Posted by: Dean Foust on June 30
Okay, so it only took, ur, one week for me to fall down on my pledge to make sure my new feature, “the business travelers’ App and Web site of the week” appeared, well, weekly. But I have a good excuse: I volunteer each summer as a den leader at the Cub Scout Day Camp my son attends and the demands of corralling nine hyperactive boys from activity to activity in 96 degree heat left me with no juice to post to the blog. But when you have moments like this—when my son, who’d never shot a BB gun, earned his “Team USA Sharpshooter” scout patch on his first try—then blogging can wait, no? Without further ado, this week’s picks:
TRIPKICK (http://tripkick.com) provides a lot of the same information about hotels in major cities as other web sites, but goes one further with insider information on which rooms or floors to request—and which to avoid. Relying on the “wisdom of crowds”—aka, travelers who have already stayed at these hotels, and who post their findings—Tripkick can tell you, for instance, which rooms to request (and reject), give you the square footage of each room classification (i.e., “King Deluxe” vs. “King Terrace Suite”), give you the transportation options—and costs—to and from the major airports, as well as user reviews that discuss noise levels, view, location and even bathroom size.
Continue reading "Business Travel App and web site of the week: TripKick, Delivery status touch"
Posted by: Dean Foust on June 30
J.D. Power and Associates released its latest “customer satisfaction” rankings of the major airlines, and the big headline is: Airline passengers are getting to their destination quicker, but are increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of service. The best performers in the survey: Alaska Airlines and JetBlue, with WestJet charging hard on the rail. Dragging up the rear: United, U.S. Airways, AirTran and Frontier.
J.D. Power (which like BusinessWeek, is owned by The McGraw-Hill Cos.) found overall customer satisfaction dipped for the third straight year, and to the lowest point since 2005. The nearly 13,000 fliers that Power polled were dissatisfied with in-flight services, flight crew, cost, fees, the fat guy who snores in the next seat, the amount of salt on the peanuts, and the fact that there was a flight attendant on that return trip from Reno who wouldn’t give them the whole can of Coke (okay, I made up those last three things).
The good news: The customer-reported length of flight delays was down by eight minutes, to an average 72 minutes. And average wait times at the ticketing/baggage check counter dipped from 14 minutes to 12 minutes over the past year. So flying stunk, but stunk less, I guess.
One interesting nugget in the survey: Noting that government statistics showed the overall rate of on-time arrivals was up by more than five percentage points from 2008—to 78% so far this year—Power analyzed the data and concluded that 70% of the improvement came from issues within the airlines’ control, rather than external issues like bad weather, security issues or air traffic control.
As for the performance of the individual airlines, J.D. Power gave highest marks to:
Continue reading "New airline rankings on customer service"
Posted by: Justin Bachman on June 22
The online hotel reviews business – and this is not a small market, lest you were wondering – gained a new entrant Monday with the launch of Oyster Hotel Reviews. Oyster aims to post objective reviews on some 20,000 hotels in the top 200 cities that attract leisure travelers.
The interesting part about Oyster, however, is how the company obtains its reviews: It’s hiring real reporters to “cover” hotels. Rival sites, Expedia (EXPE)-owned TripAdvisor.com and Sabre’s IgoUgo.com aggregate user-generated opinions on hotels and face periodic allegations that their systems are gamed. Oyster maintains that its reportage sets it apart. It accepts no freebies, “media rates” or payments to do reviews. It aims to be an objective editorial site, not one that sells hotel rooms or markets brands. It hires experienced writers who have worked for publications such as NPR, ESPN, Time Out New York, Radar, the Village Voice, the BBC, and Huffington Post.
“Our reporters also have the experience to actually weigh the both the upside and downside of a stay at every hotel,” the company tells users on its Web site. “We focus on conducting honest reporting and thoroughly investigating each hotel we visit.” All the photos are from the staff, too. There are links to online travel agents like Orbitz (OWW) and priceline (PCLN) to check prices and to book, which is one of the revenue streams.
Continue reading "Hotel Reviews and Objectivity: Oyster Hires Reporters"
Posted by: Justin Bachman on June 18
US Airways’ (LCC) chief executive Doug Parker made a bit of news earlier this week when he described a “material” increase in leisure travel bookings the company had seen in the past two months. The context of the conversation was whether the industry had hit bottom and was seeing any signs of hope. "We don't know what it means yet but there is something going on there,” Parker said while chatting with a Dow Jones Newswires reporter June 16 in Detroit.
I think I might have one idea what’s going on: Cheap fares. Parker is a very friendly, straightforward, accessible guy who worked mainly finance jobs before he became a CEO. He harbors no secret affection for bargain-basement fares: He’s a firm capitalist and would be among the first to lecture on how super-cheap fares can quickly harm a balance sheet. However, the day after Parker’s comments, I purchased a ticket on his airline to attend a wedding in Minnesota in late July. The fare was $64.19 from New York City to Minneapolis, for a total of $83.20 with taxes and fees. The return flight, on another airline, was only $30 more, including taxes and fees. Good for me, not so good for an executive or shareholder. I’m no airline executive, but it seems to me fares like that spur leisure travelers, just like they always have.
Posted by: Dean Foust on June 17
I’m launching a new feature on this blog: the business travelers’ App and Web site of the week. The description should be intuitive enough, but I’ll be posting my choice of both the best travel-related application and the best travel-related web site that I’ve come across in my own travels.
Look for these each week, hopefully Mondays (and take advantage of our RSS feed to check for updates). I’m not necessarily promising that each of my choices are brand spanking new—as in they just launched during the previous week—but that they’re relatively new, and guaranteed useful. So with that preamble behind us, this week’s picks: TripCase.com and TripIt.com.
TRIPCASE (www.tripcase.com) is a free iPhone app that was released recently by Sabre, one of the large reservation systems used by airlines. Once you’ve registered, TripCase shoots information to your iPhone on not just the basic details of your flight (i.e., arrival and departure times), but updates on flight status, gate changes, security wait times, baggage claim information, car rental information, and even a description of the hotel you booked, along with photos.
Best, you can also set the service to shoot all this same information to anybody else you designate – so your wife/husband, boss, or client knows if your flight was delayed, cancelled, etc. And as mentioned above, TripCase automatically, and electronically, forwards your travel information to your iPhone, which gives it a step up over rival TripIt, which requires you to remember to manually forward your travel information to TripIt via email.
Continue reading "New feature: Best Business Travel App and Web site of the week"
