@southwestair

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of Southwest Airlines.

Recently, I had an experience that proves why Southwest does something right that most airlines have wrong.

My travel plans for next weekend have changed. Josh’s closing got pushed back due to a problem on the seller’s end. That means I’m not helping him move this weekend. Instead, I’m going to be spending the weekend in Washington, DC to see an old friend from college. I had already purchased my airfare on Southwest weeks ago. With most other airlines, my $265 fare would have been history. But not with Southwest.

I went to southwest.com and canceled my reservation. That meant that I had $265 in credit available for my next flight. Instead of losing money, I can apply it to my trip to DC this weekend without any additional fees. A refund would be nice, but that’s not very good business. But by giving me an opportunity to use that money toward a different trip, they keep me coming back for more.  THAT’s good business.

It gets better, though. As the day has progressed, I’ve decided to take Friday as a vacation day. Reggie is heading to my friend Chris’ house on Friday morning now. That means I can catch an earlier flight. Most airlines will charge you a fee for this. Instead, my flight has a lower fare available than my original flight. Southwest is giving me the fare difference as a credit.

You’ll never see US Airways do that.

I read in a recent blog post that Delta is premiering their new safety video.

It’s awful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgpzUo_kbFY

If the cheesy acting isn’t bad enough, the flight attendant wagging her finger while telling me that smoking is not allowed on any Delta flight is just too much.

Maybe I’m just nitpicking the aircraft, but they filmed this on a Boeing 757 and the graphic showing the exits is a 737-700. Keep in mind that Delta doesn’t even fly the 737-700.

In all fairness to Delta’s people, these things are incredibly boring to watch, so making them has to be even more painful.

UPDATE: Okay, in fairness, I double-checked my facts and wasn’t entirely accurate. I was correct when I said that Delta doesn’t fly the 737-700. They fly the 737-800. However, Delta does have ten of the 737-700 on order. (details)

This is one of those things that airlines do and I’ll never understand it. Frequently, you’ll see a flight that starts in one city, stops in a second, and then continues on to a third. For example, a flight might start in Philadelphia, stop in Pittsburgh, and then continue on to Los Angeles, all on the same flight number. Southwest does this a lot. In most cases, the plane stops, but you don’t actually have to get off the plane because it’s just a stop.

This situation, though, is very different. Delta flight 118 starts in Boston, stops in New York, and then continues on to Paris. This is fine except for one thing. The flight changes planes yet it keeps the same flight number. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

And as much as I love flying on the Boeing 757, I really don’t like the idea of flying across an ocean in a narrow body aircraft. I’m sure it’s perfectly safe. It just seems… somehow wrong.

In my little fantasy world, I would have an unlimited supply of money and the ability to travel to exotic destinations on a whim.

Tonight, I was looking at the Hawaiian Airlines website and noticed that they serve Tahiti. Just for giggles, I priced out the airfare from Boston to Papeete, Tahiti since Hawaiian doesn’t serve Boston. $1500 in May is a little more than I can afford for just the airfare. Anyway, what caught my eye is that Qantas (the Australian national airline) served it from LAX. That had to be a codeshare since it was on an A340, and in fact, it was. It turns out that this is an Air France flight. That, too, sounded like a code share. Why would Air France do LAX to Tahiti? If my geography were a little better, I would have known that Tahiti is also known as French Polynesia.  So yeah, Air France serves this one from LA.

It sounds like an absolutely wonderful place. Perhaps that should be a destination for me in the future.

I’m off to New York in the morning. I have a ticket for the 6:00 AM US Airways Shuttle and the 6:15 Acela train. I’m thinking I’ll take the Acela, which takes longer but is a lot less stressful. I booked a first class return ticket on Wednesday for the 4:00 PM Acela.

I dropped Reggie off with Beth at her work yesterday afternoon. She reports that he’s already marked her knitting bag.

After dropping Reggie off, I stopped at Borders to pick up a book to read on the train. I finished it in about 18 hours. Oops. I also stopped at a store to look at luggage. I know exactly what I want, and they didn’t have it. I want a 22 inch Travelpro Crew Series 6 rollaboard.  It’s the replacement to the one I already have, which has been with me for about eight years and across the country countless times. The 26” bag is just as old and has been across the Atlantic several times, as well. Both bags are really showing their age and need to be replaced. But I don’t travel as much as I used to, so it’s hard to justify spending a lot of money on luggage. Still, going back to my Clorox Bleach theory, there are some things where I just won’t skimp on quality, and my luggage is one of them.

While in New York, I’m there for two nights. Monday night, I have reservations at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill. It’s going to be a little expensive, and I’m not sure I can justify that on my expense report. I also want to see the tree at Rockafeller Center, something I’ve never done. Tuesday night, I’m supposed to meet up with somebody for a drink. This is a guy I’ve been chatting with for a few years. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, so that might be fun.

This trip to New York is completely pointless. Our business project manager promised that someone from the technical team would be there this week for their implementation, thus I’m going. Still, there is no pressing need for me to be there.

I’m kicking around the idea of going back to Europe in the spring.

I really hate the idea of flying across the Atlantic in coach. When I had a bazillion frequent flyer miles to burn, I got spoiled by upgrading. Once you fly business class across an ocean, you’ll never want to sit in the back of the plane again.

The flipside of this is the price. The cheapest business class seats I’ve found across the Atlantic start about $2500, but most of them are in the $3500 range. That’s a pretty big price tag for a round-trip flight. This has me looking for other options.

There are options. One of them is a low-cost business flight from New York like MAXJet.  One problem with MAXJet is that it lands at London’s Stansted airport instead of Heathrow or Gatwick.  Another problem is that I don’t get to earn miles that I’d ever be able to use again. Oh, and I’d have to get to New York, too.

Another option is to fly Virgin Atlantic’s Premium Economy non-stop from Boston to Heathrow and then hop a train to wherever it is I’d like to go.  That will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars, which is much more palatable than other business class fares. The downside is that I don’t really want to go to London. I’d rather go to Berlin and Amsterdam on this trip. However, I certainly wouldn’t mind taking the Eurostar train.

I really have no idea what I’m going to end up doing. It’s going to require some thinking and planning.

I have to go back to New York in early December. The Monday night I get there, I have reservations for dinner at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill. My niece is going to be jealous, even though she does say he looks like a monkey.

Every time I drive to my parents’ house, I take the same route: I90-I84-I81-I80. And every time I seem to hit traffic in the same places, Hartford (such as it is), Wilkes-Bare/Scranton, and the I84-I81 split. This time, I’m thinking of trying a different route: I90 to I79. It’s going to take me about a hundred miles out of my way, but it’s a different route. I’ve never driven across upstate New York

I’m not sure it will add or subtract any time from the trip. In theory, it should add time to the trip, but when you sit on I81 in Scranton for an hour, it just might make a difference.  Assuming we leave at 7:00, we’ll have all day to get home. Time really isn’t that big of a deal.

Besides, my car is fun to drive.

Map stolen from Google Maps.

I was up shortly before 4:00 this morning to catch my 6:00 flight. There were nine people from my company all on the same flight.

It was a quick day in the NYC office to take care of a technical problem that our helpdesk should have picked up on. I was also supposed to have some face time with our international client services rep. Those two hours got reduced to fifteen minutes because he was busy with clients and their architects.

Because of the storms about to hit the northeast, we were afraid the 4:00 and later shuttles could be cancelled. When I say we, I mean the other four people who were going back to Boston.  And let me tell you that our approach into Boston was one of the bumpiest I’ve ever had. We were buffeting more than I cared for. I was seriously getting nauseous, and for me to be upset by a flight, you know it has to be bad.

One of the great things about today’s trip is that my expenses are minimal. I had to pay my taxi to and from Logan, which is cheap. We had a car service to and from LaGuardia, and those were picked up by one of our project executives. I’m okay with that.

You know, it’s kind of sad when New York, the greatest place on Earth, stops being exciting. I find Chicago more exciting these days.

I’ve recently been playing around with flightmemory.com. It’s a tool that allows you to input all of your flights and then keep a history. In the past five years, I’ve flown 64 flights for over 80,000 miles, enough to circumnaviate the globe more than three times.  The map here shows just my domestic flights. It does not include four transatlantic flights and two transpacific flights. Oh, there are two intra-Europe and two intra-Australia flights as well.

I wish I still had the records of my road warrior days. That would really show some flights.

Here are some interesting statistics of my travels.