What's the lounge for?

One of my biggest peeves about lounges is their silly hours.

Here I am in the PHX RCC (Red Carpet Club) waiting for my 7:35pm departure flight back to SFO but we won't start boarding till well after 8:30pm due to late incoming aircraft (I hope it's incoming, it hasn't left DEN yet though!). Yet the official hours of the RCC here is till 7pm, so that's when they are going to throw us out of here. Nice!

Karma?

It's been almost two weeks since my disastrous flight to Newark where after I switched seats with someone across from me so that they could sit with their travel companion I ended up sitting next to the jerj who didn't MHOB, and I ended up leaving my brand new earphones and iPod on the plane. At least I think that's where I left them, after using them most of the flight, I reached for them a few days later on an Amtrak train and didn't find them. In addition to the annoyance of realizing I probably lost them, I had to listen to the way-too-loud volume of the person sitting next to me, taking little satisfaction in the fact that she's sure to go deaf soon.

I mention the seat switch, because no good deed goes unpunished and even though the seat was an even swap, if some honest person happened to pick up my iPod/earphones, they'd have no way to return to me as my name isn't associated with the seat I left them on, but the seat across the aisle from it. Oh well, live and learn.

Other bad karma was last Xmas when coming back from NY we had confirmed seats in F (first) on UA's p.s. service from JFK (three class international quality service and seats on JFK-SFO and JFK-LAX routes) and the nice-seat-p.s. 757 was swapped out for an international 767. Which is nowhere *near* as nice in F or C.

Well, last night I went to check in online for my p.s. flight today (confirmed in C on an upgrade) and realized OMG it's a 767 but the new, reconfigured one that United has made so much noise about since last summer, but since there are just a handful of them still, they've mostly been on international routes I don't fly. The closest I came to flying one was when my disaster abortion of a flight 75 SFO-HNL went mechanical and they were trying to get us a new plane and we almost ended up with the reconfigured 747 but no luck (and then they misfueled the plane we did get and we had to go back and then spend the night at the airport and they ran out of vouchers for hotel so we had to do our own, and then they left us off of the manifest for the extra segment replacement flight the next day but we got 17,500 miles for our troubles each).

Anyway, they had me in one of the backwards facing seats so I quickly switched myself to 6H, front row foward facing and have been holding my breath and keeping my fingers and toes crossed since then, hoping this really will be true.

I'm now sitting at the JFK RCC and sure enough the RCC matron even said "Oh, it's the new plane, I should go take a look at it" and I'm so excited I'll probably go to the gate an hour in advance to take a look and get in line to maximize my time on it!

Luckily I have my camera with me and it even seems to be charged, so I'll try to take some pictures even though lots of pictures have already been taken and posted all over the place.

This doesn't make up for lost iPod and earphones, but it sure makes up for the lost p.s. F opportunity last December!

MYOB?

Usually I'm happy to put on my headphones and ignore my seatmate, but today was a classic it was hard to ignore.

As we're circling in a holding pattern over Newark (which would deserve a rant of its own if it wasn't so commonplace) he says to me: "excuse me is your cell phone turned off?"

Huh? "Yes" I say. He gets all agitated and starts mumbling how they told us several times to turn off our cell phones. So I take out my Blackberry and show him it's off, even pushing a few buttons to show him it's completely off. Instead off shutting him up it prompts him saying something about me having it on the entire flight.

Bizzarro city, especially since I was working on the Sunday paper the whole time and hadn't touched the BB except to turn it on once to check the time (which still leaves the transmit function off as required, since it wouldn't get signal in-flight anyway I don't understand why anyone would intentionally turn it on before landing anyway).

Late flights

Some flights always seem to be late.

Why? And how can you tell your flight will be late? Maybe you can't tell in advance, but certainly on the "day of" you should be ready and armed with knowledge.

Two days ago I was flying SFO-YVR on a United 737 at 12:45pm. Earlier that morning I noticed that there was a noon 737 from EUG (Eugene) due into the gate I was leaving from. So that's my plane. It gets into Eugene from SFO. So now if it leaves for Eugene from SFO at 8:23am as scheduled so far so good, but if it leaves late, where will it pick up the lost time?

So, using sites like http://www.flightstats.com/ you can figure these things out and be a little more ready for the bad news before the airline decides to clue you in that you'll be sitting at the gate for a few extra hours...

So now it's two days later and I have a 3:44 flight from Vancouver back to SFO. Guess what? It's the very same plane and it was already an hour late getting to Eugene this morning. So am I surprised when I got a page a few hours after I saw that saying _my_ departure was also an hour late? Nope.

Expiration of miles

If you haven't been paying any attention to this you've probably lost lots of frequent flier miles.

Most FF programs expire the miles in your account after a certain amount of inactivity. I lost about 10K in my Delta account in 2000 by miscalculating time since my last flight. My parents had 25K in their United accounts till a few months ago when they hit the (new and shorter) 18 months since last activity date.

Imagine my surprise when I resurrected access to my Continental OnePass account which I haven't used in over fifteen years (I've been flying CO but crediting the miles to my Delta SkyTeam account) and found that it had over five thousand miles in it?

Turns out, Continental miles never expire. I have heard their FF program referred to as NoPass so maybe they don't do you any good if you can't use them... I haven't had any trouble using UA miles when I've wanted/needed to, and AA has been reasonably good on that front as well...

Now it doesn't take much to keep the miles from expiring. Just spend or earn a couple of miles. Any activity on the account will reset the expiration - link your Safeway card to your account and spend enough to earn 100 miles, or use one of those earn-miles-for-clicking-here websites, or buy some flowers using a link on the airline site, transfer or convert some miles/points, etc.

But you've got to remember to do it. That's why keeping only three or four FF accounts is best - combine all travel on the same alliance into the same FF account (I use AA for OneWorld, UA for StarAlliance, DL for SkyTeam and then I've got JetBlue and VirginAmerica who aren't part of any alliance yet).

More cutbacks in F

I can't imagine that cutbacks by airlines is news to anyone, but it's still annoying as they chip away at *everything*.

Yesterday I had a midday flight from SFO to YVR (San Francisco to Vancouver) and being an international flight, they've always served a lunch in first class (F). Knowing that the cutbacks in service are continuous and merciless, I checked at the RCC (Red Carpet Club) at SFO whether there would be a meal in F. "Lunch" they said. So, even with a 90 minute delay I figured I was okay not to eat.

There were all of two of us in F (8 seat cabin on 737) and the choices we were offered were a "snack box". It turned out to be more analogous to the "fresh" salads they offer on BOB flights in Y (Buy-On-Board in coach), except maybe a little smaller. Mine had a small piece of chicken breast, three carrot sticks, three zucchini sticks, a little tub of salad dressing about five grapes and two milk chocolate squares. All would have been forgiven had it been dark chocolate, but milk chocolate??? Ah, that's a rant for another blog!