To travel hopefully……..
Wednesday a.m., sitting in the departure lounge at Los Angeles, waiting for the Honolulu flight. Made the right decision to fly with British Midland and their Air NZ partners on this trip, the alternative supplier would have been BA, commonly described as a ‘pension fund with an airline attached’ and the employer of some of the worst examples of customer service personnel that it has been my misfortune to experience. Anyway, I digress, the point that I wanted to make was that the choice of carrier is something that needs to be thought about well in advance of any big trip. It’s not just about stops and stopovers, the fact that airlines operate on the ‘hub’ principle (think of hubs, and spokes, etc) means that you need to be careful about where you change planes, especially if your route takes you to or via the US of A. Check this story on the folly of flying anywhere near New York and this blog entry on the inadvisability of travelling anywhere in the US during the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.
Incidentally, Los Angeles has quite a nifty ‘real time’ system to warn of incipient problems, click here to see what I mean.
The hard truth is that the traditional airline business model is under tremendous commercial pressure, largely because of the ‘Ryanisation’ factor caused by the transition to the sort of low-cost/low service flights much enjoyed by the Brits and most of our fellow Europeans. Despite valiant sabotage attempts by the trade unions and the old fashioned ‘legacy’ airlines, the cheap flight phenomenon is taking root in North America and has caused most of the bigger carriers to downsize the aircraft used on internal routes and to take steps to improve load factors, all to improve efficiency and stay alive until some sort of stability returns.
From a traveller’s viewpoint, the outcome of this has been to reduce the flexibility of the system, the huge number of seats taken out of the system means little or no slack to cope with delays or cancellations, which translates to lower levels of customer satisfaction and puts huge pressure on gate staff and airport infrastructure when things (inevitably!) go wrong.
We’ll be in Hawaii for couple of days, we will take a couple of tours and hope to get some decent photos, etc.