News and notes from around the interweb:
- Optics: There’s a lot of misinformation about the wastefulness of several disaster relief charities. Red Cross volunteers staying at the St. Regis Houston probably doesn’t help, but they got a discount rate of $179 and are sharing rooms.
- Talking out of both sides of their mouth: Amtrak advertises how much more comfortable trains are than basic economy while having just hired the former Delta CEO who was the first to introduce Basic Economy, and who has mused on doing the same thing to trains. Oops.
Copyright: tdezenzio / 123RF Stock Photo - Now that’s just dumb: When I saw that Pittsburgh airport was talking up building a new airport terminal that seemed… silly. It’s worse than I imagined. They’re going to spend over a billion dollars to reduce the number of gates and save just over $20 million a year. (HT: Cranky Flier)
- How to get banned from a hotel: A man who attempted to rob a Holiday Inn last year has been ordered to pay restitution — and to stay away from the hotel. Who sticks up a Holiday Inn? Willie Sutton they ain’t.
- Goverment industrial policy for… music? Austin wants to increase the city’s hotel tax from 15% to 17% (circumventing state law) in order to “build out the local music ecostructure.” They’re going to spend more than the increased hotel tax will raise in the near-term building out the city’s convention center in order to be allowed to increase the hotel tax. Yet somehow more money will flow and the city will mastermind growth in art. Or something.
- Pension liabilities are a future time bomb really dependent on whether rates of return meet aggressive projections. Airlines were given legal permission to reduce their payments but that doesn’t reduce their liability. Boeing has the second-most underfunded pension in the S&P 500 with a $20 billion gap. It just made a $3.5 billion pension contribution — of its own stock.
- Control your room via app: Hilton wants to let you set your room temperature via app and have your favorite TV channel already on when you get to the room.
Will the Hilton app actually let me lower my room temperature to a comfortable level, or will I need the VIP app?
Pittsburgh likely made the announcement to woo Amazon’s new HQ. Expect it to be shelved if they don’t get the HQ.
Only fools would blame the Red Cross for the lack of hotel availability during or after a hurricane in a major population center. Then again there are people who would be mad about the hotel choice if the rooms are free.
Yes, like the four scumbag texas republicans that voted against hurricane federal aid to their own state.
Obviously they figured the majority that needed help are minorities, whom they hate anyway.
In re Amtrak:
Part of the reason this is coming up is a bit more complicated than just “introducing basic economy”. Right now, almost all long distance coach trains have a seat pitch on par with Virgin America’s First Class seating (though the seats are narrower due to train dimension limits). This is awesome…except when they have to use a short-haul coach (with more like 35 inches of pitch) and dump some pax in those seats. Now, usually this honor goes to “shorts” (pax on relatively abbreviated trips…for example, someone traveling from Washington to Richmond on a New York-Miami train), but it’s still a problem because in a sense those passengers picked out a long-distance train (and may have paid a higher fare as a result) but didn’t /quite/ get what they paid for. This in turn limits Amtrak’s ability to redeploy short-haul equipment to meet occasional surges in long-distance demand.
What seems likely is that there will be a coming split in coach, with the “basic economy” product being targeted at shorter-haul passengers (who arguably don’t need 50-odd inches of seat pitch). The question is how it is handled, but continuing differentiation among passengers is a generalized trend and not necessarily a bad thing (especially if it can be used to drive back demands that Amtrak turn a profit on food and beverage…something that the pre-Amtrak railroads /never/ did as a rule [1]). As it is, Amtrak has been expanding the presence of “Business Class” offerings on LD trains.
Squeezing short-haul trains for more passengers is going to be trickier because so many of those trains are state-supported (and for those that aren’t, mainly on the Northeast Corridor, the equipment interchanges sufficiently to make doing this with some trains but not all a nightmare…imagine Southwest re-equipping half of their fleet of a given 737 variant but not the other half and you can see where this goes), though my understanding is that you might be able to jam another row in before you start having problems. Do remember that back in the 1970s, however, many of the currently 72-seat coaches were used as 84-seat coaches.
[1] There might have been a few odd cases, but as a rule the “Eastern” railroads (the Pennsy, New York Central, etc.) covered about 60% of their F&B costs with revenue from those operations while “Western” railroads (Santa Fe, CB&Q, Southern Pacific, etc.) ran a bit under 50%. The Eastern railroads often did so because of massive passenger loads on daylight runs between certain city pairs. Guess what Amtrak’s numbers look like? If you guessed “a dead ringer for the pre-Amtrak railroads” you win: The LD trains’ numbers look like those Western railroads’ numbers, while trains on the NEC are pretty close to break-even (and thus an extensive “Eastern” system would probably end up looking a lot like the old Pennsy/NYC numbers).
The Red Cross article is exactly why so many people refuse to give to them and choose smaller charities that have less overhead and waste. The spokesman says it’s fine because the employees “doubled up”. Does that mean they usually don’t? These people are supposedly helping the disaster victims – which to me would entail spending long hours and coming back to the hotel to sleep, then wake and start over again. Why not 4 to a room? This is a charitable endeavor, not a vacation.
The link to the CNBC story where the Hilton VP said personalization of room temp and TV is coming doesn’t work, it seems CNBC deleted the story. A cached version of the story reveals it to be a non-entity, merely a Hilton VP musing about what might be coming in the future.
Sensationalist click bait reporting at its best by the dumb news outlets. I’m sure that the St Regis as a gesture of goodwill gave such a good deal as a way to take care of the volunteers helping to rebuild the city… It’s an excellent rate IMO and certainly much lower than gsa’s per diem. Maybe some folks would rather them stay at Howard Johnson or motel 6 but why would you want to abuse the red cross volunteers like that =P