News and notes from around the interweb:
- London is considering regulating Uber by… instituting a minimum 5 minute wait between requesting a vehicle and its arrival, and banning display of cars for hire via a smartphone app.
- 15,000 bonus Club Carlson points for a Park Inn stay in North or South America by the end of the year. Registration required. (HT: Kalboz)
- Delta is going to stop ID’ing customers for access to their lounges; a boarding pass or membership card indicating access will suffice. That works for me at United and American. But I guess someone once thought there was a rash of people impersonating Delta Skyclub members in the past? Glad folks stopped doing that.
- A man that has repossessed over 1700 planes explains how it’s done. (HT: @stratosOLOC)
- Along came a spider, who sat down beside… a London-based barrister on a Qatar Airways flight…
London-based Jonathon Hogg claims he was bitten on a Doha-Durban flight. He said he felt a sharp pain in his left leg before seeing a spider running away across the cabin floor.
Speaking on UK television channel ITV, he said the following day his leg turned black and was badly swollen. Doctors in South Africa diagnosed a bite by a brown recluse spider and performed an emergency operation to cut away a large section of affected flesh.
- Frontier Airlines has become really profitable.. expect an IPO
- Amtrak has started charging excess baggage fees (HT: @@jayhawknj)
I find the success of Frontier — and Spirit before them — to be fascinating. They offer a bad product but make money — disproving Gordon Bethune’s statement that “you can make a pizza so cheap that nobody will eat it.” I always thought they made their money tricking customers with sub-par service and hidden fees, and that results would tail off because travelers would become wiser and they wouldn’t get enough repeat customers. So far, at least, that does not seem to be the case.
Ironically, flying Spirit/Frontier is probably best for the sophisticated travelers who generally shun them. That’s because such travelers are better at avoiding the fees (take a backpack instead of a rollerboard, buy only their cheapest tickets) and know what to expect. Because once you pay the fees, I think most customers would be better off flying “better” airlines.
Surprise, England ruling by force of inefficiency
@iahphx I think Little Caesars proves Bethune wrong…