I’ve been talking about how crappy airline service has become lately, and I just read this article from the Wharton School which I thought I’d share:

Wharton professor Serguei Netessine’s trip from Philadelphia to Dallas in May was an all-too-typical day in the sky.

After circling Dallas for an hour because of stormy weather, his flight was diverted to San Antonio where he spent several hours on the runway waiting for the storms in Dallas to clear and eating a bag of peanuts for lunch. He arrived in Dallas five hours late and missed most of his scheduled meetings, rescheduled his appointments for later in the day and succeeded in booking — actually overbooking, as it turned out — what he thought would be an evening flight back to Philadelphia. He had no choice but to fly home the next day after paying $400 for the only room available at the airport Park Hyatt.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide whether or not to go ahead and book that air travel. Prices could go down, or they could go up, so what’s a boy to do? Well here are two sites to help you solve this dilemma.

When you are in the early planning stages, pop on over to Farecast and tell them your destination. Within seconds you’ll get a prediction as to whether the prices are expected to rise or fall for that particular route and you can make your decision accordingly.
Read the rest of this entry »

The holiday travel season is upon us, so the airlines will be overbooking flights like no other time of year. Add to that the unpredictability of weather this time of year and you’ve got both a recipe for disaster and for opportunity.

As a former VP of Sales, it’s fair to say I did a bit of traveling. So here are my top tips should you find yourself in a position to volunteer to be bumped from a flight. Keep in mind that if you do this, you will be inconvienced, and it can really suck. So make sure that you get enough to make it worth your while or… just don’t do it.
Read the rest of this entry »