Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Sometimes when I get on my usual rant about why certain airlines suck, my friends getting sick of it seem to take the attitude “of course they suck, there is nothing they can do about it”.

But as Mike points out in a post about Virgin America (and I’ve had similar experiences with other airlines), you CAN do better. And you can even do better while having your staff feel good about their jobs. You just have to care about making the overall experience and system work and not just about fleecing “business” fliers into paying $2000 for domestic flights.

From the Church of the Customer blog about how a crew on Southwest treated a passenger’s birthday with a “cake” and some singing. JetBlue and Alaska Airlines are a bit less goofy, but still have a great focus on customer service too. I haven’t flown Virgin American yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Meanwhile the big old guys that treat you like crap are begging for more government handouts and protection. These guys made $6 billion profits last year, but still they want us to cover over any rough spots for them (while they treat us like crap). This would be a great time to let the economic principle of “creative destruction” play out. Business failures are painful, but with every business failure is an opening in the market for a new more capable player to really do well.

Amazing. A friend just booked a flight on American and they booked her through Dallas Fort-Worth with a 40-minute layover. Considering that they give your seats away 30 min before the “flight time”, close the doors 20 minutes before the flight time, and that it usually takes a minimum of 15 minutes to get between gates there (30-40 if you don’t do a full out run) this is crazy.

I CAN’T BELIEVE THESE GUYS ARE STILL IN BUSINESS. The only explanation is to again recall that these policies are designed to be intentionally consumer unfriendly by forcing you to miss flights and thus helping them avoid bump-charges.

A few weeks ago we flew out to Washington DC. This time we took Alaska Airlines. So same pair of airports (Seatac, National). But the difference couldn’t be more striking. The Alaska flights were non-stop. The airplanes were in good condition compared to the American ones. The staff was friendly and helpful- this guy had forgotten his day-planner at the check-in station, and not only did they make 3 announcements in the gate area for him, but they actually brought it down through security so he wouldn’t have to run back to the check-in area and back through security. The cabin crew was nice, the pilots gave us helpful advice. And we were a few minutes late into Seattle so they asked people who didn’t have connections to let the 17 folks with tight connections off first.

Now, let me be clear. It probably doesn’t actually make a real world difference. But if you are that person stressing about your connection, just the simple fact that the crew is expressing sympathy and a desire to help with your plight makes 1000% difference in how you feel about the situation. After letting the folks with connections off I thanked the crew as we left- they said that what they did was against policy. And its a shame that its against policy, but the more important thing is that their employees aren’t taking their frustration out on customers and actually seem to recall they are in a service industry. They were friendly and helpful. And that makes all the difference.

News.com has a great story about the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group facility in Arizona. It looks awesome- hopefully I can find some time later this year (hopefully when its not so hot) to visit.

Yesterday we got back from a weekend in Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday. A couple of random observations-

1) There is an incredible amount of construction going on. There is always a lot of construction in Vegas but I have never seen so much. And chatting with a couple of cab drivers confirmed that its more than in the past. They said that the construction companies are aggressively recruiting workers from all over the country. I guess given that the town still sells out for big events and conferences and that there is this increasing trend of building condos/timeshares on the strip its not surprising but it still seems pretty extreme.

2) We had a dinner at Bouchon in their private room. The food was very good - although its not a place to get your mind blown with something new or amazingly good, its very strong and predictably good. The service was incredible- there were maybe a couple of rough edges, but the overall experience of them taking care of us in the private room and the orgy of extra deserts at the end were great.

3) It is interesting to see the evolution of various trends in the casino industry. Over the past couple of years I’ve seen lots of casinos having more and more of the lame continuous shuffle machines and the super-lame single-deck blackjack (with the horrible odds because of how they change the pay-outs on blackjack). Someone like myself looking for a game with reasonable odds (I like 2-deck, dealer stays on soft-17) was usually out of luck unless you were willing to have a huge minimum bet. I was happy to see that TI has moved back to the decent 2-deck tables. At the same time I did notice though that their overall selection of table games were pretty small and the trend towards casinos being mostly slot-machines doesn’t seem to have stopped that much.

4) The pools at Mandaly Bay are still crazy. The pools themselves are still fun (although the construction sucked), but every chair available is staked out by someone so there is literally no place to put your stuff. Its also especially lame that people stake out a chair just by putting a towel on it- the staff should be much stricter about removing towels left on chairs with no personal belongings since I suspect many of those people have entirely left. Also, the Mandalay “The Hotel” is cool, but getting from it to the pool is crazy because you have to go way around. They need to make some sort of passageway so you can get to the pools faster from The Hotel.

Kat and I took a trip to Vancouver this weekend. We had been planning on flying down
to Napa but the Napa forecast was for thunderstorms which put a damper on the whole thing
(since they are aren’t especially good for flying OR for nice wine-tasting parties).

Last year we had a similar change of plans and just went to Portland for the weekend instead. This
year we headed the other direction and headed up to Vancouver.

One note- I’d love to be pasting some of these reviews on Judy’s Book but
they don’t appear to cover anything in Canada. I’ll have to chat with folks back in the office about that this week,
although I do understand that there is probably a pretty high entry cost into any new geography for them.

Friday night after a long drive we went straight to Vij’s. We were a little stressed that we wouldn’t make it
in time before they closed but everything worked out. We checked in and had a nice glass of wine and some snacks
as usual while waiting. I just don’t understand why more restaurants can’t do half as good of a job of taking care
of their guests that are waiting for a table. The meal was wonderful as usual- we had short ribs with cinnamon, an Indian crepe with navy beans, venison
medallions,
and their signature lamb popsicles with fenugreek cream sauce. I also managed to pick up an extra canister of their
roasted fenugreek leaves which they normally sell in the shop next door. At this time of night the next-door place was
closed but the proprietor got me a can anyway. This has been my secret ingredient recently in a lamb marinade I make for the grill so
I was pretty eager to get some more.

Saturday morning we
went to the Granville island public market for lunch and a little shopping. Maybe some
Vancouver residents think the opposite but this feels much cooler to me than the
Seattle public market. Lot’s of interesting food stalls, not quite as much
straight tourist junk and several shops offering stuff that is really hard to
get in the US including some leaves used for Thai curries, etc. We had a good
donut but the secret was to get an absolutely fresh one- the other ones we tried
were just ok. We also had a bagel from Siegels- these were only ok again but we
found out later that their main branch is in town. We also sampled a soup from
“The Stock Exchange” and some pies from “A La Mode”. The soup was pretty good
but I found the pies disappointing- especially the raspberry/rhubarb which just
didn’t taste right for some reason.

After lunch we headed to the movie theatre to see the Da Vinci Code. I
thought it was pretty good- when I read the book I felt it was written to be a
better movie than novel in the first place and the movie didn’t disappoint
(although neither did it join the pantheon of the greatest movies).

For dinner Saturday we went to Lumiere where we sat at the “tasting bar”
which is actually a set of tables outside the main dining room (although they do
have a few seats at the actual bar that are open for walk-up guests). I thought
Lumiere was great- we started with a hamachi salad which included some crab and
greens. We then had some squash ravioli with truffle butter sauce. I’ve often
found squash ravioli to be a fairly boring dish put on the menu so there is
something for the vegetarians, but these were great- intense and flavorful. The
third starter we had was the duck broth with dumplings. This was a stand-out for
the whole evening- worth the trip just for this one dish. The duck broth was
just so flavorful. For our main courses we had veal cheeks, foie gras two ways
and some potato puree and two-color asparagus. These were all very good,
although it was another example of dishes that were bigger than they needed too
be and that were also outclassed by the appetizers. The appetizers were just
more interesting and memorable. We finished with a tapioca pudding and a
chocolate fondant and a glass of Gehning Brothers 2003 Riesling ice-wine which
was really excellent. Some of the ice-wines are over sweet without the right
balance but this one had a great acid and tropical fruit flavors.

Its also worth noting that the wait-staff was great. Good wait-staff can’t
make up for bad food but at an already good place makes it extra special. They
were attentive, helped us deal with our small table and made some great
recommendations for the next day. This is where we heard about the main branch
for Siegel’s bagels and Caffe Artigiano. The next morning we started off
checking out Artigiano where they made a great “Spanish Latte” which included a
little sweetened condensed milk, some great coffee and clearly skilled
barista’s. After that we headed to the main Siegel’s branch which was I thought
better than the bagels in the market. And finally as we headed out of town we
stopped for our real lunch at Sun Sui Wah which is probably the most well known
dim sum place in the Vancouver area.

We stayed at the hotel Listel. The Listel is somewhat less expensive than my
favorite place The Opus, and its in a pretty good location and I thought the
service was very good. Their “thing” is that they feature lots of art including
art from a local gallery in most of the rooms on the floor we were staying on.
This made it better than your typical generic business hotel, but it still
wasn’t as stylish or cool as I expected. There was one big problem with it
though- the shower was not very nice to start with and the water temperature
sucked. It was just way too cold. To be fair, we didn’t complain about this
until on our way out so we didn’t give them enough chance to fix the problem.

The trip back across the border was a pain as usual. I really need to check
out the Nexus pass thing since that line just
zooms by the rest of us. There was this annoying guy ahead of us in line who
kept shutting his car off every time he stopped and then had to restart it again
to move forward. Cars from the other lane kept scooting in front of him and
every time (dozens!) he started his car we could smell the stick behind him. I
have to assume he thought he was somehow saving fuel or reducing polution
without realizing that starting a conventional engine (as opposed to a hybrid)
causes a ton more pollution than just leaving it running for a couple of
minutes.

One other quick note- many of my friends and I have done lots of food photography over the
years (check out tastingmenu.com for some of the best).
Getting good photos in the low light conditions of a restaurant is always a big problem. But if you
use the flash the result is often washed out and even worse. Lately I just figured out a track of using
the flash but putting a napkin over it- the resulting lower level of diffuse light works just great and
while you need to be a little careful to not annoy other diners too much it isn’t as bad as the full flash.

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Friday was the big day to tour the Alhambra. The Alhambra is the old
village/palace/fort complex constructed on the hill above Grenada and various
parts of it date back 1200 years and span many different cultures from the
Romans, Arab/Moorish, Catholic kings to a modern day monastery. I’ve done a lot
of travel around the world and this is both one of the coolest things to tour as
well as one of the longest single sites (if you want to check out the whole
thing).

In the days prior to our departure the weather forecast for Southern Spain
didn’t look good but luckily the weather forecasters were wrong and it was
absolutely beautiful. We hiked all over and I took an amazing amount of
pictures- over 1000 in this one day. The Alhambra has so many examples of cool
architecture so I took lots of close ups of various carvings or various designs,
plus there are a ton of great spots for panoramic photographs. It will probably
take me weeks of playing around at home to pull together some higher quality
panoramic stitches.

After touring all day we found a dinner place on a local square a bit away
from the central tourist masses and returned for a second time to get some
gelato at the Cafe Bib-Rambla.

Another twist on the timing of our trip is that it was Holy Week (or Semana
Santa). Many of the towns in Spain have traditions where they take their statues
of the Virgin Mary out of their churches and parade them around while often
dressed in clothes that resemble the Klu Klux Klan to American eyes (although
the Spanish traditions are much older and I gather the Spanish are annoyed that
the infamous American organization stole their symbol). These statues are on
these giant platforms and are often carried by 20-40 men marching along an inch
at a time.

We were tired after dinner and tried to pick up a taxi to take us up the
hill. The driver refused to take us and at first I was pissed, thinking he just
didn’t want to take the fairly short ride which would probably require him to
take a fairly long return with no fare (the streets out of the Alhambra are not
straight-forward to put it mildly). The driver managed to communicate to Stacy
that the way was blocked and sure enough we looked over and saw a police car
blocking the road up to our hotel. We set off on foot but were unsuccessful
asking the cop where and when the procession might be. We kept looking around
and just as we were getting close to the top we started seeing some lights and
noises. My reaction was “hurry up, let’s go before we miss it” but Stacy
accurately pointed out that the thing’s don’t move very fast at all and there
was no rush.

The procession at the Alhambra was a pretty small one I gather and they
weren’t even wearing the special clothing. Still it was pretty cool and it
wasn’t over until past 1am and they had delivered the statue back into the
church right next to our hotel.

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After a long day of travel we arrived in Grenada, got our bags and our rental
car. Picking up the car was really easy and while I was a bit concerned that the
“service needed” message came on right away, it was driving fine and the only
staff-person at the Avis counter was gone by the time we were ready to leave the
parking lot.

We followed the highway signs for the Alhambra. Our hotel is actually on the
grounds of the site so we needed to drive up a road that is normally restricted.
Stacy proved her value right away by negotiating with the guard who restricts
access up to this road since we didn’t have whatever documentation he expected
to prove we had reservations.

The Hotel America was great. Initially I wanted to stay at the main hotel on
the Alhambra site- the Parador. However the Parador costs about twice as much so
we had switched to the Hotel America which wasn’t anything fancy, but it had a
nice relaxed cafe and wasn’t as stuffy feeling as the Parador.

After relaxing a bit we joined Lauren, Ken, Olivia, Belle, Norm and Dan (big
crowd!) for a very nice dinner at a Moroccan place in the Arab quarter (I wish I
remembered the name of the place).

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This is the story of our return flight from Washington DC last weekend. For the post title
I borrowed a phrase from the Colbert Report that sums up nicely how angry I am with the experience. This was the worst travel I have ever experienced and that is a catagory with lots of competition.

We started off with a nice morning / early afternoon in Baltimore and headed out driving to Washington National with what we thought was plenty of time. We got a bit messed up in the directions and made it to the airport with no time to spare- luckily Kat was able to do a web check-in on her phone and we ran through the terminal, picked up the paper tickets at the desk and ran to our gate just as they were calling final boarding.

Unfortunately we are delayed on the ground about 5 minutes because ATC has some radar outage. In theory this shouldnt be a big deal, but I check the tickets and apparently they only gave us 35 minutes to make our connections at Dallas (to be clear these were booked directly with American Airlines). DFW is a huge airport and American has gates spread out over 4 terminals there now. We arrive in Dallas, but then get held up another 10 minutes because another airplane is still at our arrival gate. A bunch of the passengers start to get tense since we all have tight connections and its especially frustrating looking out the window at all the adjacent gates that are empty. Why dont they just park us at the next one? Eventually they move the airplane in, and again Im surprised that they flight attendants arent making any special effort to help people with tight connections- no announcement about waiting to get off if you dont have a close one or anything.

Our connecting flight is across the airport- we landed in C and needed to get to D. There is this skylink train thing but it loops around the outside and would have been 20 minutes easily. There is a ramp across the road between the terminals so I decide to run for it and Kat and Fen will follow as quickly as they can. On my way out I ask a guy at the counter to call over to the other gate and tell them they have 3 passengers on the way. I dash down the terminal, up the escalator, across the ramp, down the escalator, and arrive at the destination gate, looking at my watch- 2 minutes before the scheduled time. Right as I get there the gate attendant announces to me that the flight as left and closes the door in my face and heads down the ramp.

Ill have to admit that at this point I got quite irate and was yelling. I had just been running for 10 minutes straight and it tends to ramp up the adrenalin + the frustration levels. My anger was increased by the gate attendants non-communicativeness. I pictured them shutting the door on an airplane with 3 empty seats just because they wouldnt hold up the airplane for an extra 2 minutes (to be clear- the door of the airplane wasnt closed yet, the guy was going off to go do that).

At this point the remaining woman at the desk (or the guy who closed the door in my face) could have probably defused the situation by saying quite simply “we put some last minute people on the airplane so your seats are full and its not like we can go on the airplane and drag them off. There is another flight to Seattle tonight and we will make sure you get on it.” I know dealing with upset travelers is probably the worst part about those jobs, but its still part of the job and doing it right with honest clear communication is important. Instead they took the approach of “maybe if I ignore you then you will go away” which when one is in a complex travel situation just makes you more upset.

Eventually the supervisor came out from the gate and he did seem to understand the basics of the above. He explained that American Airlines was basically having so many delayed flights that they were just assuming that tons of people would miss every connection. They were aggressively giving away seats for people who hadnt shown up 10 minutes before the fight since they always had a huge crowd of people to push to the next one.

The next problem though was that he chose to exact a bit of revenge on me for being upset at the gate. He got Kat and Fen on the next flight but only put me on “standby, which gives you an excellent chance to get on”. Calmer now we went to the next gate and waited. I figured that since I had gold status with American Airlines that was supposed to put me at the front of the standby list, so no problem.

Two hours later the next flight boarded, they called some standby passengers and Im still waiting. Its 10 minutes before the fight and the gate attendants are looking over the folks that are going to get screwed on this connection- look, there are 3 coming from Costa Rica, no way they are going to make it on time. They are giving away their seats, and at the last minute (10 minutes before the time on all the screens and all the tickets) one person does make it. They tell me Im out of luck and they will get me on the morning flight.

At this point Im pretty much in shell-shock. Three minutes later a woman runs up and goes through the same thing I did at the previous gate. She starts out screaming “I cant believe this, it says Ive still got time, Im going to be fucking fired if Im not in Seattle for work tomorrow morning”. She manages to stop screaming but her voice is still not normal. The three people from the Costa Rica flight show up and are pretty annoyed but are still on vacation-mellow. They are all really confused about how this happened to them and the woman behind the counter isnt giving an honest explanation so I tell them what the guy at the other gate told me. Now she is pissed at me and accuses me of trying to start a riot (and to be clear at this point Im very calm and just matter of fact explaining what I just witnessed happen to them). Again its the “maybe if the passengers just don’t know the system they will go along like sheep” attitude. Luckly we now have things like blogs to get the word out.

So she sticks me with a middle seat on the morning flight and wont help me with a hotel room and says I need to talk to the supervisor. He takes about 15 minutes to finish up helping someone with some unrelated flight and then looks at my info. At this point he comes out and says that they intentionally screwed me on getting on this evenings flight because I had been upset at the other gate, hooks me up with a voucher for the Clarion inn, and sends me off.

The shuttle to the hotel takes about an hour to pick me up. Its actually really cold in Dallas- about 40 degrees. When the shuttle does come Im the first to get on but at the next terminal there is such a big line for the Clarion shuttle (all of whom had been waiting over an hour) that they all cant get on and we have to turn away others. I speak with the shuttle drive who says that its just been crazy for the past two weeks- something changed two weeks ago and American is bumping way more people all the time.

The morning flight was pretty normal and uneventful other than again overcrowded shuttles- I wound up sharing a taxi with some others rather than waiting another 20 minutes. They had no problem switching my center seat to an aisle.

To sum it up, there were a whole host of things that are totally wrong here. First of all, American Airlines has pushed their hub thing beyond its limits- trying to schedule 35 minute connections (which a flight attended for another airline described as an illegal connection), and by policy showing inflexibility in helping people make those connections is just a really bad way to run things. But I suspect the problem is deeper since this approach gives them plenty of people who are bumped by accident- which lets the airline overbook and avoid having to ask for volunteers that can cost them $200-$400/seat to get. Intentionally causing your passengers to mess up their itineraries in order to deal with your overbooking situation is just an evil way to treat people.

Then, given that situation, the way your staff deals with people is just not ok. Ive heard a few things about the unhealthy airlines lately and I wonder how much of what I saw was a symptom of the dysfunctional labor/management thing going on at American. The non-communicative attitude and the staffs need to show customers whos boss by screwing my getting on the next flight is not going to get the airline healthy again. At this point I cant imagine any destination that I need to get to so badly that I would make another connection at DFW and in general Im all set to avoid American whenever possible (although sadly that is not 100% possible).

Finally, the situation with the official departure times is just wacky and I don’t think this is unique to American Airlines. Why print 7:28pm on a ticket and show it on the displays when this time is completely useless to your passengers. If I have to show up at 7:18pm before the doors close, why not put that as the departure time? If 7:28pm had some use to me that would be one thing, but as far as I can tell its just one more gimmick that lets them schdule crazy-tight connections, “accidentally” bump more people and avoid having to pay for over-booking.

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