I had a 1:45 flight from Greensboro to Washington-Dulles on United.  The plane took off on time, but halfway to DC we were turned around and did an emergency landing back at Greensboro due to a faulty sensor in the cabin door. Bummer.

Back on the ground we were told to de-plane and then wait for word about the flight.  Eventually it was cancelled (about 5:00) and in the interim United’s computers went down worldwide.  That meant that no one could tell us if we’d be able to get on the next flight because they couldn’t pull up the reservation system and they couldn’t tell if the flight was full (it was).  And they couldn’t tell me if I’d have a seat this morning if I came back to the airport so I ended up renting a car and driving up.  My little one hour flight turned into a 12 hour ordeal.

Most bothersome to me was:

  • They only had one person working two gates and handling all the flights.  This poor woman (her name was Alicia) did yeoman work and never lost her cool, and she was lucky that there weren’t any really nasty passengers to deal with. Why did they leave her stranded there like that for over five or six hours?  Where was her backup, especially when she had two or three flights at a time to deal with?
  • Communication from United was terrible and almost non-existent.  The woman at the gate was using her personal cell phone to call other agents at other airports she had worked with on previous assignments to try and find out what was going on.  She might as well have been stranded on an island with the amount of communication she received from the company, and consequently we were on the same island with her.
  • How can United not have some kind of backup system for this contingency?
  • No love from United.  Last year when I had a flight out of Dulles that was delayed several hours on the soon-to-be defunct Independence Airline they brought in extra staff to deal with the passengers and they provided us with complimentary sodas and chips.  Yesterday, despite being there for over six hours no one from United even offered a drink or food voucher. Heck, no manager even came down to the gate to check things out.

I want to emphasize that the employees at United that I dealt with were all polite and as helpful as they could be. Their management hung them out to dry, and if anyone from United is reading this I can tell you that your folks were great and they never once pointed the finger at you even though they should have.

Friendly skies my butt.

Better to Be Lucky Than Good

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I was a hair away from booking my next business trip on Independence Air out of Piedmont Triad International Airport, but I put it off until today because I wasn’t sure of my itinerary.  Today Independence announced that they are ceasing operations on January 5, 2006.  Sure, I’d have been able to get a refund, but what a pain that would have been.

So I’m flying United and it’s costing me about 50% more than it would have to fly Independence.  I would now like to officially nominate myself for the Piedmont Triad Discount Airline recruiting committee.  Unfortunately it doesn’t exist so perhaps I should just take the bull by the horns and start the darn thing myself.

Know anyone at JetBlue or SouthWest?  Personally I prefer JetBlue. Perhaps we could create an incentives package like we do for everyone else.

On another, slightly related note Ed Cone suggests that PTI offer free wi-fi.  I agree wholeheartedly.  How much can they possibly be making with their for-profit relationship with the company providing the service, and how many business travelers are they irking in the process of not making very much money? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

JetBlue Effect Missing the Piedmont Triad?

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There’s an interesting item from Reveries Magazine about
the JetBlue effect.  Essentially it says that many small communities
are becoming vacation spots because of inexpensive airfares offered by
JetBlue, AirTran, Hooters, etal.  One person interviewed decided to buy
a condo at Myrtle Beach instead of the Jersey Shore because the airfare
to Myrtle is so cheap and the property in Jersey so steep.

On the heels of the news that Piedmont Triad International Airport
is seeing a reduction in flights one has to wonder if the Triad is
missing an opportunity here.  Granted the Triad isn’t a traditional
second-home kind of destination, but PTIA is the closest airport to the
mountains of NW North Carolina and it could be an important part of the
push to bring economic development to the western part of the state. 

In fact the entire Triad could benefit from a push to be the gateway to
the beautiful, and pretty much undiscovered northwestern NC.  That
would also work nicely with the burgeoning Yadkin Valley wine region.

Just a thought.

Cross posted on Winston-Salem Business.