Southwest Airlines Imposes Dress Code Yet Again: Passenger Ordered to Change T-shirt

by Catherine Bodry on

What’s going on with Southwest Airlines? Surely with all the negative media coverage the airline’s flight attendants should know better than to impose any kind of dress code — not with the very real potential for lawsuits these days.

Then again, every time a Southwest employee has made a judgment call on a passenger’s duds, the company gets loads of media attention. And all this attention means that Southwest is in the spotlight — never mind why. This attention — and the “specials” that have followed — makes all this clothing-censor business mighty suspicious as far as I’m concerned.

First it was Kyla Ebbert and her teeny-tiny skirt (which appears to be conservative for her, based on her MySpace page photos). This time, the passenger, Joe Winiecki, was a male wearing a “sexually suggestive” t-shirt. Although Winiecki felt that the employee’s request that he change his shirt or leave the plane was a violation of his First Amendment rights, he changed rather than risk missing a day of work. Naturally, a Southwest spokesperson said the employee made a mistake.

I wonder how Southwest will spin this latest incident into a fare special? Last time it was “mini” fares. I’m sure they can find some clever double-entendre in this case as well.

Delta Requires Two Seats for Conjoined Twins

by Grant Martin on

In this week’s version of bizarre news, Delta is requiring that a mother traveling with conjoined infant twins purchase two seats instead of one. As the Arizona Republic reports, Mandy Bailey spoke with Delta ticketing agents before departure and they couldn’t figure out how many seats to sell her. After a brief period of evil-doing and cat-stroking, Delta replied that since the kids would need two oxygen masks they need extra seats. Then they told Bailey (I’m not making this up) to “call the Red Cross” for help paying for the other ticket.

I suppose I can see the concern with not having enough oxygen masks for conjoined twins. But what do mono-infants sitting in their parents’ laps do when the oxygen masks drop? In that case there is still only going to be one mask falling from the ceiling: for the adult.

In the end, Delta is put in a hard place because they’re trying to cope with nonexistant standards on conjoined lap infants against the simple human problem of a mother getting her girls out to see family in Maryland. Despite the defensive stance that any corporate entity has to take in this day and age, in this case I think they’re being a little conservative with their policies.

Top Five Foreign Travel Search Engines to Fuel Your Budget Travel

by Grant Martin on

With the tanking dollar and rising fuel costs, it’s getting harder and harder to find cheap fares out of the US these days. But not all markets are created equal. Airlines and travel agents base their prices on supply and demand; if they decide to cater to a particular country or region, often times the prices from that area will reflect it. As the New York Times recently reported, it can therefore be useful to try querying an off-shore search engine in addition to your favorite domestic website.

I’ve been doing this for a few years with mixed luck. What I’ve found is that with a little bit of patience and clever planning, one can frequently find competitive fares by searching on foreign sites. The difficulty is in finding the best engine and method suiting your needs; not all sites accept US-based credit cards nor are they in English. Occasionally, you’ll also have to deal with paper tickets and will need to find a foreign address to send them to. But these are small hurdles on your quest to dirt-cheap fares. A little research and patience and you’ll be well on your way to secret low-cost tickets from abroad.

Luckily, you have me to give you a head start. I’ve compiled a list of my top five favorite tools for finding good deals from foreign sites. Don’t forget to convert your currency!

1. zuji.com
As I reported earlier this week on Gadling, Zuji is a powerful tool built off the Travelocity engine, with the added benefit of broad flex searches. I’ve booked several mainland China flights through Zuji with no problem — just watch out for their added taxes at the end.

2. kayak.co.uk
The British analog of kayak.com, kayak.co.uk (or kayak.fr or de.kayak.com) provides a similar fare search from a European perspective. As the NYT article mentioned, Paris-Nice flights researched on kayak.fr were generally cheaper than those found domestically.

3. opodo.co.uk
There is a faint stench of Oribtz on the Opodo website, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of the operation, you can’t go wrong with the solid architecture on the site. I subscribe to the weekly fare deals coming from Opodo, and occasionally they come up with some competitive prices.

4.travelprice.be
Travelprice only comes in two flavors, French and Dutch, but that just adds to the authenticity of the site. Pawing around the reservations page you’ll find a lot of the same options as in any other search engine (airport codes are always the same) and you should be able to find your itinerary after tinkering around for a few minutes.

5. flylc.com
If you’re traveling solely in Europe its also always handy to check the low cost carriers to see if any of them serve your route; most of their itineraries don’t show up on legacy travel search engines. Flylc has a comprehensive list of city pairs and the airlines that serve them, just click your departure and destination and you’ll see what carriers are available. I always cross reference flylc flights to the legacy carrier itineraries to see if there is a huge fare difference.

Zuji.com: Singapore’s Flexible Travelocity

by Grant Martin on

If you’re anything like me, you want to spend as little as humanly possible on your plane tickets. If this means you have to fly on Air Plus Comet, a cargo plane or as a courier (impossible in this day and age, by the way), it doesn’t matter. As long as you land in Madrid/Ibiza/Topeka ok, you can handle the temporary discomfort.

For this reason, it pays to be flexible on booking flights; we all know that flying on a weekday or off-season is less expensive, but legacy online travel agents like Orbitz and Travelocity make it difficult to do a broad search. Sure, you can sometimes factor in a few days of flexibility or maybe even a week or month. But if you just need to “get to Greece some time next summer for as cheap as possible,” these engines don’t have that capability.

Alternatively, try using Zuji.com, the Singapore-based company loosely associated with Travelocity. If you select “other” as your country and select “flights,” you can run a flex search between any number of months and just ask it to find the cheapest fare across the board. Depending on the strength of the Singapore Dollar you can also occasionally find cheaper standard fares than on a legacy site. Granted, you’re going to have to convert from SGD to USD and they do impose taxes right at the end of the transaction, Zuji is still an excellent resource for research into budget fares. If you have qualms about booking on an offshore site, do your research on Zuji and book through Orbitz or directly through the carrier.

Airlines’ On-time Record Getting Worse

by Catherine Bodry on

Despite assurances from the FAA, George Bush, and individual airlines that travel will improve, airlines’ on-time records (and reputations) are getting worse. A report from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics marks 24th consecutive month in which on-time performance deteriorated from a year earlier. In August, 159 flights sat on the runway for at least three hours, and the longest wait was six hours.

Long waits and late arrivals are not the only grievances from customers; in August alone there were 1359 complaints about service — more than two times the amount there were in August 2006.

Mishandled bags have also been a growing problem — over one million bags were lost in June and July in the U.S. alone!