Brad Ideas - Air Travel - Comments

I understand the revenue management

brad — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:57:59 -0800

But that is not the case here. Here it’s just bureaucracy. If I had booked the flight as two one-way flights, at no extra cost, I would have been able to change one leg. If I had booked a slightly different flight to Europe with a similar plane change and also a flight number change, I would have gotten the upgrade offer.

I agree that revenue management causes all sorts of strange things, but these are not among them.

My general view is that when you have a business like this, you should have a desk that is able to authorize changes when the airline is clearly doing something silly and bureaucratic. Escalate to that desk if it seems that has happened, and if that happens a lot, fix the software.

Revenue management

John Moore — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:59:56 -0800

You are being treated to the tender mercies of revenue management systems. These automated beasts were first developed in the '80s to allow American Airlines to defeat a discount carrier. RM's optimize the revenue on a flight by selling low when they have to, and selling high when they can. Because these decisions are not made real time, they create a thicket of ever changing weirdness in pricing. However, they work really well, which is why aircraft are usually full these days.

They use AI and linear programming and various models as part of their work. I have run across these in my work in the hotel reservation business, which also uses them. When they set the fares, they are looking at history and then modeling current demand against that (and other factors) to calculate the price. Airlines used to use humans to do this, but the modern systems are much more effective (and weird).

In the airline world, customer satisfaction has taken a back seat (okay, way back in the tail cone) to price competition. That's how they can get away with treating us this way. It may piss you off royally, but they make more money doing it - even as everyone is growing to loathe the airlines.

Frequent Flyer Porgram

Michael — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:43:28 -0800

I have similar experiences with several airlines. I changed from LH to UA 3 years back and still have LH miles which I tried
to use now. A miles & more ticket Duesseldorf to Montreal is at 60000 miles plus 618.36 CAD fees.

For the same dates you get a similar flight on expedia (Going leg identical, return leg different routing but also 1 stop) for
696 CAD. Identical flights (but not a LH ticket) go for 765 CAD. If you insist on LH paper it's 1166 CAD.

The Fee structure tends to be a bit better at

Lithuania

Anonymous — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:39:06 -0800

The best in Lithuania. Most of them similar
Tele2 prepaid. Its around 6 cents to tele2 and 18 cents to others network.
Bite prepaid similar rates
TeleMaxima prepaid: with 1 dollar per month charge, you get around 6 cents to all networks, but the quality of network not the best.
Ezys Prepaid. 2 cents in Ezys network and 18 cents to other networks. Thre is option to pay 2 dollars per month and call at 6 cent per minute to all networks.

Pre-paid SIM/micro-SIM for Paris, France with data?

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:58:50 -0700

Pre-paid SIM/micro-SIM for Paris, France with data for use with unlocked iPhone. Not a lot of data just enough to search for places to go and routes. Thanks!

The cheapest prepaid SIM in

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:35:50 -0700

The cheapest prepaid SIM in Holland (& Belgium & France) is by Lyca Mobile; both to phone/send SMSs international as national. It has the lowest roaming costs as well if you stay within the EU (I didn't verify the costs outside of the EU).
Check out there site, the prizes and offers are a bit different from country to country but for those 3 countries it's definitively the cheapest.

Did you check if yor phone

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 05:53:39 -0700

Did you check if yor phone is GSM faehig? The Europeans invented the cell phone, so your American handset may be the reason why it did not roam.

New SIM Cards from USA SIMs

Bill N — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:14:23 -0700

We have a few new SIM cards at USA that are great for travelers
Pure Prepaid (only need to refill once ever 6 months) - http://www.usasims.com/Pure_Prepaid_SIM.html
Spot Mobile (Uses both AT&T and T-Mobile also offers direct dialing abroad) - http://www.usasims.com/Spot_SIM.html
AT&T now offers 500MB of 3G Data for $25 - http://www.usasims.com/ATT_SIM.html
Red Unlimited offers 30 unlimited calling and SMS for $40 - http://www.usasims.com/Red_Pocket_Unlimited_SIM.html

rip off

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 13:01:32 -0700

Mr Simcard resells Simple Mobile 2G plans as 3G. So a $50 plan from Simple Mobile ends up costing over $100. What a rip off. Next time I go direct to Simple and avoid Mr Simcard.

Data

brad — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:19:56 -0700

It does look like a good plan, though data seems to be 99 cents/mb while roaming. Much better than US rates but not as good as many euro data roaming plans I have seen which are about 50 cents.

I'll assent to this

Johnny — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:26:32 -0700

Meteor abolished their roaming charges for roaming in Europe completely a couple of months ago, so they're even more of a bargain at the moment, cheap sim card too.

So for example if you were planning on travelling across Europe for the summer, you could pick up a meteor sim and use it liberally in all European countries and still pay the same as you would in Ireland.

Hopefully other networks will follow their lead.

Best solution fot travellers - MyTravelPhone

Seth — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:21:04 -0700

I travel a lot and use MyTravelPhone prepaid SIM card in my travels. It covers more than 180 countries (according to what they declared), in most countries incomings are free of charge. I travel often to USA, EU, Israel, ex-USSR, in most of these places i pay only $0.35-0.45 per minute (depends on country). They deliver MTP cards all over the world.

Germany Prepaid Vodafone--Can I use it in Greece?

Karen — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:22:27 -0700

Hello, I have a German Prepaid (D2) Callya Phone. Can I use it in Greece?

stay away from Mrsimcard

Don't use Mrsimcard — Sun, 29 May 2011 12:06:41 -0700

I just wanted to tell my story about Mrsimcard....We bought what was supposed to be a blackberry SIM card from there. First off it never work, no one ever answered the phone when we call to get help. No cellphone store we went into had a clue of what we had. After three days of both being ignored by Mrsimcard and no one else being able to help us we just gave up...............Also we never got our money back from them.....Why in the US is it do hard to just get a SIM card?

Compete with biz class

brad — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:27:22 -0700

I do agree there is a risk that they could see these seats as competition for business class. United at least used to offer an empty middle if available to elite flyers, and sort of do still — except it never works because they fill planes too well.

Part of it would depend on whether companies let people place high bids on getting these empty middles with corporate money. If they did, the bids might get quite high so only corporate users get it. But the unsure nature of the bid would probably not be suitable for companies that have decided to give staff business class. I think it would only affect people flying on their own dime.