Virgin America launches 7-hour fare sale to say ‘thanks’ to flyers

by Melanie Nayer on

Update: Due to the overwhelming response from travelers, Virgin America has decided to extend this sale by an additional seven hours! Tickets must now be purchased by 11:59pm PT tonight.

Everyone says ‘thank you’ in their own special way, but Virgin America is saying “you really like us!” with a last-minute fare sale.

Clearly overwhelmed with gratitude from being honored as “Best Domestic Airline” in the Travel + Leisure Annual World’s Best Awards readers’ survey, the airline is thanking the readers with ridiculously discounted fares. The “Three-peat” seven hour fare sale for travel starts today at 10:01am PT and ends 4:59pm PT at 11:59p.m. PT.

You must travel between August 25, 2010 and October 6, 2010. Fares start at $33 for short-haul flights (San Francisco to Los Angeles) and $113 for long-haul (New York to San Francisco, for example).

Maybe now is the time to finally book your summer vacation plans?

Solar-powered plane flies at night

by Sean McLachlan on


An airplane that relies entirely on solar energy has flown for 24 hours straight, cruising along happily through the darkness and emerging into the dawn with three hours left in its batteries. Once the sun rose, of course, the batteries immediately began to recharge.

The Solar Impulse is the product of the same great minds that brought you the cuckoo clock–the Swiss! The entire wingspan is covered with 12,000 solar cells that power four electric engines. Average cruising speed is 70 km/hr (43.5 mph). You can see complete stats on the plane here.

The next step for the engineers is to make the next generation of the plane, one that will fly around the world by 2013. The Solar Impulse is not the first solar-powered airplane, only the first to complete a manned night flight. Scientists and engineers have been experimenting with solar-powered planes since the 1970s and manned flights since the 1980s. This new leap forward will add impetus to a field of study that has so far received little attention from the press.

While this technology is still in the experimental stage, the potential impact for the airline industry and the environment is obvious. Airline emissions pose a major environmental threat, and G8 leaders have called for a 50 percent reduction in airline emissions by 2050. That’s a tall order, but it looks like the Swiss have shown the way forward. Of course the Solar Impulse’s slow speed and small cockpit mean the age of solar-powered 747s is a long way off, think of it as the modern equivalent of the Wright Brothers plane. It was only a generation after Kitty Hawk that passengers started flying to international destinations.

Cathay Pacific to launch in-flight WiFi; mobile device connectivity

by Melanie Nayer on

It’s one thing to connect in-flight from coast-to-coast, it’s another thing to connect when you’re flying across the world! Travel writers, business executives, and Internet-junkies rejoice: Cathay Pacific has just announced it will launch long-haul in-flight WiFi in 2012!

The Hong Kong-based airline plans to roll out broadband Internet onboard their fleet and Dragonair planes starting in early 2012, thanks to some help from Panasonic Avionics Corporation, a worldwide supplier of in-flight entertainment and communication systems.

The in-flight fun will feature eXConnect broadband service and eXPhone GSM phone service but here’s where it gets really exciting: as part of the service, you’ll get the Cathay Pacific-branded free-of-charge entertainment portal, which is accessible through all passenger devices (read: iPads, PDAs, etc.) and seatback screens. Readers: take a moment to digest that information — we realize it’s pretty big news.

Here’s more straight from Cathay Pacific:

eXPhone, offered in collaboration with AeroMobile’s GSM mobile phone technology, allows passengers to use their mobile phones, smart phones and BlackBerry devices onboard to make voice calls, send SMS text messages or utilise data services and stream content wirelessly to their iPod, iPhone and iPad. eXPhone gives the airline flexibility and full control over the services offered including restricting certain services when appropriate.

According to Cathay, the in-flight entertainment options will include a range of content updated during the flight, access to airline and partner sites, e-commerce, airline-specific advertising, and live television with pay-per-view capability for special events.

Couple this with Cathay Pacific’s business class cabin and I might just move into the plane.

So google is buying ITA Software. What does it mean for you, air traveler?

by George Hobica on

First of all, what is ITA Software? Briefly, it’s a technology company based in Cambridge, MA that provides the airfare search software behind such sites as Orbitz, Kayak and many airline web sites. Its claim to fame is that it digs deeper into airline reservation systems than some other technologies, and usually finds fares that are only available via the airlines’ own websites. And it allows users to do an easy flexible date search over any 30-day period.

But: It does not provide searches on Southwest AIrlines, Allegiant Airlines, Ryanair, and a few other smaller carriers. Similarly, low-cost leader Spirit Airlines keeps its best fares for Spiritair.com.

Nor can ITA calculate promo code or some other special airfares that the airlines reserve for their own web sites.

Recently, for example, US Airways tweeted fares from Philadelphia to Tel Aviv for $99 each way plus tax, summer travel. JetBlue tweets frequently as well, with $10 fares. United recently tweeted 20% off discount codes. These deals were not picked up by ITA Software. If airlines increasingly market their best deals through narrow channels, and keep them from ITA, it will further change the fare finding game. My thinking is that if airlines can figure out how to eliminate all third parties, such as profitable Southwest has done, they’ll do it.ITA also doesn’t include the “name your own price” fares you can find on sites like Priceline.com, which are often quite good if you don’t have a sufficiently large advance purchase window. And it doesn’t include consolidator airfares. In fact, no airfare search site includes all of these things.

So will the Google acquisition change airfare search for the better? Online airfare search “is ultimately not a very good user experience,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on a conference call. “There’s clearly room for more competition there.”

That’s an interesting statement. More competition? Compared to other categories, airfare search is anything but devoid of competition. Recently, TripAdvisor got into the game, as did Travelzoo with its fly.com site. That’s in addition to sites like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Cheaptickets, Hotwire, Booking Buddy, Farecompare, Yapta, Cheapair, and about a dozen others. ITA Software powers many of these sites already.

ITA does not sell airfares directly. It only shows what it believes the lowest fare to be on any given route, and then you need to conduct a separate search on the site of your choice to find the fare. Most people go directly to airline web sites to complete purchases, although sometimes the cheapest fare will be outbound on one airline and a return on a second airline, which is where the online travel agencies (OTAs such as Travelocity and Expedia) have an advantage, since they show fares on more than one airline. Will Google turn ITA into a fare-selling engine, in competition with its paying customers? Who can say?

Of course, Google is already in the fare search business. If you Google a term like “Boston to New York depart Dec 13 return Dec 15 2010” (try it), the top unadvertised search result will be a google-generated search box allowing you to click on many major OTA’s and meta-search sites.

But it will not actually return fares without further clicking. Perhaps at some point an ITA-generated fare result will pop up, showing the lowest price your Google search, instead of sending you to an OTA’s link.

Airfare search is such a crowded, ever-changing business, fraught with uncertainty and risks that it’s interesting that Google wants in. But I’ll have to assume they know what they’re doing.

George Hobica is the founder of Airfarewatchdog™, the most inclusive source of airfare deals that have been researched and verified by experts. Airfarewatchdog compares fares from all airlines and includes the increasing number of airline-site-only and promo code fares.

[Flickr image: tortuga767]

Galley Gossip: 5 tips for traveling with a wedding dress

by Heather Poole on

From the moment my husband got down on one knee and proposed in the sand at sundown, I knew I wanted a destination wedding. When it came time to choose a wedding dress, I only considered styles that were sleek and simple. Basically I had to find something I could pack inside a suitcase since we had booked tickets on a regional carrier. Most of these airlines do not have closets or decent overhead bin space. So I knew beforehand that I’d have to gate-check a bag at the airport. It was a risk I chose to take. Thankfully my dress arrived safe and sound. I picked it up on the tarmac in Monterey.

Not all brides are quite so lucky.

“Can I hang this inside the closet?” asked a passenger on my flight from New York to Miami last week. She held a long, white garment bag with the words David’s Bridal written in gold across the zippered front.

Normally flight attendants are more than happy to accommodate a wedding dress, but sometimes it’s just not possible. This was one of those times.

“Congratulations!” I said to the blushing bride in an attempt to soften the blow. She smiled. Oh how I dreaded delivering the bad news. How could I tell her there were no closets and that first class coats had been hung on a hook between the bulkhead wall and the last row of first class seats? No way would her big puffy dress fit in such a confined space. And if miracle upon miracle it did fit, it would get crushed.

Tips for traveling with a wedding dress:

1. Ship it: FedEx / UPS / DHL and avoid airline hassles altogether! Most wedding dress places have shipping boxes and many will ship (domestically) for free. Too much can happen in transit. Do you really need the added stress?

2. Skip the poofy dress: Cinderella dresses belong in fairytales, not on airplanes. Sure it looks beautiful on you, but it’s not going to look so great after you pick it up at baggage claim because you were forced to check it when it didn’t fit on the airplane. Doesn’t matter that you’re getting married, if it doesn’t fit it doesn’t fit case closed! Be smart and travel light.

3. Check aircraft equipment: Most wide-body equipment (an aircraft with two aisles used mainly on long haul routes) have closets on board for passengers to use. They’re usually located in first class. Not all narrow-body equipment (single aisle aircraft) have closets since so many of them have been reconfigured to make more room for passenger seats.

4. Board first: Just because there’s a closet on the airplane doesn’t mean there’s going to be space available for your dress. Closets are small and quickly fill up with large bulky items such as wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, paintings, strollers, musical instruments and garment bags. Your only option may be to place the dress inside an overhead bin. If you’re in coach, choose a seat near the rear of the aircraft since most major carriers board from back to front first. This will ensure you find a place for your dress since bins tend to fill up quickly now that passengers bring everything on board to avoid checked luggage fees. If you’re traveling on an airline like Southwest that uses a first come-first serve boarding system, get to the airport extra early so you’re one of the first passengers in line.

5. Buy the dress a seat: The only surefire way you won’t have to check the dress is to buy a seat for it. I’m not kidding. Passengers traveling with musical instruments do it all the time. There’s nothing more important than the dress, am I wrong? The dress to a bride is a lot like a child to a parent in that you’ll do anything to protect it from being harmed. Just make sure to book it a window seat and don’t forget to buckle it in.