The rumors of Thanksgiving holiday travel problems turned out to be greatly exaggerated as most airports ran smoothly over the holiday and travelers mostly made it home from Thanksgiving without incident.
AP Reports on a happily uneventful Thanksgiving Travel Season
Changi Airport of Singapore has added one of the world’s nicest and newest terminals. Changi offers the traveler 80 airlines serving 200 cities in 60 countries.
The Airport at Changi is already a major airline / travel hub in Asia.
With the addition of Terminal 3, Changi Airport now has an annual handling capacity of 70 million passengers a year.
Here is the official website for Changi Airport: www.ChangiAirport.com/
Alice in Singapore has some great pictures of the new terminal at Changi Airport in Singapore.
Her blog is here and has a lot of great information about visiting Singapore as well as the recent Singapore Changi Airport article and photos.
Airport Wayfinder is a high tech kiosk system that is used in airports to orient travelers to the airport and the surrounding region. QuickAid.com was actually spawned out of this type of Airport travel kiosk system – the first of it’s kind many years ago and now defunct as a kiosk system, though still ticking as this travel website.
Diet Detective has released another Airline Food Survey. United wins, though they are evaluating some pretty meagre offerings in the survey including those little $5 “snack boxes” that are now so common on many flights.
As much as I occaisonally enjoyed the occaisionally good online hot meal, I’m glad the airlines have chosen to stop that in favor of simpler, cheaper snacks. I think full meal service basically added over $10 per person to a coach ticket, and given the relatively modest quality of the meal I think my money is better spent on the ground. Of course some of the international flights have much better food, and we may see this become a marketing perk for all airlines in the future. In the meantime, happy snacking!
The Chicago Sun Times reviews the expected travel situation at Chicagoland airports. So far the holiday travel experience seems to have been OK for most travelers. News outlets are not reporting major delays from today’s travel, though Sunday travel “home” may tell the big tale.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/660339,CST-NWS-air21.article
Note: I was not familiar with BTS Travel until tonight and cannot vouch for this as a good company – but they did have some great posted rates to China, and these excellent general discount travel tips:
SATURDAY NIGHT STAY
Try including Saturday night during your stay at the destination.
BOOK EARLY
We sell heavily discounted tickets only. Our seat inventory is very limited on each aircraft. The earlier you book the more chance you have to get the cheapest possible seat.
AVOID WEEKEND TRAVEL
Traveling Monday thru Thursday is generally cheaper than Friday thru Sunday. This applies to departure and return travel. Airlines charge up to $80 more for weekend travel.
THE CHEAPEST ONE WAY FARES
We offer substantially cheaper one way fares than many other major websites. Our one way fare are typically up to 50 percent cheaper than round trip fares.
EXTENDED AIRPORT SEARCH
Our search engine automatically searches for lowest fares using multiple airports within large metropolitan areas. This method is guaranteed to find you the lowest possible fare if you are flexible with the airports.
President Bush is speaking about how the government will attempt to curb flight delays this holiday season and take some measures to help passengers. Mary Peters, Secretary of Transportation and FAA Administrator Bobby Sturgill are flanking the president who is noting an “epidemic of aviation delays”. He is offering these solutions:
1) Military to open some routes that had been unavailable to commercial traffic.
2) FAA is taking measures to head off delays. Moratorium on all non-essential projects.
3) Airlines taking measures to make more staff available, set aside extra seats and planes to help passengers affected by cancellations and delays.
4) Feds will use internet to update flight information. www.fly.faa.gov
5) New Regulations to assure passengers are treated fairly. Overbooking compensation will double. $400 will become $800 compensation for some major flight delays.
NY Metro area is the most problematic region for flights.
From Fox News:
27 million Americans are expected to travel this Thanksgiving holiday (I think this stat is air travel only).
Bangalore Airport Arrivals may face a bit of a challenge getting to the center of town, some 30 miles away. Rediff reports. Apparently there is no good ground transportation to and from the airport, and traffic could make that trip 3-4 hours. For elite passengers there are choppers and air shuttles but regular folks may just have to … wait… for a better solution.
Jaunt is noting how free WiFi is taking off at many regional airports. This even as large airports still try to eek out a few bucks charging relatively large fees to connect to their WiFi networks (usually 9.95 for the day). I don’t have data to back this up, but I’m confident that the big players would do well to offer free ad supported WiFi. I simply don’t pay for the WiFi when travelling, struggling instead to read my email over the Treo rather than pony up ten bucks just to surf and pick up some email for a few hours between flights.
I’m guessing enough other folks do that same that the airports would be far better off looking to the potentially high revenues they could obtain using open networks with some sort of interstitial advertising injected every 5 minutes or so, or even the less intrusive “menu” system where people would browse in some sort of window surrounded with relevant ads. If I ran a nice lounge at a major airport in Concourse A you can bet your iPhone I’d want to run ads for this in Concourse B, and the people I’d want to target would be those who are reading up email or surfing away, killing time before flights.
So hey big Airports, get with the program!
Singapore Airlines takes the maiden journey of the massive A380 luxury Airliner today.
the Singapore Air writeup tells the tale of this amazing Singapore to Sydney journey on October 25, 2007.
Air passengers on the flight enjoyed a gourmet meal and fine champagne. Sydney and Singopore charities are getting the proceeds from the tickets, which were sold at Ebay auction, some of which fetched prices like $100,000 for two tickets.
Congratulations to Singapore Airlines!