News and notes from around the interweb:
- Some justified skepticism of Onego’s all you can fly subscription which has been getting so much buzz.
- “[M]ost travel books I find dull, unsatisfying, and too scattered with wasteful, overly subjective sentences about sunsets and train trips.
- So a Member of Congress wanted to regulate the size of airline seats. Christopher Elliott declared “the [[Congressional] committee will be so preoccupied with privatizing air traffic control, this one will soar on through.” So it should be no surprise that it failed in committee (and wasn’t close). Which wasn’t hard to predict.
- Boeing faces SEC probe of Dreamliner, 747 accounting. GAAP rules allow for expensing upfront development costs over time, with pretty wide latitude. At what point is that latitude a game a company plays to smooth out their earnings? Accounting rules are often more about ‘taking a position’ to frame things how a company wants more than objective truth, and the longer a rule is in place the more likely it is for companies to figure out how to game the rule. That seems more an indictment of accounting standards than of Boeing though…
- Delta’s failed anti-American foreign policy
- Hmmm. Hotel occupancy is down year-over-year while average daily rate and revenue per available room is up.
- Brazil’s Gol has suspended Venezuela service. No airline took it on the chin in the amount of American Airlines, which wrote off $592 million in the fourth quarter related to their inability to pull money from ticket sales out of the country. Meanwhile, Venezuela – which wouldn’t let carriers pull out Bolivars – apparently intends “to charge airport services, taxes and fuel in US Dollars.”
This OneGo thing is hilarious. I am tempted to buy a subscription and fly every day for a month. Either I get a zillion FF miles or they pull my membership and I dispute the charge on my CC. Or do you have to agree to a year or something?
I am reminded of the early days of online shopping where pet suppliers were FedExing 42-pound bags of cat litter all over the country for free and allegedly rational people thought it could work out financially.
Customers should be skeptical of any up-front fee for a service to be delivered over a long period of time. “Lifetime” often means the lifetime of the company, not your lifetime.
If OneGo thinks people will buy these like gym memberships and then stop using the service, they are mistaken.
Reading the FAQ on OneGo starts to clear up some of my questions about it. Unless you book very expensive trips, a lot, 7 or more days out, looks hard to maximize.
Worth reading: https://www.onego.com/terms-and-conditions
“A PATP is not to be used for mileage runs, commercial package delivery/courier services, or any other usage that would be considered to be outside of the scope of reasonable business and personal travel. ”
Haha.