The ethics of traveling to certain parts of the world — places where human rights aren’t respected, where a sex trade exists (perhaps illegal but unfettered) or where ‘guest workers’ have their passports taken on arrival and have little choice but to toil in unsafe conditions – can be complicated. I think it’s difficult, and certainly uncomfortable, for a world traveler to ponder how their choices affect the people they meet. And it’s even tougher to ponder the signals their choices send — does visiting Turkmenistan endorse that regime? Does it provide hard currency that sustains the regime? Is your tourism in some way fostering terrible conditions that people live under? Sometimes that might be the case, although rarely does one person’s decisions materially affect the situations of people on the ground and rarely would…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for March 2015.
How JetBlue is Winning Hollywood With Cheap Prices for First Class
JetBlue is winning Hollywood. Not the studio contracts, of course. If you have a deal with Paramount, you’re flying American on the lucrative Los Angeles – New York route. But the ‘real’ Hollywood. The actors and directors and producers and independent talent who work for a living, aren’t traveling on a studio’s dime, but view the world through the lens of those who do. One of the best sources of clients for my award booking business has been Hollywood – recognizable actors who have had many small roles in film, or recurring roles on cable TV, comedic directors whose shows we know but that we wouldn’t recognize in an airport. They travel in circles with actresses and actors who fly private, or who are flown in international first class all over the world. They want…
Revenue-based Frequent Flyer Programs are Good for Flyers — and Not for the Reason You Think.
Revenue-based frequent flyer programs are good for consumers — just not in the way airlines would have you believe. Frequent flyer programs are the most successful marketing creations ever. And as such they get consumers to behave irrationally. Customers buy more expensive tickets than they otherwise would. And not even for the elite benefits, non-elites do it too and low level elites who may not get much incremental value from their status. Frequent flyer programs turned airline seats, which were otherwise commodity products, into differentiated products, and differentiated products consumers were willing to buy at a premium. But when you commodify the relationship, and you turn the frequent flyer program into a straight rebate there’s little advantage to choosing one program or another. What’s more, the leader in the revenue-based space — Delta Air Lines…
Your Fellow Passengers are Generous, Polite, and Well Behaved. The Data Says So.
Back in August, the knee defender guy touched off a media firestorm. The fight started when the male passenger, seated in a middle seat of row 12, used the Knee Defender to stop the woman in front of him from reclining while he was on his laptop… A flight attendant asked him to remove the device and he refused. The woman then stood up, turned around and threw a cup of water at him, the official says. That’s when United decided to land in Chicago. The two passengers were not allowed to continue to Denver. For about a week there was a ‘national conversation’ about how bad things have gotten with air travel, whether there’s a right to recline your seat, and the need to be polite (“we’re all in this together”). There were even…
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