Don’t pack your bags yet. But serious people in the aerospace and travel industry are taking the idea of space tourism seriously. Pundits predict that the first space tourists could be in orbit by 2005. Tourists would travel by “space plane” to “space hotels” 200 to 300 miles (320 to 480 kilometers) above Earth. NASA’s Space Shuttle is capable of flying 60 to 70 passengers on each flight. In fact this was envisaged by Rockwell engineers in the design of the Shuttle 25 years ago.

There seems to be plenty of interest from armchair astronauts. More than 40 percent of Americans yearn for an “out of this world” vacation, according to the 1997 Yesawich, Pepperdine & Brown/Yankelovitch Partners National Leisure Travel Monitor, based on in-depth interviews with 1,500 U.S. households.

Forty-two percent of those surveyed say they are interested in a space cruise that would offer amenities similar to an ocean-going cruise ship while 34 percent specifically say they would be interested in a two-week vacation aboard the Space Shuttle and be willing to spend (on average) $10,800 for the trip. Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine recently reported similar surveys in Japan, Canada, Germany and the United States that found “an enormous unsatisfied desire among the general public to travel in space.”

“Space travel is about 10 to 15 years away if NASA and the private sector develop the necessary research and technology,” says George Diller, NASA spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. “I think you’ll see commercial initiatives, but it’ll be pricey. Ten thousand dollars won’t get you to the launch pad. You’d probably be looking at something closer to $50,000 for a trip lasting an hour, allowing the passenger to experience weightlessness for about 15 minutes.”

For space flights alone, Bob Citron, a former aerospace executive and director of the Foundation for the Future in Bellevue, Washington (an organization dedicated to scholarly research on life during the next millennium), speculates that $3 billion to $5 billion would be needed to buy 24 to 45 space tourist vehicles, four or five launch sites and staffing for 1,000 to 2,000 flights a year with ticket prices of up to $50,000. “A Space Shuttle vacation is certainly real in terms of consumer interest,” says Dennis Marzella, senior vice president at Yesawich, Pepperdine & Brown. “The technology is there, but it needs to be adapted to accommodate tourists — comfortable seats and big windows.”

Patrick Collins of the University of Tokyo and the Japanese Rocket Society, speaking at the International Symposium on Space Tourism in Bremen, Germany, last March, estimates the development of a reusable, vertical takeoff and landing rocket for passengers would cost $10 billion and take six to seven years. “We need a lot of windows and we need bars, and the Japanese need a karaoke bar,” Collins says. “A gym with padded walls for zero-gravity sports would be a really fun place.”

The space plane designs may draw on the experience of “Hotol,” a pilot project of British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce a decade ago. Hotol was to have been a 50-to-60-passenger plane that would take off from conventional airports. After accelerating through Mach 5 to 80,000 feet, the plane would leave the atmosphere, continue to accelerate and become a satellite itself after reaching 250,000 feet — about four times the cruising altitude of Concorde — and an orbital velocity of Mach 25 to 30. Maximum flying time, ground to ground, to anywhere in the world would be about 70 minutes. Unlike the Space Shuttle, such a space plane would need no external fuel tanks and would re-enter the atmosphere and land under its own power. A space plane would be ideal for picking up and delivering tourists to a space resort en route.

Space Islands Project has an intriguing scenario for a space resort hotel based on a “20-year-old Rockwell idea” for joining up a dozen or so of the Space Shuttle’s empty external fuel tanks into a wheel-shaped space station. Each external tank measuring 28 feet in diameter and 154 feet long (a tad shorter than a 747 fuselage and walls four times thicker than those of the Mir space station) would be divided into three decks. The space station could accommodate 300 people in “cruise-ship conditions.”

‘The external tanks would be joined up end to end in the form of a ring with two more tanks joined up passing through the center like an axle through a wheel, like the orbiting Hilton in the 1969 movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Gene Meyers, director of Space Islands Project, “a loosely knit group of engineers, educators and architects,” in West Covina, California. “The station would take about an hour and a half to make a complete orbit of the Earth, but the ring itself would be spinning like a roulette wheel at about one revolution a minute thus developing artificial gravity. People would live in the outer ring where they would experience about half of normal gravity — they’d just be half their normal weight — so they could use bathroom facilities and suchlike at pretty well normal conditions. The central column section would be zero gravity. This could be the entertainment and recreation center, which guests could visit for an hour or so at a time. You’d have windows in the central column to view the Earth.

“There are lots of entertainment possibilities at zero gravity. Astronauts have found that blood that is normally drawn down to your legs is sort of released and drifts upwards. Astronauts’ legs become thinner, their chests expand by two to three inches, their faces fill out and wrinkles disappear. Shots of men in their forties before launch and an hour after launch look like father and son. Shannon Lucid, a 53-year-old American astronaut in the Russian space station last year, said she looked 20 years younger in space.”

Meyers and his group are looking to corporate sponsorship to meet the $10 billion to $15 billion cost of building the first space station. “You’d need about 16 of these external tanks. If we can get companies like Coca-Cola and General Motors to sponsor them for $500 million each, you’d cover big chunks of your costs for the first station; the second station would cost roughly half as much, and the third and fourth stations would be about 10 to 15 percent less.

“Space Islands Project is privately funded right now. We’ve budgeted $20 million for this first push to bring in some of the larger sponsors. The payback for them will be enormous. Coca-Cola, for example, spends $8 billion a year on marketing. So we’ve suggested that if they were to pay the cost of a shuttle launch — $400 million to $500 million — they could have the external tank painted white with their logo splashed all over it. This would give them two to three years of broad international exposure. We’re talking to Carnival Cruises, Hilton Hotels, Universal Studios, Radisson Hotels and Disney to support the project.”

‘The Frequent Traveler’ International Herald Tribune: Published: FRIDAY, JULY 18, 1997

It’s hard to separate fact and fiction these days.

A letter from Joan Draper in Ramat Gan, Israel tells of her dog Turtle creating mayhem in transit at Paris Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, when he escaped from his unlocked cage, might have been a scene from Keystone Cops.   To lock or not to lock the cage of a traveling pet is a crucial concern for civil aviation.

But the arcane domain of frequent flier programs becomes  even more surreal with news that Virgin Atlantic has launched  a ‘Flying Paws’ reward program for traveling cats, dogs, and ferrets. (Rabbits, hamsters, crustaceans and ornamental tropical fish are left to make their own arrangements (www.defra.go.uk)

On their first flight Virgin Atlantic gives jet-setting pets a ‘welcome onboard pet pack.’ Dogs are given a ‘Virgin doggy t-shirt and sparkling dog tag.’   Cats are given a toy mouse called ‘Red’ and a Virgin collar tag; and ferrets receive ‘a cool limited edition flying jacket and collar tag.’

Pets that travel on the European Union’s Passport for Pets scheme are given a passport ‘which not only gives them a record of all their flights, but allows them to collect “paw prints” which they will be able to redeem for gifts.’ After 10, 15 and 20 flights pets can claim rewards from ‘blow-dries and pedicures to Prado, Burberry, and Gucci pet clothing, to a personal “Pawtrait” from famous artist Cindy Lass, renowned for her paintings of celebrities [sic] furry companions around the world.’

One paw print is awarded per flight; five paw prints brings a galaxy of goodies, such as handmade Virgin bowls plus a non- slip mouse mat so they can ‘dine in style’ or choose to donate their rewards ‘worth £50’ to their favorite animal charity or sanctuary.’

‘If they’re feeling especially loving toward their human friend, they can show their true feelings by donating 1,000 bonus air miles to his or her “Flying Club” account.’

How do I deal with readers’ letters asking how to convert pet miles into people miles?

Question: ‘My ferret Joshua has accumulated 100,000 pet miles in the Virgin Atlantic program. Can I redeem these for an upgrade to business class on my next flight to Orlando?’ 

Answer: ‘Joshua and you should have reciprocal rights on flights taken separately or together. But check the exchange rate between pet miles and people miles.     Joshua could be entitled to elite status with access to the cargo hold lounge. But do make sure that Joshua, or heaven forbid, the animal rights folk do not get to know what you are planning.’

Airlines have different requirements about carrying pets on board.   Virgin Atlantic, in common with most carriers, does not allow pets to travel in the cabin with their owners.   But they are individually collected at check-in and travel in a separate part of the hold from the baggage, with controlled temperature, and fed water, according to Marianne Jenson, a Virgin spokeswoman in London.

Air France, one of the few dog-friendly airlines, allows dogs up to 5 kilograms to sit in the cabin; United Airlines allows ‘small dogs or cats’ to travel in a cage under the seat; guide dogs are confined to the hold.    British Airways requires all pets to be checked in as ‘excess baggage;’ except for guide dogs which are allowed a seat of their own.

Pets should not be sedated and given a light meal before traveling. Take care to check quarantine and vaccination rules and make sure you have the documents you need. You’ll find useful tips at www.hotdogsholidays.com. 

China Southern Airlines joins our ongoing debate on the crucial issue of traveling with pets, with a charmingly succinct release in the apocryphal (‘There’s a French widow in every bedroom’) guide book tradition.  

‘Pets are not allowed on board the aircraft, except for dogs for the seeing impaired.’ This is because ‘once a dog or a cat becomes agitated… it may run about the cabin and is very likely to bite off its restraining leash, or hamper flight attendants in their duty.’ Or ‘the pet could carry bacteria or parasites and since the cabin is a sealed and constant temperature environment which is favorable to the multiply [sic] and infection of the bacteria, it could affect the health of passengers and aircrew.’ What is more, ‘some pets, such as mice, could easily throw passengers into a panic; and pets of any species can leave their droppings randomly in the cabin.’

China Southern provides exemplary specifications on the size and the ventilation of pets’ traveling boxes, ‘which must be firm enough to prevent the pet from opening it from the inside, and able to hold the pet’s droppings during the flight and ground    handling,’ along with the need for quarantine certificates.

‘If you consign your pet to China Southern, it will enjoy a first class cargo service; it will not only be looked after before the boarding but also be supervised during the entire trip,’ we are assured by Li Kun, chief operating officer at China Southern  Airlines.

I am pondering the possible fate of my ferret Joshua on a hypothetical flight to Guangzou, when another release from China Southern, this time with a Chicago dateline, hits my mailbox.

It transpires that 470 ‘Canadian breeding pigs’ were flown to Shenzen; ‘accompanied on board with their own “welcoming ceremony” of a three-step disinfection.’ After the 14-hour flight to China ‘the foreign travelers were greeted in the Middle Kingdom with fire hoses and showered disinfectant.’ Quarantine clerks ‘inspected all swine documents’ to see that there were ‘no illegal aliens.’  

The ‘porkers were humanely treated and had three in-flight meals during their journey.’ That we should be so lucky!  On the other hand – ‘they did not get to see an in-flight movie, nor earn Sky Pearl Club frequent flier miles.’

So pigs do fly! Have a nice year.

Despite draconian measures to restrict hand baggage since the  airline bomb scare last month, that still forbid one to bring liquids, whether bottled water or hand lotion, into the cabin on some flights, it is pretty much business as usual when it comes to traveling with pets; an issue of crucial concern to a growing number of readers. While pets and their containers may now be required to pass through an X-ray machine, in addition to a metal detector, Air France (one of the world’s most pet-friendly carriers) still allows cats and dogs of up to 5 kilograms to travel under your seat in the cabin; larger animals are consigned to the hold. British Airways still allows guide dogs to sit next to their owner free of charge; while Virgin Atlantic will welcome dogs, cats and ferrets (in the hold) and award them ‘pet miles.’  KLM hosts pets at an ‘animal hotel’ at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, where they are fed, walked and watered, and their cages cleaned before re-boarding. Humans should be so lucky!  Itineraries and choice of airline can depend upon whether you can take a pooch or feline with you on board. 

So I was hardly surprised to learn from the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, Norwalk, Connecticut, that ‘pet travel soared 33 percent last year to a record 80 million and a full 14 percent, or 29 million, Americans travel with their pets.

‘People love their pets, and love being with their pets, and that means hitting the road with them,’ says Leslie Downey, director of communications at TravelersAdvantage.com. ‘The surging trend in pet travel has put more bark in luxury vacations, and airlines and resorts are listening.’

I can hardly wait to take my ferret Joshua on his first flight with Virgin Atlantic, when he can claim his ‘cool limited edition flying jacket and collar tag.’

Meanwhile, I am wrestling with a rising tide of anguished letters from peripatetic pet owners seeking the right airline, and the best route to fly with their pet – vaccination documents and quarantine rules, and arcane rules on certain breeds banned from cargo holds.

The latest pet conundrum arrives from Hans Carl, a reader, recently resident in Montreal-du-Gers, France, who asks how he can bring his ‘hand-fed female green-gold yellow head Amazon’ parrot over from Massachusetts.

‘We have searched for information from American and French veterinary authorities, but have nowhere been able to get firm advice on what is needed,’ Carl says, ‘Can she travel in the cabin (a cat cage does fine)?   If not, is the hold safe for a bird?’ 

Alas, I can find no way for him to bring the bird – short of getting her to talk her way through security and on to a flight, or fit her with a homing device to fly the Atlantic. British Airways, Air France and Virgin Atlantic say they do not fly birds either in the cabin, or in the normal baggage hold, although nobody could explain exactly why (aside from a frivolous suggestion that a parrot might cause a noise disturbance in the cabin, especially if it were to bark commands in a strange tongue).

Warwick Smith, a spokesman at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in Britain (Defra.gov.uk),  explained that there is a ‘temporary ban on importing live birds’ into any European Union country until December 2006, because of the risk of spreading avian ‘flu, although there are exceptions in the case of ‘endangered species.’

For advice on pet travel in or from the United States, go to  www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dq/faq_animal_importation.htm.     

Congratulations! You’ve decided that life is too short to endure the squalor and indignity of ‘cattle class’ and will join the ‘premium classes’ and shop around for the best prices in the front of the cabin. (That’s where you turn left instead of right at the door to the plane.)

But with first class costing around twice the price of business class; which in turn can cost twice the price of a flexible economy ticket and 20 times more than the cheapest ticket in the back of the plane, reconciling comfort, cost and convenience is a dialectical dilemma – it’s easy to pay a lot more for a lot less.

Premium economy can be a successful compromise.  Taiwan carrier Eva Air was the first airline to introduce a premium economy cabin in 1991, the year it started flying, with Evergreen Deluxe (renamed Elite Class on Boeing 777s), that rewarded economy passengers paying the full (Y) fare with a separate cabin, and better seating and service, followed in turn by Virgin Atlantic a year later, British Airways’ World Traveler Plus, and United Airlines Economy Plus and a growing number of carriers. Premium economy typically offers 38 to 42 inches of leg room – five to 7 inches more than regular cattle class at about one third of the price of a business class seat.

It attracts leisure travelers (especially the girth-stricken or those of normal height) and business travelers whose budgets do not stretch to business class. According to British Airways’ research, typical premium economy passengers tend to be self-employed or work for small to medium sized companies; or honeymooners. Savvy travelers often mix classes, flying out in business class, and back in premium economy, or vice versa, depending on the need to work or sleep.

The cheapest distance between two points is often flying with a carrier through its home hub rather than traveling direct, saving up to 50 percent on the price of a nonstop business class ticket – as strategy that I call ‘cross-border hubbing.’ 

Traveling from London to Bangkok last year, I forwent the chance to shell out a daunting £3,168 for a round-trip business-class ticket with British Airways, or Singapore Airlines, by paying £1,332 with Austrian Airlines and a seamless connection in Vienna. Traveling to the East Coast of the United States, consider Icelandair (fresh fish and malt whiskies in business class) – and an easy change of plane in Reykjavik makes a pleasant break. Finnair goes out of its way (no pun intended) to attract travelers from Britain to go via Helsinki to destinations in Asia and the Far East.

Many travel agents, such as long-haul specialists Trailfinders.com, offer so-called ‘negotiated’ fares with certain carriers.

For example, planning a hypothetical round-trip from London to Sydney for travel in April, Trailfinders.com offered me premium economy with Virgin Atlantic (via Hong Kong) for £1,665 (60-day advance booking); business class with China Airlines (via Amsterdam and Taipei) for £1.849; and Thai International (via Hong Kong) for £2,339.

Virgin Atlantic.com came up with premium economy for £2,600-£3,000; Upper Class (business) for £4,300 (restricted) and £6,700 (flexible) – compared with the lowest economy price of £1,083. British Airways.com offered premium economy for £918 and £1,189, and business class for £5,055. Opodo.com had the lowest economy fare (£727) with Emirates; premium economy, British Airways, £1,858; Qantas, £2498; and Japan Airlines, £5,832. Business class offers ranged from £2,564 with Etihad Airways, and £3,700 with Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific, to £4,040 with Qantas.

The lesson to learn from these prices is that not every airline or online travel agent can offer the best deal with every carrier.

If you’re traveling at least half way round the world, it may make sense to go all the way round (either east or west) by buying a round-the-world (RTW) ticket in business or premium economy. They are often cheaper and more flexible than a round-trip fare.

All three alliances (Oneworld, Star Alliance and Skyteam) offer a raft of prices and routings, usually with just two airlines; such as British Airways from Europe to Sydney, Qantas across the Pacific, and thence, via a variety of gateways, BA back to Europe. Star Alliance partners Air France and Lufthansa offer a similar around the world duo.

With such a wide world of choice out there, what is the best way to look before you book? Unless you know what flights you want, the strategy I recommend is first to go to OAGflights.com, or Amadeus.net, that allow you to check flight schedules and seat availability (though not prices) between any city pair, wherever you are in the world, and then shop around for the best prices.

Skytrax Research (www.airlinequality.com) can help you figure out the best, and worst, seats in premium cabins, along with seat dimensions and seating tips, on long-haul flights, for more than 325 airlines around the world. Seat plans at www.seatguru.com (part of TripAdvisor.com) show you which seats to ask for, and which to avoid, on nearly 100 airlines, including Air France, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Qantas.  Select an airline and an aircraft type, move your mouse over the seating plan, and seat descriptions will appear (green designates a ‘very good seat,’ yellow, ‘be aware!’ and red, a ‘bad seat.’)

Can flying make you ill – really ill? This is a question of growing concern to travelers, pilots, cabin-crew unions and the authorities responsible for the health and safety of passengers.

            We all know the symptoms: a dry throat, sore eyes, sinus pressure, throbbing head and swollen ankles. Call it airline cabin syndrome. It is caused by sitting for hours in cramped seats with low humidity (between zero and 15 percent) and a lack of fresh air. We all know what to do even if we don’t do it. Drink plenty of water, avoid alcohol, coffee and tea, which promote dehydration, and eat sparingly. And there are aerobic exercises you’ll find in the back of the in-flight magazines. As the airlines force-feed us food and alcohol to justify outrageous business-class fares.

            Quality of air has yet to compete with seat pitch and angle of recline and in-flight cuisine in the airlines’ battle for the hearts and minds of travelers in the glossy magazines. Airlines and their regulators worldwide seem reluctant to grant air quality higher status on their safety agendas.

Worries are now being expressed about the risk of passengers and crew catching serious airborne diseases – such as nasty strains of influenza, bronchitis, tuberculosis and Legionnaires’ diseases. This is because airlines are instructing pilots to save fuel by turning off one or more of their air-conditioning packs – especially after the meal when people are sleeping, thus reducing the amount of fresh air brought into the cabin and re-circulating more stale air.      

But that’s only part of the story. The most sinister cause of ill health in the air is evidence now emerging that cabin air is dangerously contaminated with volatile organophosphates from the chemical breakdown of engine lubricants and hydraulic fluids.  (Trimethylolpropane phosphate is a potent neurotoxin.) It is clear from copies of internal studies that aircraft manufacturers have know of this hazard for several years.

             Organophosphates (OPs) – developed in World War 11 as a by-product of nerve gas technology – are used in pesticides. They work by interfering with the functioning of the central nervous system. People exposed to large doses are known to suffer a range of violent symptoms, some of them fatal, but chronic effects of low doses or of exposure over long periods of time are little understood. Many scientists are convinced that the mysterious Gulf War syndrome resulted from troops being exposed to OPs. Some are convinced that that the presence of OPs in our diet and in the environment – such as aircraft cabins – cause long-term damage to health.

            An attorney for the Association of Flight Attendants in Seattle, says: ‘There are some very dirty aircraft out there and we have some very sick flight attendants. If they were Mexican farm workers in the Rio Grande, they’d have the right to be tested; but flight attendants and passengers don’t get that right: the airplane cabin is the only unregulated workplace in America with no standards that protect passengers and crew. The military have known of this problem for 20 years and have changed the type of hydraulic fluid they use. This is not being done in commercial aviation: the aerospace manufacturers, the airlines and the authorities have been keeping this dirty little secret.

            ‘Scientific studies going back to the late 1970s have demonstrated the problem of organophosphate contamination – including a 1983 FAA [U.S. Federal Aviation Administration] study. And there are thousands of cases of neuro-toxicity. But there’s been an active effort to keep this information out of the public eye. The Federal Government, the British and the Canadians, have all been sitting on this. Why? Because the authorities, along with NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] and the airlines, have been in the hip pocket of the aerospace manufacturers.

            ‘There’s a parallel disinformation campaign to make airborne diseases the focus of concern about cabin air. Let’s talk about disease, that’s the plan; they want to hide the real cause. People think they’ve got flu – it’s not flu, it’s low-level organophosphate poisoning: respiratory problems, sinus infections, nausea, loss of memory and motor control, vomiting, diarrhoea and cramps. Physicians don’t recognize it because they’re not looking for it. They should give people a cholinesterase test for organophosphate poisoning.

            At 30,000 feet (9,150 meters) the atmosphere in a plane has to be artificially created. At that altitude, the cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet, the equivalent of sitting on a mountain top, except for the healthy breeze. Outside air is too cold and too thin for us to breathe. So the aircraft ventilation systems draw in air and bring it to the correct temperature and pressure (by mixing hot engine air with outside cold air) and remove a lot of moisture, as high humidity can cause aircraft corrosion.

             Planes built before the early 1980s provided a complete change of fresh cabin air about once every three minutes. Modern aircraft supply a mix of fresh and re-circulated air, and the change rate can be as low as once every 10 minutes.

            In some aircraft, such as Boeing 757s, the air is half fresh and half recycled, and the mix cannot be changed. In other aircraft, such as Boeing 747s, pilots can choose whether to operate the air-conditioning units at ‘normal’ or ‘reduced’ flow (reducing the amount of fresh air by a half to two thirds) or shutting off one of the three ventilation packs completely.

            Airlines can save up to two percent of fuel costs, representing millions of dollars for a large airline, by cutting in half the amount of fresh air they bring into the cabin – thereby re-circulating 50 percent of cabin air. Turning a pack off not only saves fuel, but also reduces noise in the cabin.

            Whatever class you fly, the quality of the air will be the same – although the cockpit crew gets a separate source of cold fresh air, partly because of the heat generated by instrument panels and electrically heated windows. Pilots get about 150 cubic feet of fresh air a minute per person; first class gets 50 cfm a person, and economy gets less than 7cfm.

            The quality of re-circulated air depends on the efficiency of catalytic air filters and how often they are changed. (A short dry cough is typical of high ozone concentration – along with eye discomfort, nose and throat irritation and headache.) The new generation of HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filters are said to remove at least 99.97 percent of all air particles 0.3 microns in size – which includes large bacteria but excludes viruses.

            Even HEPA filters cannot eliminate organophosphates from cabin air. There is evidence that the filters themselves can be a source of contamination when heavy molecules from, say, hydraulic fluid accumulate in the filters (and coat the inside of the air plenum, or air shafts), to be subsequently released into recirculated cabin air. There are cases where HEPA filters have caught fire in the plane, releasing contaminated air into the cabin.

            Evidence that poor air quality may cause serious disease is mainly circumstantial. This is due to a lack of research and the difficulty of tracking passengers after a flight and an incubation period of three to four days, which means that people don’t always link illness with a particular flight. Plus, there are no international standards on air quality, except for levels of carbon monoxide, ozone and carbon dioxide.

            The FAA has set the maximum concentration of carbon monoxide at 50 parts per million (and ozone at 0.1 ppm, with a 0.25 ppm ceiling) and has proposed lowering the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide from 30,000 parts per million to 5,000 parts. The Civil Aviation Authority in Britain says it will follow suit. But that figure is still five times higher than the comfort guidelines for buildings. Pilots report that carbon dioxide levels are rarely controlled.

            Paradoxically, smoke-free flights may have exacerbated the problem. Smoke is a visible pollutant, so you needed much more air to disperse it. On nonsmoking flights people don’t notice the pollution so much, so you can turn down the air-conditioning.

            Dr Richard Dawood, an expert on travel medicine and author of ‘Travelers’ Health,’ says: ‘Re-circulated air is filtered with varying degrees of efficiency in taking out tiny particles, depending on who you believe, the plane manufacturers or the airlines. But in the days of smoking flights you could still smell smoke in the front of the plane from re-circulated air, not just smoke wafting in through the open parts. So filters may not be terribly efficient.

            ‘The best documented cases of disease transmission have been when the plane has been on the ground for a long time, when you don’t even have enough power to get any fresh air coming in – it’s all re-circulated. You only need a few of those 200 or 300 people to have a transmittable disease and there’s a moderate chance of catching it.

            ‘Once you’re in the air, you are even more vulnerable to catching things because of removal of moisture in your respiratory passages due to the very low humidity – air comes in to the cabin at zero humidity and goes out at maybe five to 10 percent. Your mucous surfaces dry out, which makes it easier for germs to bed in and make themselves comfortable.’

            A spokesman for the civil aviation section of the International Transport Workers Federation, in London, says: ‘We’re not alarmist, but cabin air quality is a growing problem. Air quality has been deteriorating consistently year on year. There is a breed of complaints of extreme dizziness, nausea, hypoxia, or breathlessness, headache and loss of motor control, during and after flights.

            ‘There’s no doubt that pilots do turn off air-conditioning packs to save fuel, but whether there are major health risks due to that is still an open question. None of the airlines will provide data on how much air is re-circulated. Pilots are not obliged to report this. And except for carbon dioxide levels, there are no legal limits for contaminants.

            ‘We’re establishing a worldwide task-force to look at cabin air standards. There has been a move in Congress for an enquiry into air cabin quality. The outcome is that we have reached an agreement with Boeing to put that legislative action on hold in return for a $2 million research study on cabin environment with independent experts, including us and the Association of Flight Attendants in the United States on an advisory panel to oversee that research.’

            The report was due by the end of 1999.

            Chris Witkowski at the Association of Flight Attendants in Seattle, says: ‘Boeing offered to do this study to create more time in view of the interest in Congress. I think they wanted to have a buy in from us, so that whatever they came up with, we’d be kind of backed into a corner to go along with whatever they came up with. In discussions with them about the study, they were never very forthcoming with this kind of information, which tells me that they’re just trying to cover up this problem. And by looking at other things, like seat comfort, trying to get away from health issues.

 ‘We’ve had this problem with air quality since the late 1970s, early 1980s, and there never seems to be a resolution. What we’re looking at right now are a large number of complaints for which the industry has professed they really don’t understand

the cause. We have documentary evidence that the industry has known for a long time about the danger of organophosphate poisoning from the chemical breakdown of lubricating oils and hydraulic fluids. We are concerned that the FAA has trusted the industry to take care of these kind of problems instead of taking a more active role in the area of cabin-crew and passenger health.

            ‘I don’t know how this is going to play out, but certainly it is intolerable and unacceptable that the potential for chemical contamination has never been looked at. Around 60 percent of aircraft accidents are due to pilot error. The reason the military doesn’t use the same types of organic lubricants and fluids as civil aviation is because of the effect on pilots. Since the U2 incident with Gary Powers, they changed to synthetic fluids.

            ‘We have been in support of bringing more outside air into the cabin, so that you can dilute viruses, bacteria and so on. But we must make sure that the air we bring in is not contaminated by organophosphates. That is something that has to be addressed up-front and publicly. Airlines must produce maintenance records of engine systems and filtration and catalytic converters used to filter air coming into the cabin to determine if there has been loss or leakage of fluid. And then to see what corrective procedures were implemented.

‘We have to be careful not to jump into saying what needs to be done until we know more about the extent and nature of the problem. The bottom line is that we need to come up with regulations and policies that make sense on the quality of cabin air.’

Roger Collis 2000 New York Times

Airborne between Paris and Hong Kong on a Global Airlines Boeing 2000ER, John and Jane Harbinger are lingering over lunch in the gourmet restaurant on the top deck (not much point in fast food on a 16-hour flight) figuring how they’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon. Jane decides on a soothing séance in the beauty parlor: John will make a few calls from the business center and polish his presentation.  They’ll meet for drinks at six in the suite before dinner. ‘Would sushi hit the spot? I’ll book a table downstairs.’    John asks a passing ‘skycop’ for directions. ‘Head down the main corridor towards the tail and take the elevator down to the bottom deck.’

            Planes such as this three-deck 1,000-seat Goliath – which entered service in 2015 – are derived from the 600-seat super jumbos promised (or threatened) by Airbus and Boeing in 1999.  They are flying villages, allowing infinite scope for social congress, with half a dozen restaurant concessions – from classical French to McDonalds’ junk food – casinos, shops, cyber-cafes with Internet access, and health clubs. About the only things missing are a pool and an outside jogging track. But you never know!

            There is no such thing these days as first, business or economy class. The price you pay depends on your choice of seating, cuisine and entertainment along with the kind of service you want on the ground. Accommodation ranges from standard cattle class and ergonomic sleeper seats with more personal space to air-conditioned cabins with beds, bathroom and butler service, that convert to a daytime lounge. For an extra charge, the airline will deliver a container to your home or office, transport you through the airport and load you onto the plan. Some tycoons have converted their offices into flight containers, re-creating the private railroad cars of a century ago – the ultimate in seamless travel.

            Many people travel ‘a la carte.’ You book a seat or cabin and pay extra for meals and in-flight facilities and lounges, limos and other trimmings on the ground. Traveling cattle class is no longer much of an ordeal. You only have to stay in your seat for take-off and landing; the rest of the time you can move around freely. Skycops patrol the crowded aisles ready to deal with unruly or abusive passengers who can threaten not only the well being of other passengers but the safety of the aircraft. After all, on a long-haul flight you can be in the air for up to 18 hours – almost long enough to get married, start a family and get divorced, although not necessarily in that order. Some enterprising agents are using reservations computers to help people choose in-flight companions. They punch in your high-altitude likes and dislikes and match you up with a suitable seatmate.

            Global Airlines is one of three mega-carriers that together share 80 percent of the world air travel market – the culmination of the giant airline alliances and code-sharing deals that carved up the skies in the late 1990s. These compete with consortia of regional airlines in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, along with half a dozen long-haul carriers mainly serving the business market.    

            Code sharing, whereby two or more airlines operate the same flight, and ‘block seat’ arrangements, whereby one airline sells seats on another airline’s flights, became commonplace by 2000. The abundance of space on the superjumbos allowed several airlines to share the same plane with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine and service.

This led to the concept of the ‘virtual’ airline. You don’t need to own aircraft and infrastructure when you can ‘brand’ your own cabin in a superjumbo. Travel agents can buy blocks of seats (and hotel rooms) and market them under their own brands to corporate customers.

Since 1999, superjumbos – along with advanced technology for better control of the airways with new satellite navigation systems and new airports and terminals – have diminished the specter of gridlock in the skies by quadrupling air traffic capacity since 1999. But the challenge was daunting. Since 1999, air traffic has been growing at around 10 percent a year.

Thus the number of passengers has doubled every seven years, reaching a staggering 20 billion in 2020. Where are all these people going? And, more to the point, why do they all seem to be going with me?

The growth of tourism in China has been phenomenal. The Chinese government set the ball rolling when it cut the working week to five days, giving the nation’s workers an extra half-day off a week.

This was even better news for the travel trade, because – assuming a workforce of 750 million from a total population of 1.2 billion – it meant an extra 15 billion days’ leisure time coming on stream. And with more disposable income and the liberalization of passports, the Chinese have become international travelers.

According to the World Tourism Organization, China now generates more out-bound tourism than any country in the world apart from Japan, Germany and the United States. China has also become the world’s top tourist destination with 137 million visitors in 2020.

The world’s top 30 airports will handle more than 16 billion passengers this year. The traditional mega-hubs such as Chicago O’Hare, Los Angeles International, Atlanta, London Heathrow, Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok and Singapore’s Changi are bursting at the seams, each handling around 200 million passengers a year.  But an airport building boom, especially in Asia, has added capacity. China has built more than 50 new airports since 1999.

Meanwhile, the creation of ‘wayports,’ or new hubs, in remote parts of Norway and Siberia has siphoned off a large amount of connecting traffic. More than 30 percent of the people milling around Heathrow, for example, were simply trying to get somewhere else.

Supersonic travel has become space age with Orbitol, a 50-passenger space plane that travels in low earth orbit enabling it to fly from London to Sydney in 45 minutes. Unlike the old space shuttles, Orbitol takes off and lands under its own power. After accelerating through Mach 5 to 80, 000 feet, the plane leaves the atmosphere, continues to accelerate and becomes a satellite itself after reaching 250,000 feet – around four times the cruising altitude of Concorde – with an orbital velocity of Mach 25 to 30.

More down to earth, high-speed maglev (magnetically levitated) trains traveling at 300 miles per hour have replaced air travel on journeys of up to 500 miles, releasing slots at major airports, most of which have train stations, for long-haul traffic.

Regional airlines serve ‘thinner routes,’ enabling business travelers to avoid mega-hubs. Thus ‘regional long-haul’ services allow travelers to fly point-to-point between cities such as Manchester and Osaka, Seattle and Perth, Stuttgart and San Francisco.

Mega-hubs, with a larger daily population than many major cities, are no longer a means to an end but an end in itself, destinations in their own right. They form a worldwide network of alternative cities – what you might call the terrestrial equivalent of space stations – with their own business communities and civic amenities, hotels and conference centers. Who needs to go downtown when you are already there? Many people don’t travel to cities any more, just to airports.

John Harbinger, on-line to his office in Broken Springs, Colorado, asks himself a routine question: whether he really needed to make this trip.

Technology enables (and requires) him to be totally wired at all times.  The No. 1 rule for business travelers is wherever you are, always to be on the phone to somewhere else. So why travel? John rationalizes that this is a working vacation – a chance to bring Jane along. He’s looking    forward to a round of golf with his Chinese associates. And he and Jane plan to take off for a five-day airship cruise among the Hong Kong islands.

Modern airships are safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly, as they sail and hover less than 100 feet above the ground.  An airship cruise is a spectacular way to see many wonders of the world, such as the Amazon and what’s left of  the rain forests in Brazil and Peru, chateaux of the Loire, fly along the Nile to see the pyramids, explore Venice or make an air safari in Kenya.

‘Virtual conferencing,’ has done away with the need for many business trips. A 100-inch (256 centimeter) illuminated high-resolution screen with ‘wrap-around’ sound makes everyone seem life-like and gives the illusion that you’re in the same room. This means that you can participate normally in the discussion; using the same body language.

Travel was in danger of becoming an end in itself. I am therefore I travel: I travel therefore I am. Travel is about human interaction, hands-on experience. Getting the best return on your ‘interaction expense’ is a trade-off between cost in terms of time, money and hassle and the opportunity of staying doing something more productive somewhere else.

Of course, there’s sometimes a need to be somewhere in person – the eye contact, the real, compared to the cybernetic, handshake, the impromptu meeting and, of course, the social dimension can be pure gold. It is not something you can quantify; it’s intuitive, gut feeling. Who goes to a conference to listen to the speakers? You can pick up a transcript or receive it live in your office. It’s real-time networking that counts.

In the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Homeric hero, Ulysses, back in 1842:

‘I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch where thro’

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.’

But business travel is less poetic and a good deal less sentimental. Which is why John Harbinger makes fewer trips these days. This excursion with Jane is a fairly rare experience in real-time reality. Like most other road warriors, John embraces the new ‘travel avoidance’ technology, such as virtual conferencing and virtual meetings in real or ‘displaced’ time, with chiliastic zeal.

            The technology is rooted in voice recognition software developed back in the late 90s that enabled you to call a computer from anywhere in the world, check your e-mail your voice-mail and faxes, either by computer or through the telephone. You could convert them from voice to text, or vice versa, and re-direct them by any medium.

            Recent advances in artificial intelligence make it possible to hold an open-ended discussion through a computer. The machine not only understands the meaning of what you say but replies to you in a normal voice – which might be the digitalized voice of a real person. 

John Millennium, along with his colleagues, has had his voice ‘digitalized’ and stored on-line. Early computer-generated voices sounded robotic because words were mechanically strung together into sentences, thereby losing the rhythm of the dialogue; whereas digitalized voices are produced by recording entire sentences, then shoehorning in numbers and letters of the alphabet.

Voices are recorded in three ways. If you say the number nine, for instance, at the beginning of a word, it sounds different from if you say it in the middle or the end. The same applies to words and phrases.   

It’s hard to detect a digitalized voice in displaced time from a real voice in real time. Meetings can thus be conducted in real or displaced time. You program your responses, to say, a budget meeting, in advance and your digitalized voice conducts a dialogue on your behalf. Cognitive programs are being designed whereby John can participate vicariously at several meetings while he is away. It beats the old way of having answering machines talk to one another, or batting e-mails back and forth, communication lost in fruitless volleys of non sequiturs.

Back in their suite, the Harbingers are mentally packing their bags for an ‘out of this world’ space vacation. They have been armchair astronauts for years and are looking forward to five days in a Disney Space Resort 300 miles above Earth. They will take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a NASA space shuttle adapted to carry 40 tourists, experiencing weightless for about 15 minutes.

The resort accommodates 300 people in cruise-ship luxury. It takes an hour and a half to make a complete orbit of the Earth, spinning like a roulette wheel at about one revolution a minute, thus developing artificial gravity.

You stay in an outer ring, where you experience about half of normal gravity – just about half your normal weight – so you can use bathroom facilities and such at practically normal conditions. A central column section has zero gravity. This is the entertainment and recreation center, which guests can visit for an hour or so at a time. There are windows in the central column to view the Earth.

There are lots of entertainment possibilities at zero gravity, including a gym with padded walls. Astronauts have found that blood that is normally drawn down to your legs is released and drifts upwards. You become thinner, your chest expands by two to three inches, your face fills out and wrinkles disappear.

While Jane muses about a second honeymoon in space, John is thinking about the final frontier in space travel – to experience Einstein’s paradox of relativity, that if you travel faster than the speed of light, you are younger when you get back than when you left. Daunting implications for a career in international business.

Air France flight 795 from Copenhagen to Paris is full; and it’s been a long day. Martin Simon, European marketing director for the consumer products division of Mistral Laboratories, is wedged between a hirsute Swede and a disconcertingly attractive blonde. He balances a Scotch and Perrier on his open briefcase; and is in the familiar state of shifting mental gears between markets.

Martin’s thoughts right now are hovering somewhere between the pleasant meeting he has just left (after all Danish sales are on plan and the smoked eel was delicious) and the somewhat more combative session he expects to face tomorrow.  The French company has a sales problem and is recommending that they trim their TV schedule to protect their operating profit. Martin is opposed to this; feeling that they are already spending close to minimum viable ‘reach and frequency.’ And to risk losing share of advertising at this stage of the market development might be disastrous for the brand.

Martin knows that from an overall European point of view he can easily compensate for a French profit shortfall by moving notional funds from the German market without hurting that business. (He suspects that the Germans have quite a bit more money ‘sandbagged’ in their budget.) But of course he has local sensibilities to contend with; there are few general managers willing to forgo a good end of year result for their country profit centers in the interests of the European area – especially to the consumer products division for which Martin is responsible. It is only too easy to cut ‘discretionary’ marketing expenses to the detriment of future sales and profits.

Of course, Martin is no stranger to this kind of scene. During more than fifteen years of multi-national marketing he has mastered some of the diplomatic arts; how to get results unobtrusively by letting others think that his ideas originated with them; he knows how to get inside the thought processes of the local people – much more demanding than simply speaking the language; an ability to project oneself into the wiles and wherefores and mores of the society. Culture shock is an endemic hazard for the international man.

Martin must also judge which battles are critical for him to win, and those which can be gracefully conceded to local amour propre.  He has to know when and how to refer disputes to a higher court of appeal. In this case, he must judge whether the French really have a sound business case, or whether they are just ‘being difficult,’ interpreted as ‘siege mentality,’ or the ‘not invented here’ syndrome. He knows how crucial it is to be able to evaluate local recommendations in the light of other market priorities throughout Europe. Because, for Martin Simon, international marketing is not just marketing across frontiers; it means having an overview mentality – the ability to match resources with opportunities on a global scale. Local markets are competing all the time for funds, and for Martin’s limited time. He needs to judge the priority and the quality of plans that are submitted to him – to reconcile each country’s profit exigencies with those for the whole of Europe.

This is not easy. Mistral operates a ‘matrix organization’ in which Martin shares responsibility with the local general managers for his product division within their legal entities. Martin’s divisional marketing managers only report to him on a ‘functional’ or a dotted-line basis; but to the country general managers on a line basis. Martin report to the president, consumer products division; whereas each general manager reports to the president, international operations, both at the corporate Kremlin in Broken Springs, Colorado. It is a structure which exacerbates the inherent conflict between the European area and local management. ‘Kinetic equilibrium,’ is how Mistral’s chairman described it. (The doctrine was later enshrined in a Harvard Business School case study: Chameleon Corporation.)

Martin believes it is better off trying to persuade than to legislate. The knack is to know whether a problem or issue requires a ‘strategic’ decision taken by himself or can be left to a ‘routine’ decision by his local people. The key to an effective relationship is personal credibility and trust. Martin’s effectiveness derives in part from the dialectical tension between his role as a ‘supervisor’ and his role as ‘consultant.’ The reconciliation is particularly onerous in times of serious contention.

Striking the right balance will be the key to the French meeting. He will need to draw upon all his reserves of credibility.

The plane is on time at Paris Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, but the autoroute from Roissy is closed part of the way for one-lane traffic. It is half past eleven by the time Martin reaches his hotel – too late, perhaps, to call his wife in Brussels. He chats for a few minutes with Nicolas, the night porter; then takes a bottle of Perrier up to his room and goes through the French budgets once again. He knows that a conflict is inevitable.

Tomorrow morning he is on his own.

Roger Collis 1973 Werbung/Publicite

[Another ‘blast from the past;’ aan archive story from my forthcoming collection,  ‘Management Man.] www.rogercollis.co.uk      

The latest return to the future comes in the form of the patented ‘Flex-Seat’ from Boston-based Jacob-Innovations – a ‘two-storey pod-like design for business-class seating which can be converted to an economy-class set-up on demand’ for airlines ‘that might want to alter a plane’s configuration depending on how many tickets of each class it has sold; and at the same time, ‘increasing the density of a conventional business class cabin by 50 per cent while providing full reclining’ – whatever that means.

The Flex-Seat was presented at the ‘Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg – ‘launchpad for cabin programmes that showcase tomorrow’s designs. Check it out at http://jacob-innovations.com/FLEX-SEAT.html.  Flex-Seat looks to me like Lego re-invented by the Japanese – pods for bods. Think of it as an accountant’s dream for raising the ergonomic stakes of ‘cattle-class’, or maximising the return on investment of ‘premium’ passengers – responsible, according to IATA, for 25-30 percent of passenger revenues but only 7-10 percent of numbers.’

Whatever the merits of Flex-Seat, airlines need a deus ex machina to extricate them from a dire dilemma: how to reconfigure the expensive real estate of aircraft cabins to conform to a new reality: that all-important premium traffic is declining; and that the class system,  as it has evolved over the years, needs to be re-invented.   

The statistics are appalling: premium ticket sales continue to fall – they were off 21.3 percent off in June 2009 compared with June 2008, according to the International Air Transport Association Premium Travel Monitor, which should have most airlines in a catatonic tailspin. Premium travel numbers have been in decline for 12 consecutive months.

Even the business travelers that are staying in the front of the plane during the down-turn are doing so at cheaper rates; revenues from premium travel fell even more – 41 percent in the second quarter as airlines slash prices in a frantic attempt to maintain demand.
 
The effect on the bottom line has been catastrophic. Consider this: according to IATA, ‘Premium passengers are responsible for 25-30 percent of passenger revenues but only 7-10 percent of numbers.’ Every percentage loss of travelers in the premium cabins reflects on the yield like a shadow on the wall.

And yet airlines have only themselves to blame. They failed to learn the lessons of the 9/11 crisis, which exquisitely coincided with the cusp of a recession, and sent travel into free fall – precipitating a sea change in the way people view business travel, and view their lives, sharpening their priorities.   And they failed to understand that their ‘branding,’ their class system as it had evolved over the past 40 years had got out of sync with the changing needs of the business traveler.  What is more, they have ‘debased’ the value of their brands through indiscriminate upgrades and cut prices.

Even I am too young to go back to the 1930’s with bunk beds on the flying boats and the trans-continental flights between New York (La Guardia and California (Birkbank L.A.) taking two or three days. The opening chapter in Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel ‘The last tycoon’ has an opening chapter on such a flight.  My only surrogate recollection is a photo of a woman fastening her stockings on a bunk bed on a United Airlines flight in the 1930’s.

Lillian Hellman wrote about the time on a flight from Los Angeles to New York in the 1950s when Hollywood producer Harry Cohn sent back an invitation for her to join him for lunch, saying that it was much healthier than the “dreck on the plane.”

“Two of his younger employees hauled down the largest picnic hamper I have ever seen,” Hellman wrote. “It was filled with forty or fifty fine, thin chicken sandwiches, cold white wine, prosciutto wrapped around perfect ripe melon, homemade pickles, large peaches, wonderful walnut cookies.”

So what else is new?

When I started traveling on business in the mid-1960s, there were only two classes on the old narrow-body planes and the early jumbos – first and economy. And only three types of fare: first; full (flexible) economy; and ‘excursion.’

First class was a golden ghetto for chief honchos and the seriously rich. Everyone else flew economy – which wasn’t nearly as grand as business class is today: you had to pay for drinks and headsets (with those little plugs that used to bore into your brain) but the food was okay and you had enough space to stretch your legs. Cattle class it was not. And it was democratic. You might find yourself chatting to a lieutenant if not a captain of industry, a diplomat, an aircraft salesman, a honeymoon couple, or perhaps an ambiguous lady of uncertain provenance. There was much scope for social congress.

My fondest memory of those days is of flying back from Chicago to Europe. Staff at the row of airline check-in desks behaved like barkers at a fairground. As most flights left more or less at the same time in the evening, I would up and down with my flexible ticket and bestow my custom on the airline that would ‘guarantee’ me four seats across,  ideally behind the bulkhead  in the non-movie section of the cabin, where I could stretch out and sleep. More creative souls would invoke a last-moment client meeting and upgrade to first class using their Air Travel Cards, swearing blind that there were no seats left in economy.
 
Life became more complicated when business class emerged as a third cabin in the late 1970s. The idea, you may remember, was to ‘reward’ business travelers paying the full economy (Y) fare on the new wide-bodied planes with their own exclusive cabin, sequestrating them from backpackers and savvy leisure travelers who might have paid two-thirds or less for their tickets. Comfort and service in most long-haul business class cabins is arguably more comfortable than the old first class, with lie-flat all-singing-all-dancing sleeper seats, and a galaxy of perks and gizmos; but a lot less exclusive.
 
Piling on frills inevitably piled on the price of the ticket. First class can cost twice the price of business class, which in turn costs up to four times more than a fully flexible economy ticket and 20 times more than the cheapest excursion ticket.

Faced with a blizzard of discounted or ‘gray’ fares, upgrades, special promotions, such as two-for-one fares, and a maze of frequent flier awards, it’s easy to pay a lot more for a lot less – or vice versa.

Virgin Atlantic re-invented the two-class (first/economy) system in 1985 with its Upper Class – billed as first class service and comfort at business-class prices. Upper Class became the concept for the early 1990s as several airlines abandoned first class for a more spacious business class (business class had become a tough act to follow; though there are always people prepared to pay serious money for serious in-flight real estate.)
 
Continental Airlines was the first carrier to create a combined first/business class, followed by Delta Air Lines, Air Canada, KLM, and many others. Even airlines that have kept first class cabins, only offer them on certain routes.

Premium economy is a successful compromise between the ever-increasing cost of business class and the squalor of cattle class. It attracts and business travelers whose budgets, or corporate travel policies, do not permit them to fly business class; and many leisure, especially older people.  The idea is to ‘reward’ economy passengers paying the full fare, and passengers who could no longer afford business class, with a separate cabin – echoing the rationale for business class 40 years ago.

Perhaps it is time to re-invent the wheel.

The statistics are appalling: premium ticket sales continue to fall – they were off 21.3 percent off in June 2009 compared with June 2008, according to the International Air Transport Association Premium Travel Monitor, which should have most airlines in a catatonic tailspin.     Premium travel numbers have been in decline for 12 consecutive months.

Even the business travelers that are staying in the front of the plane during the down-turn are doing so at cheaper rates; revenues from premium travel fell even more – 41 percent in the second quarter as airlines slash prices in a frantic attempt to maintain demand.  

The effect on the bottom line has been catastrophic. Consider this: according to IATA, ‘Premium passengers are responsible for 25-30 percent of passenger revenues but only 7-10 percent of numbers.’ Every percentage loss of travelers in the premium cabins reflects on the yield like a shadow on the wall.

And yet legacy carriers have only themselves to blame. They failed to learn the lessons of the 9/11 crisis, which exquisitely coincided with the cusp of a recession, and sent travel into free fall – precipitating a sea change in the way people view business travel, and view their lives, sharpening their priorities.   And they failed to understand that their ‘branding,’ their class system as it had evolved over the past 40 years had got out of sync with the changing needs of the business traveler.     What is more, they have ‘debased’ the value of the brands they have spent zillions zealously advertising, through indiscriminate upgrades and cut prices. 

I remember Jan Carlson, former CEO of SAS, saying years ago, just before SAS replaced its first class cabin with an upgraded business class, that ‘Our first class cabin is the most expensive staff dining room in the sky!’

When I started traveling on business in the mid-1960s, there were only two classes on the old narrow-body planes and the early jumbos – first and economy. And only three types of fare: first; full (flexible) economy; and ‘excursion.’

First class was a golden ghetto for chief honchos and the seriously rich. Everyone else flew economy – which wasn’t nearly as grand as business class is today: you had to pay for drinks and headsets (with those little plugs that used to bore into your brain) but the food was okay and you had enough space to stretch your legs. Cattle class it was not. And it was democratic. You might find yourself chatting to a lieutenant if not a captain of industry, a diplomat, an aircraft salesman, a honeymoon couple, or perhaps an ambiguous lady of uncertain provenance. There was much scope for social congress.

My fondest memory of those days is of flying back from Chicago to Europe. Staff at the row of airline check-in desks behaved like barkers at a fairground. As most flights left more or less at the same time in the evening, I would up and down with my flexible ticket and bestow my custom on the airline that would ‘guarantee’ me four seats across,  ideally behind the bulkhead  in the non-movie section of the cabin, where I could stretch out and sleep. More creative souls would invoke a last-moment client meeting and upgrade to first class using their Air Travel Cards, swearing blind that there were no seats left in economy.

Life became more complicated when business class emerged as a third cabin in the late 1970s. The idea, you may remember, was to ‘reward’ business travelers paying the full economy (Y) fare on the new wide-bodied planes with their own exclusive cabin, sequestrating them from backpackers and savvy leisure travelers who might have paid two-thirds or less for their tickets. Comfort and service in most long-haul business class cabins is arguably more comfortable than the old first class, with lie-flat all-singing-all-dancing sleeper seats, and a galaxy of perks and gizmos; but a lot less exclusive.  

Legacy carriers have learned much from the ‘no-frills’ model – about such things as ‘yield management,’ which aims at getting the maximum ‘yield’ for a given flight. The old notion of ‘official’ fares has disappeared. The price you pay depends on the cabin you fly in, ticket flexibility, advance booking, day of the week, and the time of day you travel. There are more combinations of prices than possible moves in a game of chess.    Larger planes meant more seats to fill – at any price.   While premium cabins have become ever more opulent, and expensive, economy travel has never been cheaper, or more degrading.

Piling on frills inevitably piled on the price of the ticket. First class can cost twice the price of business class, which in turn costs up to four times more than a fully flexible economy ticket and 20 times more than the cheapest excursion ticket.

Faced with a blizzard of discounted or ‘gray’ fares, upgrades, special promotions, such as two-for-one fares, and a maze of frequent flier awards, it’s easy to pay a lot more for a lot less – or vice versa.

Virgin Atlantic re-invented the two-class (first/economy) system in 1985 with its Upper Class – billed as first class service and comfort at business-class prices. Upper Class became the concept for the early 1990s as several airlines abandoned first class for a more spacious business class (business class had become a tough act to follow; though there are always people prepared to pay serious money for serious in-flight real estate.) 

Continental Airlines was the first carrier to create a combined first/business class, followed by Delta Air Lines, Air Canada, KLM, and many others. Even airlines that have kept first class cabins, only offer them on certain routes.

Full economy fare is the worst buy in the sky, unless you’re using it tactically to upgrade. If you’ve got to sit in the back, you might as well shop for the cheapest discount fare, savor what you’re saving, and if you have to change your plans, just throw away the return coupon and buy another ticket.

Premium economy is a successful compromise between the ever-increasing cost of business class and the squalor of cattle class. It attracts and business travelers whose budgets, or corporate travel policies, do not permit them to fly business class; and many leisure, especially older people.  The idea was to ‘reward’ economy passengers paying the full fare, and passengers who could no longer afford business class, with a separate cabin – echoing the rationale for business class 40 years ago.

According to British Airways’ research, typical premium economy passengers tend to be self-employed or work for small to medium sized companies; or honeymooners. Savvy travelers often mix classes, flying out in economy, and back in premium economy, or vice versa, depending on the need to work or sleep.

Taiwan carrier Eva Air was the first airline to introduce a premium economy cabin in May 1991, the year it started flying, with Evergreen Deluxe (renamed Elite Class on Boeing 777s), that rewarded economy passengers paying the full (Y) fare with a separate cabin, and better seating and service, followed in turn by Virgin Atlantic a year later, British Airways, Air New Zealand, and a growing number of other carriers that include All Nippon Airways, BMI, SAS, China Southern Airlines, HINA Southern Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Vietnam Airlines, and Thai Airways on certain flights.

Travel value in travel does not depend on how much you spend but on a shifting equation of cost, convenience and comfort – exacerbated by safety/security measures and the concomitant frustration suffered by road warriors. And luxury too is a moveable feast; it often depends on the dialectical balance of your priorities.

We all travel in what I call different modes, depending on the purpose of the trip and where we are going. There are times when the most welcome sight in the world is someone holding a card with my name on it when I emerge from immigration – especially at a strange or gritty airport after a long flight; or to see the inside of an airport lounge where I can suffer in comfort during an impromptu three-hour wait for a delayed flight.

Airlines are foolish to assume that that ‘business’ and ‘leisure’ travelers have a different set of needs and behavior.   As I have often pointed out, neither category is monolithic; people travel in raft of different ‘modes,’ different frames of mind, with different needs, motivations, priorities and prejudices, depending on why we’re going and where we are headed. Business travelers may range from ‘hard-core’ (clinching a deal) to ‘soft-core’ (attending a conference; combining business with pleasure). Some corporate travelers have deeper pockets than others; individual and small-business travelers, for whom travel expenses are their bottom line, may share budget priorities with back-packers and package tourists.   And there is no shortage of ‘high-end’ leisure travelers among the denizens of the first-class cabins.

Travel mode often dictates choice of airlines and hotels and class of travel and the price we are prepared to pay. Road warriors may sometimes switch modes on the same trip for ‘business extension’ weekends with their partner. Business travelers can become leisure travelers when they are on holiday, or even package tourists when traveling to unfamiliar places. How you choose to spend your time in the air may depend on your mode – hence office mode, dining mode, relaxation/entertainment mode, or indeed a bad mode. On the morning flight out when you are wide awake, you want to work; coming home, you may want to relax, or sleep.

Thus, traveling west during the day, when you’re ready to drop into bed anyway when you arrive, you might opt to fly premium economy, even economy on a very cheap ticket – especially if you can target an off-peak flight with an empty seat next to you. For a fraction of the difference between cattle and business class you could afford to ‘upgrade’ to gourmet class with your own sandwiches filled with high-rent items such as smoke eel, a pound of beluga caviar and perhaps a thermos of cold vichyssoise. Traveling east, you might want to invest in a sleeper-seat in business class, and pass on the meal.

I remember Concorde for the exquisite discomfort of sitting in a 100-seat cigar tube. You have about the same legroom as cattle class, but you feel no pain. After all, you are getting there in half the time. How good you feel about it may depend on how much you value your time (and where you want to spend it) – as distinct from how much you think your time is worth.

The jury is still out on whether one class business-only airlines are a viable model for the future.

But the Airbus A380 super-jumbo, capable of carrying up to 800 people opens the prospect of the ‘flying village,’ allowing passengers a choice of where they sit and move around.

I could envisage one of the airline alliances, such as Star Alliance or Oneworld, operating the ‘flying village’ for member airlines, who might share the same plane on certain routes, with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine, amenities and style of service.  Franchises would be sold for wining and dining – from gourmet to fast food (although what’s the point of fast food on a 16-hour flight?) and other amenities.

The notion of first class, business class and economy might disappear in favor of ‘a la carte’ travel, whereby you would book a seat, or a cabin, and pay extra for meals, in-flight perks, entertainment options, lounges, fast-track security, curb-side check-in and door-to-door limo transfers. Traveling cattle class might not be so much of an ordeal. You need only be stuck in your seat for take-off and landing; the rest of the time you’d be free to move around the plane and explore the facilities.

Meanwhile, airlines should take a hard look at the complex mess that their notion of class has become.

The time is long overdue for them to adopt the time-honored corporate practice of re-inventing the wheel.

What incenses travelers more than anything these days is that the price of an air ticket they have purchased online can just about double when it comes to the final amount charged. A friend flew from Frankfurt to London with Lufthansa: The fare was 11 euros – plus 99 euros ‘taxes.’!) Just as we have become reconciled to a raft of taxes - as wide-ranging as the U.S. Animal & Plant Health Inspection Tax, the Sydney Noise Tax and the Canadian Airport Improvement Tax – here come the airlines with extra charges for all manner of things, from checked baggage, onboard meals and beverages, even soft drinks and water, to changing tickets, and (caveat emptor) hanging on for hours on the help-line.
           Airlines have been moving towards à la carte, pay-for-all-the-extras pricing for some time, adding charges for everything from meals to window seats – following the budget carriers’ lead, believing that this is the magic bullet for restoring profitability.
           Travelers now find that that the final cost of a flight is three times more than the than the starting-off price of the ticket.

            According to a survey by Airline Information, a consulting firm in Miami, 48 percent of  respondents confirmed that their airline was charging for a la carte items, such as onboard food and drink, seat assignments and baggage; while 62 per cent felt that their airline ‘did not adequately or transparently relay a la carte options and fees to travelers.’ And 68 percent envisage airlines overall increasing their a la carte fees over the next 12 months.      

            And yet a la carte can work well for travelers (provided it is transparent and offers them  choice).  After all, why pay for meals and drinks that you do not need (subsidizing that fellow passenger who eats and drinks everything in sight), or for checking bags when you only have a light carry-on?
            U.S. carriers (except Southwest Airlines) now typically charge $15 or $25 for the first checked bag; now charge between $25 and $50 for the second bag, and $100 each for the third, fourth and fifth bags, and have reduced the maximum weight from 70 pounds to 50 pounds, or from 32 kilograms to 23 kilograms, in economy on international and domestic routes.

Delta Airlines has announced the imposition of a $50 fee for a second checked bag on international flights; and Alaska Airlines announced a $15 charge for the first checked bag.
            At Air Canada’s Web site, you can choose from four basic fare levels. The top tickets, Latitude and Executive Class, are all refundable and come with priority check-in, food, drinks and all the frills. The cheapest fare, Tango, requires extra fees for meals, advance seat selection, flight changes and access to the airport access; Tango passengers can save $3 if they forgo frequent flier miles, or do not check a bag.
            Air Canada’s à la carte pricing model is being followed by other carriers. American Airlines, for example, has announced it will fully implement à la carte pricing this year, offering a few basic fares, giving travelers the option of paying for additional services.
           But there’s a lot of anger out there.
           Stan Juster from Karmiel, Israel, writes: “Any day now, I expect airlines to charge for turning on the overhead air spigot. It’s an absurdity for airlines to think the public will accept extra fees for checked luggage, seat selection, food and water, pillows and blankets etc. - all under the guise of compensating for higher fuel costs. It’s a boondoggle; just another way to increase their profit margin, particularly in light of the recent decrease in the cost of fuel.”
            Martin Bleasdale from Les Baux de Provence, France, agrees: “They may as well include the rest of the fuel, airport landing fees, amortized price of the plane, meals, drinks, cabin lighting, crew salaries …,” he writes. “That way they could charge full price for a free ticket.”
            Indeed.

Ryanair, which has deepened the no-frills experience by making passengers walk from terminals to the aircraft in the open, for not providing umbrellas when it is raining or snowing, or even free wheelchairs for disabled passengers, now plans to  remove all check-in desks from airports by October 1, forcing passengers to check in online. And don’t expect quarter if you are overweight: Ryanair allows only 15 kilos of checked baggage per passenger (compared with EasyJet’s 20 kilos), has increased its excess baggage charge to seven euros per kilo, and will charge £5 per passenger per flight for bookings. The carrier says it expects to introduce charges of £50 per bag this year, with a view to getting rid of hold baggage altogether.
            Now, here comes the Dublin-based carrier’s abrasive chief executive Michael O’Leary with an incredulous  proposal to make passengers, who have just paid £2.50 for a cup of coffee, £1 a time to use the lavatories on board. Ryanair will introduce the charge ‘as soon as technically possible,’ raising ‘about £15 million in a year for using the facility.’

‘If you look at it sensibly, it would reduce an awful lot of the unnecessary visits to the loo that pisses so many passengers off onboard a plane,’ Leary says. ‘If we think 20 percent of our passengers in a year would use the facility, if they paid a pound per passenger, it would raise about 15 million quid and would help us to pass on £15 million of fare savings to the traveling public.’

Passenger groups have reacted with incredulity to the idea, but O’Leary says that the plan could lead to lower fares.

Rochelle Turner, head of research at ‘Which? Holiday’ in London, says, ‘It seems Ryanair is prepared to plumb any depth to make a fast buck, and, once again, is putting profit before the comfort of its customers. Charging people to go the lavatory might result in fewer people buying overpriced drinks on board, though – that would serve Ryanair right.’

O’Reilly rejects the criticism, describing the plan as another ‘cutting-edge’ initiative, like charging for drinks.

Probably, O’Leary is simply flying another kite; he must, of course, maintain his bad name as the man we all love to hate. 

This is open season for satirists and soothsayers – who are always liable these days of being overtaken by reality.  
             There’s nothing new under the sun. Some thirty years ago, the Canadian carrier Wardair (long since subsumed by Air Canada) offered quality at reasonable prices with a single standard of cuisine and service throughout the plane and a ‘Big Seat’ option.  No matter how much you paid for your ticket, you could trade up to a Big Seat in the front of the cabin for about 50 Canadian dollars.

United Airlines offers some ‘increased legroom’ seats in the economy cabin on domestic services for $39 a leg (or $156 for a round-trip with one stop).     

  The notion of having first class, business class, premium economy and economy cabins might eventually disappear in favor of total  a la carte travel, whereby travelers would pay a basic fare, depending on their choice of seat, for transportation, and pay extra for meals, drinks, in-flight perks, entertainment options, baggage, lounges, fast-track security, curb-side check-in, and door-to-door limo transfers.

  A classless society? Now there’s a template for the future!

  www.rogerandrandy.com

Moments of truth seem to come more often these days.

            Boarding an Easyjet flight from Gatwick the other day, sharp elbows having got me my usual self-satisfied pole position in the aisle seat by the emergency exit, I was girth stricken to find that the seat belt would not quite fasten – comfortably, or even uncomfortably – even stripped down under the twin filing systems in my jacket pockets. Of course, one has to prove that one is lean and fit to sit in these privileged rows. Clever Easyjet. No point in asking for a ‘seat belt extender.’ 

            So I retreated to an aisle seat in another row, and just got the thing attached.  

            God forbid that I should be a candidate for the laterally challenged folk that one sees in every airport concourse – grotesque buffalos wallowing towards the next waterhole.

Coincidentally, perhaps, I am assailed with weighty complaints from fellow travelers who complain that really large passengers ‘invade the space’ of passengers who sit beside them.

Jane Ralls, a reader in Minneapolis, on a Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Detroit, was understandably upset when an ‘extremely large’ man lifted up the armrest, sat down and occupied at least one quarter of her space. It is my experience that armrests must be kept down, at least during take-off and landing. So how can this apply to large passengers who cannot physically fit in a seat unless the armrest is up? What are seat companion rights; to demand a change of seat, or an upgrade if no seats are available? 

Many other readers have asked how people should react when a very heavy passenger spreads over into their space, and what the victims of such an incursion should expect airlines to do about.

Airlines require armrests to be kept down for reasons of safety and comfort during take-off and landing. It  follows therefore, that if an exceptionally wide passenger can’t fit into a seat without raising the armrest, they cannot be allowed to travel in that seat; but must either be required to buy a second seat (in which you raise the middle armrest and fasten yourself in the ‘double’ seat with an extra long seatbelt), upgrade if there is space, or offloaded onto a later flight.

Applying this logic (although when did you last see logic applied?) might have helped the husband of Joanna Bastin in Tournon d’Agenais, Lot et Garonne, France, who writes, ‘On a flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt with Lufthansa, my husband was in the middle seat, when an enormous woman sat down on one side of him and raised the armrest to squeeze into the seat; then, to his horror, a second equally large woman did the same thing on the other side. Her complained to a cabin  attendant who said there was nothing she could do because the flight was full.’

 ‘I once found an oversize passenger on a flight occupying part of my seat space,’ wrote George Price in Washington, DC. ‘I politely declined to occupy my seat, or take a later flight since the plane was full.   As I recall, the airline got someone to take a later flight in exchange for some free travel.  With obesity a growing problem and airlines jamming more seats into cabins, it is time for all passengers to send carriers a message by insisting on occupying the seats they’ve paid for.’ 

            ‘British Airways advises anybody who has concerns about seat width to purchase more than one seat, but we do not have a weight limit for passengers,’ says Jay Merritt, at British Airways. ‘Our check-in agents and ground staff keep an eye open for passengers who may have a problem fitting into a seat.   If a passenger cannot utilize a seat safely (armrests must be properly down for take off and landing) alternative arrangements have to be made.   We can provide extensions to seat belts for those who can fit into a seat but cannot be safely secured by the normal seat belt; and special seat belts for anyone who has purchased two seats. Should issues arise on the aircraft, our cabin crew are trained to deal with problems using  common sense approach.’

            American Airlines follows a similar policy to Southwest Airlines, requiring ‘very large’ passengers to purchase a second seat.

            ‘We are sensitive to the needs of both larger passengers and those whose travel experience may be eroded through sharing seat space with them,’ says Richard Hedges, director of corporate communications, Europe and Pacific, at American. ‘Where there are instances of obese passengers whose bodies protrude extensively into an occupied adjacent seat, we may ask that they purchase a second seat at the same price or take a later flight. Passengers who find that their seating space is intruded upon by a fellow passenger, should raise the issue with one of our flight attendants, who will do everything possible to ensure the comfort and safety of both passengers.’  

             Understandably, some ‘oversize’ people feel that they are normal, and have a right to the space they need. Leland Stuart in El Paso, Texas: ‘I am 6 feet 7 inches and weigh 260 pounds with a 50-inch chest; I’m not fat, only ‘large.’ To say that I should have to purchase an extra seat seems unfair and discriminatory. I find it difficult to get in and out of a seat; the person in front of me cannot recline their seat as it hits my knees and the person in   the next seat is cramped as I take some of their space.    Airlines could accommodate large people by making six or eight seats in coach with a little extra room available only to them.   There are certainly enough of us to keep the seats occupied.’

‘I’m not particularly tall, but I am wide,’ writes Edward A. O’Neal from Norfolk, Virginia.  ‘On long flights, my wife and I have bought three seats for the two of us; cheaper than business class and nearly as comfortable. We try to get a plane with three seats abreast in the middle – so both of us get an aisle seat with plenty of space between us.   We just have to let the crew know so their head count will match up.’   

Southwest Airlines requires ‘large people’ to purchase a second seat for ‘safety and comfort.’  

United Airlines announced on April 15 that it would charge passengers for a second seat ‘if they are too large for a single one.’ The policy applies to those who cannot fit into a seat with the arm-rests down and with no more than one seatbelt extender.

 Such passengers will be ‘re-accommodated next to an empty seat’ if the flight is not full. If it is, they will be asked either to pay for an upgrade to another cabin or to travel on a later flight. On that later flight they will be put next to an empty seat if possible or asked to buy a second seat.

 Ryanair says it is now considering how to charge a ‘fat tax’ after more than 30,000 passengers allegedly voted in favor of charging ‘excess weight fees’ for very large passengers. ‘Charge per kg over 130kg (males) and 100kg (females)? Charge per inch for every waist inch over 45ins (males) and 40ins (females)? Or, charge for every point in excess of 40 points on the Body Mass Index (+ 30 points is obese).’

 People have pointed out, with crucifying logic, that overweight travelers might be encouraged to lose weight if airlines were to adopt a ‘total weight’ system, whereby the passenger would be weighed along with their baggage. It makes sense if  you think that airlines have to compute the total weight of passengers, crew, baggage, meals and fuel in their cost-efficiency calculations.

Belinda Fogg in Tokyo is one of several readers who agree with this idea.  ‘The present system of weight limits for baggage unfairly discriminates against smaller people,’ she writes.  ‘On a flight from Auckland to Tokyo, my baggage weighed in at 10 kilograms over the limit; but the carrier waived a $300 excess fee, probably because the plane was only half full.   However, as I weigh only 53 kilograms, if you added 10 kilograms to my body weight I would still be lighter than many of my fellow passengers.  Why don’t airlines devise rules whereby they weigh people AND their bags together?’

Bruce Bogin in Paris suggests that airlines ‘should make a total weight standard, for body weight with baggage, and charge for any excess? Say the standard is 275 pounds. Two passengers show up at check-in: A slip of lady weighing 100 pounds, with a couple of bags weighing 225 pounds – total weight, 325 pounds; and a man weighing 300 pounds, with small carry-on bag – total weight, 325 pounds.   Both lady and man are 50 pounds over the limit and should pay an excess baggage charge.’

Let us not forget the plight of tall, thin passengers. M. Massimo in New York writes, ‘I am 6ft 2ins tall with a back problem and cramped seats in economy give me a lot of pain. So is it possible to buy two or three economy seats as an alternative to an expensive business class fare?

British Airways, Continental, Delta Air Lines, and Virgin Atlantic, say they accept such bookings. Sometimes extra wide passengers or carrying musical instruments or paintings, ask for extra seats.

Carol Fitzpatrick in Hartford, Connecticut, strikes a cautionary note: ‘Make sure that the assigned equipment for all flights has armrests that are not fixed in the down position.’     Many families with adjacent seating prearranged have found themselves split up because of such an occurrence.

It is also wise to book directly with the airline and check on the aircraft type. You will have one ticket for all the seats you book. You can check on seating plans and get an advance assignment, online or with your travel agent. Seat pitch, width and angle of recline vary according to which carrier you choose, even with the same aircraft type. Some seats offer more legroom than others (especially in cattle class). Airline sites are often less than forthcoming. Check with Skytrax Research, www.airlinequality.com, which offers seating tips for 325 airlines. Flatseats.com compares first- and business class ‘lie-flat’ beds and ‘nearly horizontal ‘angled flat-seats. At www.seatguru.com, you can learn which seats you should avoid on many major airlines. The site also has links to seat maps provided by some carriers. Bear in mind that certain seats (such as those in emergency rows) are only allocated at check-in.

Oh, yes, and try to make sure that your seats are pre-assigned – and together. I did hear of one wide-bodied traveler (this is a true story) who found to his chagrin that the two seats he had reserved for himself were on either side of the aisle!

Slot me into an airline seat next to an interesting-looking neighbor, with a gin and tonic and a back-up copy of War and Peace, and I’ll surrender to serendipity. After all these years, and goodness knows how many expense-account miles, my think-bubble still fills with anticipatory asterisks and exclamation marks at the prospect of meeting someone new. I remain an unreconstructed Walter Mitty who has not accepted that the most interesting person on the plane is sure to be sitting two rows in front of me. Human contact - however inhuman - is probably the last adventure left in air travel.

            Not that Fate has always given me an even hand. Sartre knew what he was talking about when he said: “Hell is other people.” There was the man who spent six excruciating hours trying to sell me a corporate jet; the woman I spent six delightful hours trying to seduce, only to have the cool dry handshake after touchdown. “No, I’m OK, thanks, my husband’s meeting me.” And the long-distance life story: “You’re a writer! My life has been so interesting. I’ll tell you my story, you write it up and we’ll split the proceeds.”

            (Even worse was boasting about being a writer, only to meet a real novelist on a promotion tour for his new book - the kind where the author’s name is three times as big as the title.)

            But why do people have this urge to tell you their life story? And why are instant friendships forgotten as soon as the wheels touch down? The truth is that nobody wants to remember. As Groucho said: “I never forget a face; but in your case I’ll make an exception.”

            My theory is that the relationship between passengers sitting next to one another in a plane has a confessional element to it. Relaxed by food and drink and the prospect of never meeting your captive companion again, you can unburden your soul without trepidation.

            In the old days, before seats were assigned, you had to target a seatmate in the departure lounge, follow him or her up the steps into the plane, and fling your briefcase on to the adjacent seat with a disingenuous smile.

            Nowadays, you’re left to the mercy of the check-in clerk. On long flights I ask for an aisle seat so that I can escape from my seatmate or adopt a custodial stance as circumstances demand. “Shall we share a central table?” or perhaps a more risque‚ “Your armrest or mine?” are useful gambits when the drinks come round.

            People who complain about getting shanghaied by in-flight bores often have themselves to blame. Simple stratagems like putting on the headset, fiddling with your laptop or pretending to read (or write) A Brief History of Time should do the trick. The ultimate conversation killer is to answer “What do you do?” with: “I’m in deep-sea sewage.”

            One way to attract attention is to delve into a crowded briefcase (people can’t resist squinting at someone else’s belongings). You can lubricate the gambit with a conversation piece, like bundles of $100 bills or a stuffed boa constrictor.

            But don’t make the same mistake as a former colleague of mine on a flight home from India. He showed a necklace he had bought for his wife (this is a true story) to the woman he’d been chatting up - which she graciously accepted.

            One idea might be to allow us to change seats halfway through a flight so everybody gets the chance to meet. After all, on a long-haul flight you may be in the air for up to 16 hours. That’s almost long enough to get married, start a family and get divorced, although not necessarily in that order. (No, I have not, is the answer to your question.) The new Airbus A380 600-seat super jumbo is like an airborne village with infinite scope for social congress, should we so desire.

            Meanwhile, I think airlines should offer more latitude (not to mention longitude) in choosing in-flight companions. One idea might be to use the reservations computer for a spot of computer dating. They would simply punch in your high-altitude likes and dislikes and match you with a suitable seatmate.

            We might even see appeals like the following in the personal column of the New York Review of Books:

            “Sales executive, 35 (can pass for 34), attractive management style, into white-water canoeing, Indian artefacts, client lunches, seeks upwardly nubile flight companion for meaningful business-class relationship, view sharing seat-back videos, tall stories. Sincere replies only, please.”

            But if you find, as I do, that most fruitful in-flight encounters take place in the mind, beware of the “snore syndrome” - floating off into a Mittyesque trance, and waking up to dusty looks from your neighbors.              

DO’S & DONT’S

*Do invest in an upgrade - you may meet a better class of person. Downgrade if you want to be alone: four seats across is the ultimate refuge.

*Do avoid the middle seat at all costs. Yes, you have a choice of two neighbors but it’s hard to escape. The aisle seat offers strategic flexibility.

*Do avoid children (they’re usually up front of every cabin) - unless you want advice on the latest computer software.

*Do take plenty of reading material for emergencies. If you don’t have War and Peace, pretend you’re writing it.

*Don’t go overboard eating and drinking everything in sight; you never know who may be sitting beside you. Wrap-around magenta shades and mineral water with a musical score or screenplay invite more scrupulous attention.

*Don’t say to a celebrity: “I’ve seen your face before. Give me a second…”

*Don’t boast or make indiscreet remarks until you’ve positively identified your neighbor. He or she may know your boss/client/auditor/husband/wife.

*Don’t hand out someone else’s business card - unless that is the statement you really want to make.

Will the successful no-frills, or budget airline, model work for long-haul, trans-continental flights? That is the question – especially in such dire economic times, when many airlines are cutting services and reducing capacity.  

One airline that is bucking the trend is AirAsia X, the low-cost, long-haul affiliate of AirAsia (www.airasia.com), which has announced plans to fly five-times weekly non-stop (a 12-hour flight) between London Stansted and Kuala Lumpur, starting March 11, 2009.  One-way fares start at £99 (RM49) for a 31-inch pitch seat, and from £549 (RM1,999) including airport taxes. 

(Currently AirAsia X flies 4 times weekly to Gold Coast, Australia, and 5 times weekly to Hangzhou, China. AirAsia X aims to cover destinations which are more than four hours away from Kuala Lumpur, complementing the existing AirAsia network and offering daily point-to-point frequencies to popular destinations in Australia, North Asia, India, the Middle East and Europe.)   

[No-frills carriers are modeled on Southwest Airlines in the United States. They are characterized by point-to-point services, high utilization of aircraft, low distribution costs, achieved with on-line booking, and variable one-way fares that reflect demand for flights at different dates and times of the day. Such has been the success of carriers such as EasyJet, Ryanair, Air Berlin, and German Wings, that ‘full-service’ airlines, like Air France, SAS, Swiss and British Airways, have adopted similar low-cost, one-way pricing in order to compete on short-haul routes in Europe.  It is often hard to tell the difference these days between no-frills and the full-service, or ‘legacy,’ carriers in Europe, as they both raise the stakes in competing with one another.

Analysts have long debated whether the ‘no-frills’ formula can work with long-haul services, if only because quick aircraft turnarounds can be frustrated by issues of safety and time-zone constraints, and crew schedules.   And of course, the discomfort span: will passengers tolerate being jammed for eight hours into a knee-crunching seat that they might just about put up with for a short flight? And one has to offer some creature comforts on a long flight.

Craig Jenks, president of Airline/Aircraft Projects Inc. in New York, says, ‘You are asking, can one become the other and vice versa?   The answer is that the high-cost full-service carriers are doing their best to reduce costs.  And the low-cost carriers over here are going progressively longer haul. JetBlue and Southwest both fly from Coast to Coast, one hour less than the North Atlantic.     You might say, if they can do that, why can’t they just cross the Atlantic? It so happens that that one hour time difference is the difference between operating a narrow body plane like the Boeing 757 and a wide body like the 767. Simplicity of equipment is absolutely paramount.   And when you go long haul, you have to have better food, service and entertainment. And probably a premium cabin of some kind.’

‘Pay-per-frill,’ such as charging for priority boarding, and disembarking, in-flight use of mobile phones, extra legroom and baggage allowance, and gourmet meals, might be the answer for both airlines and passengers. Look out for hybrid premium seats or cabins, not as fancy (or pricey) as the all-singing-all-dancing ergonomic lie-flat sleeper seats in first and business-class cabins  of the big name carriers, but at least as comfortable as those old  first class seats in the narrow body Boeing 707s and DC 8s back in the late 1960s, before business class was invented. Following perhaps in the tradition of the much lamented Canadian carrier, Ward Air (long since subsumed by Air Canada) that had a ‘Big Seat’ option on long-haul routes between Canada and Europe.   Everyone got the same service, but you could opt to pay extra for a larger, more comfortable, seat. ]

I spoke first with Azran Osman-Rani, CEO of Air Asia X:, and then Tony Fernandes, AirAsia group CEO.

R.C: There are various business models for ‘no-frills,’ ‘low-cost’  and ‘budget’ that are sometimes hard to define; then you get so-called ‘hybrid’ carries – a sort of segmentation within the low-cost category.   What sort of model is Air Asia on this particular route?

A.O-R: I joined AirAsia a year and a half ago to start AirAsia X – a separate company  that does long-haul services – operationally, we’re one and the same and we have one consumer brand which is Air Asia,  but Tony has kept us as a separate entity because he did not want to expose AirAsia’s public shareholders to the different risk profile of  long haul, which at that time was unproven compared to short haul – he wanted to use  public shareholder funds to underpin the financing of AirAsia short haul operations.

As we started AirAsia X as a separate company, we were able to raise our own funding,  buy our own planes, but we take advantage of the strength Air Asia has in terms of the brand and the network; we share the same pilots and crew, and ground handling… now, here’s Tony.

R.C: Successful no-frills carriers, such as Ryanair and EasyJet, have been based on the Southwest Airlines model, which is essentially point-to-point;  single equipment;   low overhead;  low distribution costs – they pioneered on-line booking, and one-way pricing, which legacy carriers have been following; high aircraft turnaround and high  utilization of capital; no interlining… Now  this works for short haul, but can it work for long haul? Can you give me a rationale for the long haul? and how you are going to make it work?

T.F: Right now I think we are the only airline that is using our present model  how does it work?   Since we started everyone has said the long haul model doesn’t work for the all the reasons you have said. Now where we buck the trend is we take AirAsia and we put it on steroids  and it becomes AirAsia X and it becomes high capacity,  high utilization;  we still do quick turnarounds, we’re not slaves to a timetable; so if you look at our London flight, we arrive at different times during the day so we maximize utilization. But the key is really the point-to-point; we’re not really point-to-point, though we operate as point-to-point. What does that mean?  It means that when I fly from London to Kula Lumpur, the point-to-point  traffic in KL may not be that large, but you now have a short haul network that’s second to none. You can go from KL to scores of destinations, like Bali, Phuket, Bangkok, Singapore and so on… So we marry the long haul with the short haul in what we think is a winning formula.

R.C: So you can interline?

T.F:  We don’t actually practice the interlining policy; we have all the advantages   without the costs…

R.C. Interlining is costly?

T.F:  Correct. We’re like EasyJet; if you want to fly on you, have to have a separate ticket. We make it easy. For example, in our new terminal were building in KL, we have for the first time put in a transfer desk; and people coming off Azan’s planes  can go to this desk and recheck in for their next flight. We will make it a form of interlining, but we’ll make it self-liquidating; i.e. if you say I don’t want to deal with my bags, can you put them on the next flight? then we will charge you for that service. So it’s still a menu of services, that are priced, so that you can virtually get a full service product. But you pay for it.

R.C: This a la carte  pricing is now happening with the full service airlines; it started with baggage. I see it working for the consumer  because if you just want a basic  fare  you get it; you think you’re getting free food or interline, but you’re not; it’s in the cost structure. I prefer to pay for my own champagne if I want it.

T.F: Correct. It’s inequitable;  because the guy in front of you may drink three bottles;   the guy behind you may be a teetotaler…

R.C: But tell me how it works.

T.F: You buy a  base fare, a seat; change your ticket? No, you want to change anything,  there are change fees and so on. We ask for discipline. Why? Because  a lot of people will book a seat and then they don’t turn up. It’s a perishable product; when you don’t turn up we have very little time to sell it again, so we say, to maintain our low fares,  our efficiency, we ask a little bit of discipline  from you. One base fare,   dynamically priced,  based on demand. Our yield management is exactly like Ryanair or EasyJet. The best passenger  in the crude sense, according to [Michael] O’Leary, is someone going to a funeral. Why? Because he has to get there. So you open a newspaper (you had no intention of going to KL), you see £99, you say, I’m going to go; that’s the discretionary market that we fill up using our low fares; then the middle market people, who had planned to take a trip; then the last minute travelers. We charge a bit more for them because we know they’re time sensitive.

So that’s how we work; maybe I’m a little bit biased. It’s been in my mind since I was a 13-year-old plane spotter at Heathrow.  I’ve looked at how could we get people cheaper across from Europe to Asia;  and I think that for £99 pounds,  people will say,  I was going to Spain, but now I’ll go to Bali. The same for people in Southeast Asia, who only dreamed of seeing Big Ben. There are three things people in Asia people are dying to see: the Queen, Big Ben, and a football match. It’s now a reality.

You buy your basic fare and get a 31-inch pitch; it’s a shell-back seat that slides down – we think it’s irritating when someone puts their seat back on you. We have a  wonderful in flight system that costs you about £5; you pay for that and order from a choice of food on a touch screen; the order goes straight to the galley and crew will bring it out  with drinks; it’s all there, comfort kits,  extra blankets, order what you want, just swipe your card. I reckon you’d spend another £20  more on a 12-hour flight; one meal and a snack in between. You’re talking about £10 for food; maybe £5 for luggage.

You can also pay extra for a better seat; this could be an aisle seat, one by the emergency exit  or  by the bulkhead – allows you to stretch a bit more. Or it could be a completely better seat, the XL seat we call it, leather, fully reclining with more leg-room. It’s not a class. You see, that’s where complexity comes in; if I put in a class, then I have to have a separate check-in;  people’s expectations are different,  and your costs start creeping up. We have 30 XL seats on the Airbus A340 we’re leasing initially from Air Canada. Our load factor on those seats is about 65 percent.

Eventually, our configuration will be about 50 flat beds.  Again, as a traveler  I don’t care too much about the food; it is space and getting a good night’s sleep with really flat beds. One thing airlines screw up on is the duvet; they cut costs and put polyester and tiny pillows. We give you a really decent pillow and a decent blanket; that’s all inclusive in the seat cost – about £1,000 return.         

So I keep the tradition;  I’m not changing my model – I have high utilization;  point-to-point, I don’t interline, don’t have a separate class; but we manage to tweak it without spoiling the operational efficiency, by giving customers a choice, so they can supplement it. 

R.C. Would you call it a hybrid?

T.F:  I’d like to say it isn’t actually, because I do think we’re in the traditions of Southwest Airlines; but I’d like to say we’ve been innovative, in being very religious to the model  but finding ways to preserve the model. I sit down with Herb Kelleher of Southwest and he thinks what I’m saying is complete sacrilege. O’Leary would crucify me on the stake of low cost for abandoning the model. But I think one of the dangers of those guys is they don’t look at different ways of doing it. Jet Blue took out rows of seats, and put in live TV and all that, and putting in lounges. Or Air Tran having a business class; I don’t agree with that. But I think if you’re just stuck in your way for 40 years, then you  do miss opportunities; one has to be evolving. But the core principles of the model are still there, although you can add value to that model.    

R.C: How can you get fast turnaround on long haul?

T.F: We’re doing it. We’ve got 18 hours utilization; we’re turning around a 340 in about an hour right now; our 330 with 383 passengers we’re doing it in 55 minutes. An hour versus 25 minutes isn’t going to get you an extra flight to London. But let me tell you how we get it, how we differ from a traditional long-haul airline. One is if you look at our timetable. Everyone is flying at the same time  every day; if I took a Malaysian Airlines flight, it would leave KL at 12 o’clock at night, arrive in London at six in the morning. Because of its integrity to its schedule, it would leave London  about 11 o’clock in the morning and arrive back at KL  at five; and then it wouldn’t leave again till 12. So in two days you lose 12 hours,  because it doesn’t want its business class passengers getting up at six in the morning.

We’ll start off with five flights a week. But  I’m going to look at London to KL as  being a shuttle route. It sounds bizarre, but I really think I can get five, even seven flights a day. But I don’t want to scare the hell out of anyone. I’d say to them five times, but I really think we could do seven times a day; every three hours. Now why do I think that? Because I’m not just serving the UK market in Stansted; all my low cost brethren are there: Ryanair, EasyJet, Air Berlin, and whoever else survives this mess. So someone from Paris or Prague can fly over to Stansted, and take us to KL; and equally, someone from Malaysia can get over to Stansted with us, and travel on to Paris or wherever.

R.C: Will you do deals with them, with other low-cost carriers? 

T.F: Well, I think eventually. Mind you, doing a deal with Michael O’Leary sounds a scary thought. Stelios though is a good friend; I started this airline based on Stelios, and yeah, Stelios is a much nicer person to deal with than O’Leary. I’ve got 600 million people in Asia I can promote to, so basically, I don’t think we need a formal tie up; because the Internet brings it all together anyway.   

R.C: But why on earth are you launching at this particular time? Oasis, Zoom and others all going out of business?

T.F: What they did wrong was, number one, they didn’t have size; number two, they only had two or three planes; they didn’t have a brand like AirAsia. But the most important thing is they veered away from the low-cost model. Oasis had a business class with the same seating configuration as Singapore Airlines, and lounges. But the most important factor was, they didn’t have Air Asia’s short-haul network. When you arrive on KL with us, you’ve got the connectivity with us throughout Asia. 

We have 100 destinations out of KL, and hubs in Bangkok and Jakarta, like Stelios in Europe. I think that’s the difference between us, plus we were religious to the model;    we pack the seats in and made it as comfortable as possible.  

R.C. What sort of load factors do you have to have for this?

T.F: Well, right now,  fuel’s come down so much, so our load factors come down dramatically. Right now, at today’s oil price, for break-even we’re looking at 52 percent; with oil at $100 dollars, we’d be looking at about 65 percent; $150 dollars, we’re looking at 85 percent – at these fares.

R.C: Still, doing this in the credit crunch; why are you so optimistic?

T.F: I thrive on calamity; I thrive on the fact that everyone’s got their heads in a spin   and don’t know what to do. And in a world of chaos, it’s the best time to capitalize and to build market share when everyone’s too busy looking after their own back sides; they’re not worried about what you do, all they’re saying is, this guy’s a lunatic,  he will fail. So they leave us alone. 

What I say, if anyone listens, is the best time to build a brand is during a recession,   because everyone else has cut advertising. The worst time to cut your marketing budget is during a recession, because when you come out of the recession, your brand is very strong; those who survive will be very strong. So it’s the easiest thing to cut, that’s correct, but it’s the worst thing, and you sometimes can’t see the effects of the brand building, you know, to the bottom line. I have daily battles with my controller who says, why don’t you take a quarter page ad instead of a full page? But we thrive on this; we’re contrarian, we believe people want to travel, that we have good news and this will stimulate travel.  

R.C: What about other routes?

T.F: The big question is, whether I put all my eggs into Stansted, and use that as the base into Europe; or whether we split and say, okay, let’s have one in Stansted, one in central Europe, and one in eastern Europe. I would probably say the latter. So we’d look at somewhere in southern Europe or central Europe. And I’m a big believer in eastern Europe; I believe the Poles, and the Czechs, and the Slovaks would love to come to our part of the world;  and we would  love to go to their part of the world.

Call me any time. I would love to pick your brains.

London, Dec. 2008    

Travelers will welcome the cascade of cuts in fuel surcharges by airlines such as British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air France/KLM, Thai Airways, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and El Al, in response to a sustained fall in the price of oil, with jet fuel now half the price it was in the summer. Air Canada has eliminated fuel surcharges altogether on North American flights, instead “folding them into advertised base fares.”

This raises some questions: What is the “benchmark” price for jet fuel on which surcharges are based? And with the price of jet fuel accounting for more than a third of most airlines’ costs, are surcharges just the means of protecting airline profits during the downturn?

But what incenses travelers more than anything is that the price of an air ticket they have purchased online can just about double when it comes to the final amount charged. Just as we have become reconciled to a raft of taxes - as wide-ranging as the U.S. Animal & Plant Health Inspection Tax, the Sydney Noise Tax and the Canadian Airport Improvement Tax - here come the airlines with charges for almost everything, from checked baggage to onboard beverages, even soft drinks and water, to changing tickets.

The airlines believe that “à la carte,” pay-for-all-the-extras pricing is the magic bullet for restoring profitability.

“Airline customers clearly resent these often unclear fees, but they have incredible potential to boost the bottom line of an airline,” said Christopher Staab, a managing partner at Airline Information (www.airlineinformation.org), a consulting firm in Miami. So much so, he continued, that despite the worldwide economic downturn expected to hit most airlines very hard in 2009, many of the mainstream U.S. airlines “are expected to be very profitable next year thanks to à la carte pricing.”

But there’s still a lot of anger out there.

Stan Juster from Karmiel, Israel, writes: “Any day now, I expect airlines to charge for turning on the overhead air spigot. It’s an absurdity for airlines to think the public will accept extra fees for checked luggage, seat selection, food and water, pillows and blankets etc. - all under the guise of compensating for higher fuel costs. It’s a boondoggle; just another way to increase their profit margin, particularly in light of the recent decrease in the cost of fuel.”

Martin Bleasdale from Les Baux de Provence, France, agrees: “They may as well include the rest of the fuel, airport landing fees, amortized price of the plane, meals, drinks, cabin lighting, crew salaries …,” he writes. “That way they could charge full price for a free ticket.”

Staab said that every time airlines need revenue they simply increase their à la carte fees: Some U.S. carriers “are charging $15 or $25 for the first checked bag; all except Southwest Airlines now charge between $25 and $50 for the second bag, and have reduced the maximum weight from 70 pounds to 50 pounds,” or from 32 kilograms to 23 kilograms, “in economy on international and domestic routes.”

Fees vary radically, Staab added: “You go to book and you don’t know what you’re going to pay. This is a particular problem with online travel agents, like Opodo and Travelocity. I booked a fare on Expedia for $300 and I finally paid $600. They didn’t tell me; there was just a little flag saying, ‘Extra charges may apply.’ But you have no idea what those fees are; it’s not their fault, they cannot keep up.”

À la carte pricing will work for both airlines and travelers provided it is “transparent” and offers customer choice; after all, why pay for a meal and beverages, or baggage services that you don’t need?

Air Canada’s à la carte pricing model is being followed by other carriers. American Airlines, for example, has announced it will fully implement à la carte pricing next year. There are likely to be a few basic fares, giving travelers the option of paying for additional services.

At Air Canada’s Web site, you can choose from four basic fare levels. The top tickets, Latitude and Executive Class, are all refundable and come with priority check-in, food, drinks and all the frills. The cheapest fare, Tango, requires extra fees for meals, advance seat selection, flight changes and airport lounge access; Tango passengers can save $3 if they forgo frequent flier miles, or do not check a bag.

Speculating on the scope for a la carte options with the Airbus A380 Super Jumbo some time ago, I envisaged one of the airline alliances, such as Star Alliance or Oneworld, operating the ‘flying village’ for member airlines, who might share the same plane on certain routes, with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine, and style of service. Franchises would be sold for wining and dining and other amenities.

There’s nothing new under the sun, they say. Some twenty years ago, the Canadian carrier Wardair (long since subsumed by Air Canada) offered quality at reasonable prices with a single standard of cuisine and service throughout the plane and a ‘Big Seat’ option. No matter how much you paid for your ticket, you could trade up to a Big Seat in the front of the cabin for about 50 Canadian dollars.

‘You’ve checked in, and printed your boarding card with your seat assignment online; fantastic. You then need to check your bag with an agent; go through passport control; join the queue at security; then present the boarding card and an ID when you board the plane. Each of these processes is being done in self-service mode somewhere in the world. We are trying to corral these to deliver a program to speed the progress of passengers through the airport.’

This is how Paul Behan, program manager for fast travel, at the International Air Transport Association in Geneva, talks about his mission.

Baggage, for example: you first need to register that you intend to check one, two or more bags, either on the Web or a self-service kiosk at the airport. Then you ‘self-tag’ your bags.

‘That’s what is happening in Scandinavia, Germany and Canada; getting the bag to the point ready to go,’ Behan says. ‘You still need an agent for airline liability and security sides, but you can cut the process to about 20 seconds as opposed to the couple of minutes it takes now. However, some pilots are going on in Europe, such as Schiphol, for a totally unmanned baggage drop facility.’

If your bags don’t make it to the other end, instead of standing in line for an agent, you will fill in the data at a kiosk, or an Internet work station, in the baggage hall, print a receipt, and leave without seeing anyone.

The next stage to printing out the boarding card at home will be to check in with your cell phone, or use it as a postbox for a Web check-in. Check in the night before and send it to your mobile. According to Behan, ten airlines enable mobile phone check-in with IATA bar-coded boarding passes.

Cell phones can lessen the misery of hanging around the airport waiting for a delayed flight.

Imagine a snow storm over Chicago with a hundreds of delayed or canceled flights; standing in line at the desk for an agent to help you.

‘We’re looking at mobile technology to send a message to the passenger saying, don’t turn up at the airport at two o’clock but at four; and by the way, here’s your new boarding pass. This is a reality today,’ Behan says. ‘You’ll also be able to use your mobile device as a boarding pass; saves you having to print a bit of paper.’

‘The next step is boarding the plane. In Japan, Scandinavia and Germany, they’re implementing self-boarding gates,’ Behan adds. ‘Think of your metro station. You’ll present your boarding pass either as a piece of paper or mobile with a bar code. There are some challenges with passport checks at the gate; but we are working on that.’

Baggage is the number one reason why travelers do not use self-service options, according to a survey by SITA, a Geneva-based airline communications provider, conducted at six of the world’s busiest airports.

SITA Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey examined the attitudes and habits of a representative sample of the 232 million passengers who use seven international airports: Hartsfield-Jackson, Atlanta; Mumbai International; Charles-de-Gaulle, Paris; Moscow Domodedovo; Sao Paulo Guarulhos and Johannesburg. Interviews with 2,143 travelers representing more than 60 nationalities flying on more than 100 airlines were made at the departure gates during April and May 2008.

The survey confirms that self-service is part of full-service expectations; and airlines are responding with technology giving travelers greater convenience, with power to control their airport experience. Only price (70.5 percent) and flight schedule (63.1 percent) rank above ‘ability to make your own arrangements on the Web’ (42.5 percent).

Overall, 57.6 percent of respondents booked their flight on line, while 36 percent checked in on the Web or at a self-service kiosk. ‘Ease of use’ (72 percent) and ‘time saved’ (60 percent) were the most popular reasons for online booking - plus the fact that the Web makes comparison of the various options easier (56 percent).

‘Baggage is the reason stated by almost half (48.4 percent) of people as the reason for not using self-service check ins when it is available,’ says Dominique El Bez, SITA director, portfolio marketing, ‘seriously detracting from the passenger experience, and limiting the savings and efficiencies made possible by self-service technology. Addressing the baggage dilemma is a key milestone towards achieving our target of 80 percent self-service check-in.’

According to the survey, 47.8 percent of travelers would be willing to use both remote check-in and bag-drop services in the future, and 42.2 percent of them would be willing to pay for them.

A majority of respondents (66.7 percent) would welcome more online functions such as the ability to modify reservations. The ability to use kiosks for flight transfers would be welcomed by 53.8 percent, and for reporting lost baggage claims by 41.8 percent.

The number of travelers willing to use airline Web sites to frequently book other travel components, such as hotels and car rental, is expected to ‘almost double in the coming years’ from the present 11.2 percent.

‘Automated border control and security processing’ would be acceptable to 48.7 percent, while a ‘weighted average’ of 40 percent of travelers would accept the idea of airlines or airports using ‘location sensing technology to guide them through the terminal.’

This is ‘Big Brother’ territory. Radio Frequency Identification Tags linked with a network of high resolution CCTV panoramic cameras around an airport can track the location of any passenger with an accuracy of one square meter, enabling authorities to keep an eye on suspicious individuals, find lost children, ensure that passengers arrive at the gate in time to board their planes, and help evacuate airports in an emergency.

RFID chips work by emitting a short radio message when interrogated by an electronic tag reader. Passengers might be given a wrist band or a boarding pass embedded with a unique ID, cross-referenced to information on the reservations system, such as name and flight number.

The highest acceptance of the idea among respondents was in Sao Paulo (69 percent); the lowest in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle (four percent).

What do airlines and banks have in common? Answer: They are likely to go bust overnight.    What are the airline equivalents of Lehman Bros. and Goldman Sachs?   Will governments bail out failing carriers in a similar way?    If not, what can I do if I have booked a ticket with an airline that collapses?

The prospect of airline failure looms large for many travelers. High  fuel costs and the credit crunch have already seen more than 20 airlines go bust this year. (Alitalia’s future had looked doubtful until a last-minute agreement appears to have rescued it from bankruptcy.) And, in the early hours of September 12, XL Leisure Group, the third largest UK tour operator collapsed, leaving 90,000 customers people stranded abroad, and 23,000 holding advance bookings.

XL customers who had booked a package holiday  (flight  plus accommodation) were protected under Britain’s Air Travel Organizers’ Licensing scheme for tour operators, which is overseen by the Civil Aviation Authority;  those abroad were repatriated;  those  who had not yet traveled got their money back.

But people who had simply bought tickets direct with XL Airways were not covered by ATOL, or an alternative bonded scheme, and had to pay their own way home.

Whether or not you can get reimbursement from an airline which has gone bust depends on where you buy your ticket, how  you pay for it – and the small print of your travel insurance. Trip cancellation terms of most travel insurance policies do not cover scheduled airline failure.

Credit cards offer the best protection, whether you pay for tickets direct with the airline, or through a travel agent.   Should the airline be grounded, you can claim the money back from the card company, or bank, if you were due to travel.  If you are left stranded abroad, the card company should refund the cost of the flight home.

Debit and charge card transactions are not protected in the  same way, and you are most likely to lose your money; although  Visa debit card holders are covered by a ‘chargeback’ procedure  on the basis that goods or services have not been delivered, or are not as they were described.   According to Visa Europe, in such cases the chargeback rules allow its card issuing banks to recover money paid on all Visa debit and credit cards from the retailer’s bank.    Visa chargeback claims must be made within 120 days of the purchase or from the date the goods or services were due to be delivered.  

If you book flights through a travel agency, whether online or terrestrial, make sure that it is a member of the International Air Transport Association (400 airlines and 6,000 travel agents around the world) and participates in its ‘billing and settlement plan’ –  through which agents remit money from ticket sales to airlines. The BSP facilitates the cash flow between passengers, agents and airlines, and processing refunds.

‘When Alitalia appointed an administrator, we, according to the rules of the system, secured a deposit allowing the airline to continue participation in the BSP,’ says Lorne Riley at IATA in Geneva. ‘This minimizes the risk to participants, the airlines, the travel agents, and by extension their customers.’

So is it better to buy tickets through a travel agent  rather than an airline?  ‘You could make that speculation,’ Riley says. ‘I wouldn’t.’

Some travel agents now offer ‘Scheduled Airline Failure Insurance,’ either free of charge or for about $10 for a business class round-trip flight.   Two big providers of SAFI are brokers Marcus Hearn in London (www.scheduledairlinefailure.co.uk), who sell only to agents; and International Passenger Protection, a company that offers insurance directly to travelers through its Web site – www.protectmyholiday.com.

The long-haul travel specialists Trailfinders.com in London, guarantees ‘that clients will not lose any money paid to us for travel in the event of a collapse of an airline, tour operator, or any other provider.’

‘This pledge has been honored since our foundation over 38 years ago,’ says Nikki Davies, PR & marketing manager of Trailfinders in London. ‘It makes no difference at all how they pay; we put client’s money into a trust fund; if an airline goes bust, we’ll give them a full refund, or sort them out on the next best alternative, whichever they prefer.   They will not lose any money.’

Monica Beaupre, a manager for public affairs at American Express in New York, says, ‘The best travel companion you can take along is travel insurance. We offer a wide variety of travel insurance benefits here in the U.S.  Global Travel Shield is for card members and non members; Travel Assure is a package of protection just for card members.’

Both policies provide cover ‘if a covered trip is cancelled or interrupted due to… financial default or bankruptcy of a tour operator, hotel, resort, rental car company, other travel supplier or Common Carrier Conveyance.’

I would argue that this covered ‘scheduled airline failure;’ But if I were buying the policy, I would like it to be spelled out, in a ‘what if?’ scenario.

The devil, after all, is in the small print.

The International Air Transport Association has launched a new Travel Centre at www.iatatravelcentre.com. For an annual subscription of $25, travelers have access to personalized advice on passport, visa, and health advice, based on their itinerary, and details, such as nationality, documents held, and expiry dates, as well as airport taxes payable at departure or arrival, customs and currency regulations. According to IATA, an estimated 35,000 travelers are turned back at their destination or transfer points by immigration authorities every year due to wrong documentation. Countless more are refused boarding when airlines discover that their documents are not in order.

Frequent fliers can create and store their personal profiles, and be advised by e-mail when regulations change which might affect their travel plans. IATA updates its data base with about 14,000 changes a year.

‘Credit-crunch’ is now vying with ‘war on terror’ as the mantra of the decade; but the impact on travelers is likely to be far less onerous. The post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ has contributed much to the delays, indignities and the misery of air travel - harassment by over-zealous immigration and security officials and baggage restrictions. But the ‘credit-crunch’ and the concomitant soaring price of oil, which is sending world airlines into a tail-spin, may perversely turn out to be good news for travelers; in spite of the daily diet of doom served up by the Jeremiahs - with 24 airlines going bust so far this year and airlines facing a collective loss of $2.3 billion this year, having previously forecast a profit of $4.5 billion.

We have faced Armageddon before when 9/11 exquisitely coincided with the cusp of a recession, and sent travel into free fall, precipitating a crisis among world airlines. Some went bust; others reinvented themselves with new strategies, learning from the success of then emergent no-frills carriers. And, of course, travelers gradually returned to the skies.

Let the bad times roll! You don’t have to be a professional cynic to believe that what is bad for the travel trade is good for the traveler; depending on the fine balance between supply and demand - the difference between a buyers’ and sellers’ market.

The late author, Anthony Samson, once said that there are only two types of planes, empty planes and full planes. And the challenge for the traveler is to find a flight with plenty of empty seats.

Matching capacity with demand is the ongoing challenge for airlines. Many carriers are cutting capacity - dropping some routes and reducing frequencies, grounding parts of their fleets, scaling back expansion plans, raising fares, and fuel surcharges, and charging for checked baggage, in the effort to reduce costs, to stem the tide of losses. But it’s hard to keep capacity in sync with demand in an industry in which aircraft ordered during the boom are delivered during the slowdown. The era of very cheap air travel may finally be over, but many business travelers will welcome respite from the crowds on the ground and in the air.

Passenger numbers are set to fall this summer, according to the Air Transport Association of America, which represents leading U.S. airlines, and the Airports Council International, as a result of soaring oil prices which threaten to hit $170 a barrel. The ATA forecasts a dip of 1.3 percent, or nearly three million passengers this summer - with ‘planes approaching 85 percent full.’

The International Air Transport Association records year-on-year international passenger growth of three percent in April, capacity growth of five percent (10 percent on the trans-Atlantic routes), and aircraft load factors falling from 77 percent to 75.4 percent.

Airline capacity cuts may not necessarily be bad news for travelers. For instance, while American Airlines intends to scrap 75 planes and reduce the number of seats on domestic routes by 11 percent to 12 percent this year, these are mainly regional jets, which burn more fuel than larger planes; trans-Atlantic services are unlikely to be significantly trimmed, with capacity falling at most by 0.5 percent. Although American has cut its New York-London Stansted service, it has introduced non-stop flights from Chicago to Moscow.

And here comes Delta Air Lines with new flight from New York JFK to Cape Town; and Finnair announcing a new service from Helsinki to Seoul.

British Airways has raised its passenger fuel surcharge for the 11th time - from #26 to #32 on a round-trip short-haul flight and from #158 to #218 on long-haul flights. Virgin Atlantic has raised surcharges on all tickets, but less steeply for those in the back of the plane, to reflect the fact that more fuel is burned per passenger in business class and premium economy.

With characteristic chutzpah, Ryanair responded to fuel surcharge increases across the industry by releasing 500,000 seats for #10, including taxes and charges. Chief executive Michael O’Leary said, ‘No airline is better placed in Europe than Ryanair to trade through this downturn. We will continue to grow, by lowering fares, taking market share from competitors, and expanding in markets where competitors either withdraw capacity or go bust.’

Nevertheless, Ryanair will cut costs by grounding up to 20 aircraft this coming winter.

Crises focus the mind. ‘Do I really need to make this trip?’ ‘How can we attract people to fly with us?’

American Airlines’ decision to charge a fee for checking baggage ($15 for the first bag, $25 for the second, $100 each for the third, fourth and fifth bags) is likely to be followed by every airline. Airlines have been moving toward pay-for-all-the-extras pricing for some time, adding charges for everything from meals to window seats - following the budget carriers’ lead.

A la carte pricing may become the magic bullet. Why pay for what you don’t need?

Deep frustration among air travelers in the United States led to them avoiding an estimated 41 million trips over the past 12 months at a cost of more than $26 billion to the U.S. economy, according to a survey published in May by the Travel Industry Association of 1,003 air travelers who had taken at least one round-trip by air in the last 12 months. Travelers express little optimism for positive change; nearly 50 percent saying the air travel system is bad, getting worse, and unlikely to improve in the near future.

Roger Dow, president & CEO of the TIA in Washington, said, ‘The air travel crisis has hit a tipping point - with more than 100,000 each day voting with their wallets by choosing to avoid trips. This landmark research should be a wake-up call to America’s policy leaders that the time for meaningful air system reform is now.’

According to the survey, more than 60 percent of travelers believe the air travel system is deteriorating; 48 percent of frequent travelers (5 plus trips a year) are dissatisfied with the system; 51 percent feel their time is not respected in the process.

Inefficient security screening and flight cancellations and delays are air travelers’ top frustrations.

‘With rising fuel prices already weighing heavily, we need to find ways to encourage Americans to continue their business and leisure travel,’ Dow said. ‘Unfortunately, just the opposite is happening.’

Satirists and soothsayers have a tough time these days: We are always being overtaken by the future - not  to mention current news.

The Airbus A380 super jumbo went someway towards fulfilling my prediction that a  ’flying village,’ a ‘three-deck 1,000-seat Goliath’ would enter service by 2015, in a futuristic piece I wrote on the euphoric cusp of the millennium.

I had speculated on the possibility of on-board amenities such as beauty salons, bars, restaurants, gymnasiums, libraries, casinos, shops, private cabins that convert to day-time lounges with private showers. Apart from taking off and landing, one would be free to move around the plane. There would be no end to social congress; 16 to 18 hours is almost long enough to get married, start a family and get divorced. About the only things missing would be an Olympic-size pool, and an outside jogging track. But you can never tell.

The Singapore Airlines’ A380 is certainly impressive.

Reporters have raved about the 12 suites, like cabins on an ocean liner (’a class beyond first class’), some of which convert to double beds (but don’t hold your breath for en suite bathrooms); the 60 ‘flat-bed’ business-class seats on the upper deck (’widest business-class seats in the industry’).

But I am reminded of the little boy at the circus with his grandfather. One of the most spectacular acts was a guy shot out of a cannon who managed to play a few notes on a violin before he landed in the net. ‘Wasn’t that fantastic?’ the boy cried. ‘Not bad,’ the old man admitted, ‘but Heifetz he ain’t!’

So let us wait and see whether other airlines will meet the futuristic challenge of the A380 (which is one-third larger than the 400-seat Boeing 747-400) by fully exploiting the extra space - especially if a stretched version comes along.

But I do not expect anything much more imaginative from Qantas or Emirates (who start flying A380s in August 2008),  Air France, Lufthansa and British Airways; although Virgin Atlantic talks about a gym, a casino, beauty salons, bars and restaurants, and a family area…

Predictions? One of the airline alliances could operate the ‘flying village’ for member airlines, who would share the same plane on certain routes, with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine, amenities and style of service.  Franchises would be sold for wining and dining - from gourmet to McDonalds (although what’s the point of fast food on a 16-hour flight?) and other retail outlets.

Look out for ‘a la carte’ travel, whereby you book a seat, or a cabin, and pay extra for meals, entertainment options, lounges, fast-track security, curb-side check-in and door-to-door limo transfers. Even cattle class might be less of an ordeal. You might only be stuck in your seat for take-off and landing; the rest of the time you would be free to roam around the plane and explore the facilities.

The ultimate premium experience might be for an airline to deliver a container to your office or home, transport you through the airport and load you onto the aircraft. Serious high-fliers might even convert their offices into flight containers, re-creating the private railroad cars of a century ago - the ultimate in seamless travel.

Fanciful?  I’m just trying to stay ahead of the forecasting  game.

Satirists and soothsayers have a tough time these days: We are always being overtaken by the future - not to mention the news.

The Airbus A380 superjumbo, which made its inaugural commercial flight with Singapore Airlines on Oct. 25 from Singapore to Sydney to great media hype and circumstance, went some way toward fulfilling my prediction that a “flying village,” a “three-deck 1,000-seat Goliath,” would enter service by 2015, in a futuristic piece I wrote on the euphoric cusp of the millennium.

I had speculated on the possibility of onboard amenities such as beauty salons, bars, restaurants, gymnasiums, libraries, casinos, shops, private cabins that convert to daytime lounges with private showers and butler service in first class. Apart from taking off and landing, one would be free to move around the plane. After all, on an ultra-long-haul flight, there would be no end to social congress; 16 to 18 hours is almost long enough to get married, start a family and get divorced. Enterprising travel agents might use reservations systems to help people choose in-flight companions. They would simply punch in your likes and dislikes and match you up with a suitable seatmate. About the only things missing would be an Olympic-size pool, and an outside jogging track. But you can never tell.

Singapore Airlines A380 is certainly impressive, raising the stakes in the Airbus-Boeing battle for supremacy in the skies. Reporters have raved about the 12 suites, like cabins on an ocean liner (”a class beyond first class” according to Singapore Airlines), some of which convert to double beds; the 60 flat-bed business-class seats on the upper deck with all the bells and whistles. The 399 economy seats, spread across both decks, are just 50 centimeters, or 19 inches, wide with a knee-crunching 82-centimeter seat pitch. The proletariat walk upstairs by a spiral staircase at the rear of the plane, although we’re not told if they are encouraged to mix with the high fliers in the premium cabins, who get to visit a “passenger corner” to “pick up snacks between meals and socialize during the flight.”

We will have to wait and see whether other airlines will meet the futuristic challenge of the A380 (which is one-third larger than the 400-seat Boeing 747-400) by fully exploiting the extra space. Singapore Airlines has configured its first A380 with 471 seats in three classes - instead of a possible 853 seats all in cattle class. But how about 250 seats in an all-business configuration, or an airborne conference center? And how about a stretched version of the plane, a 1,000-seat behemoth?

Singapore Airlines, which has ordered nine more A380s with an option on a further 15 aircraft, plans to introduce three flights a day between Singapore and London Heathrow from the first quarter of 2008, followed by flights to Tokyo, Hong Kong and San Francisco.

Emirates, the largest customer so far for the A380, with an order for 55 aircraft, believes the plane will help develop Dubai as a major transcontinental hub. It plans to install showers and “private rooms” for premium-class passengers. It takes delivery of its first four A380s next year.

Virgin Atlantic (which has ordered six A380s, with delivery delayed until 2013) says it plans to offer such amenities as a fitness center, a casino, beauty salons, bars and restaurants, and a family area.

“We want to give passengers the choice to move around in this plane,” a Virgin spokeswoman said. “The idea of sacrificing seats for space is something we have done with Upper Class on our 747s, with a bar and lounge area.”

Predictions? I could envisage one of the airline alliances, such as Star Alliance or Oneworld, operating the “flying village” for member airlines, who might share the same plane on certain routes, with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine, amenities and style of service. Franchises would be sold for wining and dining and other amenities.

The notion of first class, business class and economy would disappear in favor of à la carte travel, whereby you would book a seat, or a cabin, and pay extra for meals, in-flight perks, entertainment options, lounges, fast-track security, curbside check-in and limo transfers. Traveling cattle class would not be so much of an ordeal. You need only be stuck in your seat for takeoff and landing; the rest of the time you would be free to move around the plane.

The ultimate premium experience might be for an airline to deliver a container to your office or home, transport you through the airport and load you onto the aircraft. Serious high fliers might even convert their offices into flight containers, re-creating the private railroad cars of a century ago - the ultimate in seamless travel.

Fanciful? I’m just trying to stay ahead of the forecasting game.

When travelers talk class of travel, the conversation covers topics such as better service, bonus mileage, seat pitch and avoiding “cattle” class.

However, in the world of frequent flyers, there is only one true class of travel, and everybody knows it: travel in business class. You get more space. End of story. Forget the glassware; forget the 25-percent class-of-service bonus; forget about avoiding the unwashed masses who occupy economy class. Every business traveler always prefers business class, and they prefer it because they get more space to sleep, to work, and to stretch their legs on those transatlantic flights. Of course, if first class is within reach, anybody would be a fool not to take it, but how many companies eagerly foot the bill for first?

Having dealt with that, we can now look at other aspects of class of travel. In a general overview, there is much to be said about differences between classes of service, why a traveler would choose one class over another and which carriers offer a better product. What follows is a quick rundown for each class. After that we get down to the important business at hand: miles. How does class of service affect mileage accrual and redemption?

One word of caution though: We’ve decided that the current state of domestic first class is not worth including here, a point that most of you would surely agree with.

Economy Class
When talking about economy class, there is no end to the complaints. Our readers indicate that “the best economy class [they] have flown does not exist,” because they “hate them all equally.” What makes coach so awful? The most immediate issue is seat pitch, which is the industry expression for space. Seat pitch is the distance measured between a seat and the seats in back and in front of it. When a carrier calculates the amount of space required for a seat, they default to what is termed the “95-percentile passenger.” The industry believes this prototypical passenger represents the average dimensions of most passengers. A 95-percentile passenger is male, 5′10″ to 6 feet tall and weighs 180-210 lbs. Hmmm …. That fits (looking around the office quickly) just the editor; who must be in-flight somewhere tipping the statistical scale in favor of that body type. No wonder economy class is so uncomfortable. Moving on from our very scientific analysis, the carriers have developed an industry standard of a 31-inch seat pitch to match this mythical 95-percentile passenger. For those who have stuck in economy class on a long-haul flight replete with screaming children, stale food and mounting minutes spent on the tarmac, 31 inches represents some type of medieval torture chamber.

If economy class is so miserable, why would anybody allow themselves to be herded into one of these strait-jackets that airlines call seats? The first answer is cost. If you pay for your own seat, the expense report makes the benefits of economy obvious. It has been said that: “Anyone willing to pay 10 times the price for business or first class over an economy ticket is a fool or a millionaire, though as an upgrader he/she could be a mileage millionaire.” A company conscious of the bottom line is going to book traveling employees into economy and save enormously. Some travelers have the benefit of measuring cost and comfort against each other. For short-haul and day flights, stick it out in economy and save cash. For long-haul or overnight flight, the benefit of comfort outweighs the concern over price. If economy is in the future though, many have decided to change frequent flyer loyalty, choosing United and their Economy Plus program or even JetBlue, both of which offer extended leg room. Many business travelers still feel that American Airlines blinked when it started to add seats to coach, when they had just started to move the dial for frequent flyers with their “More Room Throughout Coach” seating plan, popular with AAdvantage members. Other carriers recommended by our readers internationally for the quality of their economy class include Cathay Pacific and SAS.

Business Class [international]
Having escaped the constrictions of economy, business class provides an oasis. Travelers receive an extra 8 inches or more seat pitch, while avoiding the dramatic price increase associated with first class, even though today’s business class is easily as good or better than first class was just five years ago. As most of our readers know, a dozen years ago airlines started to introduce two-class service internationally, and thus introduced the hybrid class of travel which was somewhere between economy and first class. Even though business fares have risen rapidly in recent years, our informal poll still records 70 percent of travelers opining that business class is usually worth the added cost, simply for the extra space and comfort. “Service, the lounge [access] and food are also important,” records an InsideFlyer Advisory Board member, “and individual screens are good, too, for the privacy.” Another agrees that he likes the perks such as the “ability to sleep, technology like power adaptors for laptops, onboard Internet access for some and personalized screens for movies.”

Another standard is booking economy and upgrading by any means possible, whether with miles or money, or, in the case of AAdvantage and OnePass members, both. Luckily, a good proportion of our Advisory Board members are employed by companies that realize it is well worth the expense of flying business travelers in business class on international flights longer than four hours.

Responses regarding who has a better business class product vary enormously. One reader has obviously given this a great deal of thought: “Continental BusinessElite is a 9.0 [out of 10]; it is the best international I have flown. British Airways receives an 8.5 because the leg-rests are too short for long legs in the cradle seat. American uses leather seats that seem old cowhide and not comfortable [7.5] at all and Virgin just wows you with service [9.0].”

First Class [international]
Going back to seat pitch, the industry standard has changed over the years and no longer exists because of the change to “yacht-style” pods for first-class cabins popularized by British Airways. Of course, the fares for first are dramatically higher than economy. The arguments for flying first are the same used for the jump between economy and business: “even more space, excellent food and airport lounge access.” Readers are also quite opinionated about the preeminent first-class products. Quite a few airlines hit the mark, including Singapore Airlines (no surprise there), British Airways and Virgin’s Upper Class.

Mileage Classification
Although the choice of which cabin to travel in relies mostly on comfort, space and other non-mileage related issues, class of travel does have an impact on mileage accrual and redemption. For mileage accrual, the following questions apply: How do class-of-service bonuses compare between the programs? How do partner airlines differ from the host program in providing class of service bonuses? Are more bonuses offered depending on class of travel? With regards to mileage redemption, the questions change to: Are more reward seats allotted in a certain class? In which class are rewards most commonly claimed? Within a program, what are the relative redemption values between service classes?

Mileage Accrual
Traveling in business and first class is beneficial in mileage terms because they have guaranteed class-of-service mileage bonuses. How do class-of-service bonuses compare between programs? In general, the industry standard is 125 percent of actual miles flown for business class and 150 percent of actual miles flown for first class. A few programs go slightly higher. Considering that business class fares are usually at least double if not more than those in economy, only rewarding 25 percent when you have paid three times as much for business is somewhat miserly. Another issue that we have difficulty with is the tendency to not attribute miles for discount fares, or to reward 50-70 percent of the miles flown. This is more of a trademark for non-U.S. programs and considering the backlash at Delta a few years back, may or may not be a factor in airline plans in the future. When airlines publish highly discounted fares, the airline’s competitors almost always match them, so the traveler is still making the point of being loyal to one airline over another and should be rewarded accordingly.

How do partner airlines differ from the host program in providing class of service bonuses? Once again, the industry has the general standard of 125 percent for business and 150 percent for first class, with very few variations.

If it does vary, this is normally because the program itself is different than the standard. In other words, class of service bonuses on the partner airlines almost always match the bonus levels on the host program. Of course, the popularity of alliances have made this more homogenized than in the past.

With regard to bonsues offered on a promotional, limited-time basis, does the class of travel affect how many bonuses are available? Frequent flyer programs responded to this question with a resounding and unqualified no. We beg to differ.

Mileage Redemption
Moving on to mileage redemption, are more reward seats allotted in certain classes? The answer is: not particularly. Airlines allot a certain percentage of each cabin to reward travel, a percentage which tends to range from 5-10 percent of the seats. In a more specific illustration, Northwest WorldPerks states that: “The number of reward seats available for redemption varies depending on the flight origin, destination, date of departure, date of return, class of service, the chosen reward level and the airline the members desires to travel on.”

If the same percentage of seats are offered for redemption in each class, in which class of service are rewards most commonly claimed? The top answer appears to be that, although paying for business simply to obtain more miles is a waste of money, redeeming miles to fly reward tickets in business class is a great value.

An informal poll of Advisory Board members discovered the following: 41 percent redeemed their miles in coach, 35 percent flew business class and 24 percent spent their miles in first.

Although this portrays an equal playing field, actual comments condoned business class: “[It's] a very bad idea to pay for business class, but not a bad idea to redeem for business-class rewards.”

Once again, frequent flyer programs responded with the same answer for every program: Economy class takes the brunt of reward redemption, because economy-class tickets are cheaper to redeem. Interestingly enough, some programs report that their business class redemption is higher than economy class.

Although it is more expensive in mileage terms to redeem in business or first class, how much more expensive is it? Here are some pretty loose number crunching led us to the following conclusions. (Rewards were compared internally to a program along several representative routes and then averaged to obtain an approximate percentage of increase between economy and first. For greater detail, reference the corresponding chart featured online.)

From economy to business class, the required mileage increases between 25 percent and 60 percent, with an average of 45 percent. From economy to first class, the mileage required to redeem a reward increases by 50 percent to 150 percent, with an average of 80 percent. However, the majority of programs are right at 100 percent.

From this, deciding whether it is a good bargain to redeem the extra miles from your account to fly business or first varies, depending on your personal choices. If it’s a short-hop then economy is great. However, if you’re crossing half the world to reach a vacation or experience of a lifetime, add the extra 50 percent of miles to your redemption and let the vacation begin the moment you board the plane.

And being rewarded for enduring all the misery of business travel is what it’s all about, right?