20 hours in New York

Some readers of this blog may be aware from my posts on Flyer Talk that I'm currently in the middle of a marathon trip. Today I had 20 hours in New York - one of the longest stops on my 4 week trip.

After a morning of doing tourist stuff and coffee with a fellow traveller who also posts on Flyer Talk, I was privileged to be invited by Wendy Perrin of The Perrin Post to have lunch in the Conde Naste Frank Gehry designed cafetaria. It certainly is very different to where I normally have lunch (and no, that's not at 39,000 feet).

It was interesting to hear her talk on some of the different issues she faces as a corporate blogger.

More later, for yes I have a flight to catch.

Too many flights (part 2 - schedule change hassles)

A couple of hours of my time gone for no good reason.

I got a call from an airline to say their schedule had changed and it affected an itinerary.

Marks awarded for being proactive, but marks taken off for not noticing the schedule changed forced an impossible connection (flight 1 arrives later than flight 2 departs) and more marks taken off for not realising the schedule change affected another half dozen or so similar itineraries.

After I got those sorted I wondered what other bookings were affected and so looked up my other 150 odd flights booked but unflown. Sure enough some more were non-trivially impacted to the point of misconnecting. For one the airline had cancelled 2 flights and rebooked on alternative flights. The problem was flight 2 arrived earlier than flight 1 departed!

If the TripIt site I reviewed yesterday can automatically identify schedule changes and highlight them, that will make life so much easier.

I admit I don't check for schedule changes as much as I should. I have a few rules of thumb to help:

• Where the flights are longhaul flagship/prime routes with plenty of flights and I have long connections, I don't bother checking (unless I'm told) - especially if the origin/destination are slot constrained or have curfews. For here the potential for schedule changes significant enough to disrupt my plans is low - most schedule changes are likely to be an hour or less. An exception might be if an airline drops a route. For example when United stopped flying between New York and London.
• Where the flights are domestic trunk routes with plenty of flights and I am not connecting to or from a flight that is infrequent, I don't bother checking. For here most schedule changes are likely to be only a few minutes.
• For flights that are infrequent to/from destinations that are hard to get to (eg few flights, limited availability, have schedule timing issues or visa implications) and/or have multiple tight connections, then I check a month or so before the trip and again closer to departure. For here even minor changes may be enough to cause significant disruption to my travel.
• In other cases I don't check much - mainly when I remember.

The last two categories I really should check more regularly to save myself some grief.

Finally, here is a blog entry from a year ago on schedule changes and tools to check your itineraries.

Too many flights

I think I've been on too many shorthaul flights lately, or rather too many on the same airline. I can't get a couple of songs out of my head. The songs' music videos are played on a certain airline's IFE, on certain flights only.

Is it crazy to select or avoid an airline based on the music video being played?

Itinerary organiser

Yet another travel/itinerary organiser, TripIt, is being launched today. The basic concept is you can forward confirmation emails and it will automatically interpret and convert into standard itinerary format. Direct links to relevant useful travel sites are added - google map, seatguru, weather, etc. You can also enter itinerary details and notes manually. Itineraries can be shared with others.

My first test on 2 different upcoming trips did not go smoothly. One of the destinations was not supported despite being a tourist hot spot, and there was no way to accept my typed entry - if it couldn't find a match in the database the destination (or any other field) gets left blank. Despite not allowing the destination, once I had entered flight details it linked to the correct place for weather information and google map.

The airlines (both fairly major ones) were not supported and I was left to manually enter the flight information. It was annoying the required confirmation number was not identified as a compulsory field. I liked how it looks up flight data so that you only need to enter date, airline and flight number. It will be even better if it automatically updates for schedule changes. It even was clever enough to recognise that one of my flights has 2 segments with the same flight number and ask which one I was on. I didn't like that there was no option to enter origin, destination and flight times manually, and that one flight returned was not correct.

Hopefully these bugs (and to me design flaws) will be fixed, and more importantly the supported list of travel providers gets expanded. I can see this being very useful and a big time saver for me in the future. It certainly was easy to use.

The importance of being prepared

As I write this entry I'm several hundred miles away from where I meant to be, will misconnect on my next planned flight (which it will take me two flights to get to that airport) and currently several hundred dollars out of pocket.

And I'm kicking myself for being less prepared than I could have been.

Yesterday I boarded a flight which I thought would have been cancelled due to bad weather at our destination (I'd been tracking the deteriorating weather online and also could see storms in the distance in the direction we were headed), but the airline flew regardless. That was mistake 1. Given my reservations I should have declined to board.

The flight then diverted to another, very small, airport not served by this airline, but would not allow anyone to remain on the aircraft. Since the airline doesn't serve this airport they would not allow anyone to reboard.

As my travel plans included flying on to another city that same day, I had no accommodation arranged. Also being late on a Saturday afternoon there were no more flights by any airline out of the diversion airport. I was stranded.

So I called the elite number of the airline, only to get someone in a call centre in another country who was unable to offer any assistance. Mistake 2 was if I had saved a local direct number (as opposed to the general free phone number) I might have been able to get assistance.

Mistake 3 became apparent shortly after when my cell phone battery died. I of course was not expecting to need to make a 30+ minute call in a poor reception area and had no spare battery or even a charger with me.

Not only did I need to pay for unplanned accommodation and a new last minute ticket to get to the ultimate destination from yesterday's travel, but I will not arrive in time for my next scheduled flight. I can see it will take some time to patch up my travels that unravelled so quickly yesterday.

Airport info for your journey

The One World website has a handy tool that lets you create a journey guide. Information can be included on some or all of terminal maps, flight transfers, lounges, transfers to/from the city (note some options are not available at some airports - hopefully this will be rectified soon). It is easy to use - you select the airports in your journey and which information you want included. You can view the information on screen or save to a pdf.

Here is an example pdf.

I think it is great for infrequent travellers, or even for savvy travellers visiting somewhere for the first time (for instance did you know that the ECASA lounge used by Iberia at Havana is located airside but is open 24 hours?). My only gripe is I wish the lounge information included whether they had showers and free computer access.