As Another Startup Crumbles, Spirit Airlines Expands

With the apparent demise of JetAmerica before it ever made a single flight, we are left to wonder how the United States will get an ultra-no-frills, super-low-cost, utterly-comfort-free Ryanair clone.

First Skybus gave it a shot, and collapsed. Now JetAmerica can’t seem to get off  the ground. 

Meanwhile, though, Spirit Airlines is filling the void, expanding rapidly into the Caribbean and Latin America, pulling in cash from vacationers and immigrant families.  Ryanair built much of its business in Europe with a similar strategy, adding gimmicky sales pitches to low-cost, no-frills flights to mass-market tourist destinations.

Spirit may not be able to rely on vacationers quite as much — Americans don’t get nearly as much vacation time as Europeans do — but it is  following at least part of that model with  its $9 Fare Club, discount coupons, tacky ad campaigns and fees, fees, fees for everything from checked luggage to water.

Spirit recently added flights to Colombia and the Dominican Republic, and is reported to be a leading bidder for the faltering Air Jamaica. It also is expanding domestically, adding service between Florida and Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Chicago.

A Lesson In Packaging From Madagascar

I was amused when I got to the bottom of this jar of vanilla extract from Madagascar to see the big indent in the bottom.

The vanilla was a gift (and a much appreciated one) from a traveler who no doubt noticed the minor deception involved. But I’m not sure I would have noticed had I been the purchaser.

The jar holds slightly more than four tablespoons of vanilla, or about a quarter cup. Without the indent, I calculate it would have held about a tablespoon more. So the jar appears to hold 20 percent more vanilla than it actually does. (And vanilla is expensive stuff.)

The label is honest — it says it holds 5 centiliters, which is about a quarter cup. But I think people rely more on the eye than the mental calculation, even if they know what a centiliter is.

My Travel Insurance Odyssey Ends Well

I, travel blogger, screwed up by forgetting to book travel insurance after my husband and I bought tickets ($256 round-trip!) from Newalk to Honolulu for January. But I rescued myself with insuremytrip.com.

We buy travel insurance only under certain conditions, and in my husband’s view this trip met those conditions. I was kind of on the fence about it, but I agreed to buy a policy. Then I forgot to go to Travel Guard, where we usually get travel insurance, until 17 days after we bought the tickets. Trouble is, Travel Guard excludes some coverage, including financial default of the airline and medical problems related to pre-existing conditions, unless you buy the policy within 14 days of the initial trip deposit.

Uh-oh. So I went to insuremytrip.com, a site that compares travel insurance policies from various companies, and found a Travelex policy that imposes a 21-day limit. Whew.  (SquareMouth.com and QuoteWright.com also compare travel insurance.)

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Woman Killed On Cruise Ship

A woman was killed aboard a Carnival cruise ship and her husband was arrested when it docked today in San Diego, the Union-Tribune reports. The cruise industry has taken a lot of criticism over security lately, some of it justified. But it’s not the cruise industry’s fault when people bring their troubles with them on vacation. This could just have easily have happened in a hotel – or in the couple’s home, for that matter.

Public Not Told Of Bacteria In Missouri Lake

The people running the Missouri Department of Natural Resources have apparently never seen “Jaws,” in which the mayor and the chamber of commerce of Amity refuse to warn people about a killer shark that’s chewing up tourists as if they were Chiclets and, eww, it gets ugly from there. 

For four weeks, as thousands of vacationers enjoyed the Lake of the Ozarks, the DNR withheld a report showing unsafe levels of fecal bacteria in the lake, the Kansas City star reported. The reason, according to a department spokeswoman: “Business and tourism was a consideration. We didn’t want to panic the people.”

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More Middle Seats To Hate

Everybody hates middle seats on airplanes, and with good reason. What many people don’t realize is that there are proportionately more middle seats to hate than ever before.

As wide-body jets become less common, especially on domestic flights, passengers are more likely to be flying on narrow-body jets: the Boeing 737 and 757 or the Airbus A319 or A320.

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TripAdvisor Reviews Under Attack

TripAdvisor has been posting advisories about attempts to manipulate reviews for hotels on its site, the Associated Press reports.

I’ve been following the dispute between Arthur Frommer, who I worship, and TripAdvisor, a site that I find quite useful. Frommer says the site is too easily manipulated by fake reviews and travelers should rely on evaluations from guidebooks and journalists. TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia, says it is actively rooting out fake reviews.

For my part, I use the site with the understanding that some reviewers are not writing in good faith. If there are only a few reviews, I don’t give them much weight, but if there are a hundred or more, I pay attention. I look for ratings in the middle, two to four stars instead of one or four, because there is usually little to learn from rave reviews or a complete trashing. The reviews in between are more nuanced, and tend to describe the good points and the bad.

Of course, I use guidebooks, too.

Blogger Reports TSA Agent Pulled Down Her Top

My niece Seton sent me a link to this rather horrifying blog entry by a young woman who says her tube top was pulled down by a female TSA agent in the Bozeman, Mont., airport, exposing her breasts to passengers and several male agents nearby. It seems pretty clear that it was an accident, but a careless and truly inexcusable one.

Some comments on her blog entry suggested that she should not have been wearing a tube top to fly. Nonsense. She can wear what she wants, even a strapless top. Besides, she had a hooded sweatshirt over it.

For years, my husband and I had a protocol when traveling with our daughter — one of us would pass through security ahead of her and the other behind her so that one of us would always be on the same side with her. There were just too many stories about young women being singled out for attention, especially before the TSA replaced private guards.

The kid is 24 now, travels alone all the time and knows how to take care of herself. But if someone did that to her, whether it was an accident or not, they would still face the unholy wrath of this Mom.

Plane Crash In Iran Kills 168

It’s turning into a grim summer for commercial aviation, with another 168 killed this morning in the crash of a Caspian Airlines Tupolev TU-154 in Iran, CNN reports.

This crash follows the June 1 crash of an Air France A330 into the Indian Ocean that killed 228 people and the June 30 crash of a Yemenia Airways Airbus 310 near the Comoros Islands, also into the Indian Ocean, that killed 152.

The New York Times points out that:

Iran has been plagued by plane crashes in recent years, a record that aviation experts have attributed to the country’s aging and outdated planes, many of them secondhand aircraft leased from Russia.

Hole Blows Out Of Southwest 737 Fuselage

A hole the size of a football suddenly opened up the fuselage of a Southwest 737 as it climbed out of Nashville on Monday, sucking out a piece of the cabin ceiling and depressurizing the jet in a roaring rush of air that no doubt scared the hell out of everybody on board.

It’s not clear why it happened, the Associated Press reports. The jet landed safely. And, of course, there are photos.

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