February 5, 2008

I spent last weekend in Provo, and I’m not talking about Utah. Provo is the nickname for Providenciales, on the western part of the Turks and Caicos Islands, in the British West Indies in the Caribbean.

It’s 575 miles southeast of Miami, and to give you an idea of a sense of place, 30 miles to the northwest you’ll find the Bahamas and about 100 miles to the southeast you’ll find the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

So it was Groundhog Day weekend and I should tell you that in Pennsylvania the groundhog came out and saw his shadow and went back in. He’s been seeing his shadow a lot.

So, that means we are going to have six more weeks of winter. But let’s put it in perspective: We just went through the entire month of January with no snow in New York. So, six more weeks of winter means we will be cross-country skiing up Madison Avenue in April.

SUPER BOWL WEEKEND

It was Super Bowl weekend, and all eyes were fixed on Glendale, Arizona and that stadium there for the great Super Bowl game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. It was wild out there, with a thousand separate charter and private jets landing at the airport. Talk about an air traffic controller’s nightmare of ritzy glitzy people.

And the money is out of control. You know what three nights at the Ramada Inn cost people? $2,382.

That doesn’t count the tickets to the game. That is for a Ramada Inn!

There was even a monastery there that’s selling their rooms for the people that are staying there, with a couple of rules. No drinking, no smoking, but you don’t have to do a vow of silence.

The nuns at the monastery are claiming that from this one weekend alone they’ll be able to pay their mortgage for the year. Something tells me that nuns had money on the game too, but I won’t go there.

MERGER MANIA CONTINUED

The merger mania is still topic A in the travel industry. The betting still is that Northwest and Delta are going to be the dance partners, not Delta and United. Although United is now starting to say they’re talking to Continental.

Something is going to happen, and if the Northwest-Delta deal happens, it will probably create the world’s largest airline, even when they start shrinking capacity.

For example, if you happen to be in Memphis, or want to visit Beale Street, a Northwest-Delta merger is not in your best interest—the service to that airport may completely fall apart.

Other capacity areas may get cut and it is going to get tough and airfares—of course—are going to go up.

PASSENGER BILL OF RIGHTS

We talked about the New York State Passenger Bill of Rights, which actually went into effect January 1. What is weird about that is because there has been no weather in New York or significant delays, it hasn’t really kicked in yet.

The deal is if you are delayed on a flight and you are stuck on the runway and they don’t feed you and water you and otherwise give you aromatherapy. Then, the airline can be fined up to $1,000 a passenger, which is pretty high.

Michigan is now thinking of a passenger’s rights bill and why not?

They were the guys who in 1999 in Detroit suffered that famous Northwest meltdown, with more than 8,000 people stranded for more than nine hours at the Detroit airport.

The argument the airlines will always make is that the states have no jurisdiction under federal deregulation. The argument that the states are making—which has been upheld in New York—is that it is not about regulating the airlines, it is a health and safety issue. The states have jurisdiction over that and the judge upheld the argument.

We are still waiting to see, and we may not have to wait too much longer, when that law kicks in, how much drama there is going to be at the airport. When people are screaming and fighting and being taken back into the terminal and planes are being seized for failures to pay fines by the airlines. As I’ve said before, it will be great drama. Not that we need any more drama in the airline business, but there you have it.

BLACK-LIGHT ID SCREENING

I don’t know if you have flown in the last couple of weeks, but this just happened to me a couple days ago, so I know it is happening elsewhere. You used to go to the TSA and show your boarding pass and your ID, in most cases your driver’s license.

Now, they’re asking you to take your driver’s license out and they are actually using a black light, checking the hologram that is on the plastic card that is on most drivers’ licenses. They are going one more step to do it.

And for those people that have states that don’t have a hologram, guess what? You are being taken out of line. So you are being a victim of technology there.

It gets a little crazy because when you think about it. All they have to do is look at the driver’s license to see that it’s you, you have a boarding pass, you are going to go through security anyway, I mean how bad can it be?

We’ll see what happens with that, but the bottom line is, don’t be surprised when you get to the airport that don’t leave your driver’s license in your wallet; you are going to be made to take it out. And they are going to show a little black light on it to check the hologram, assuming the hologram is even there.

From Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio.

Want to know more about fliers’ rights? Check out our interview with Kate Hanni of the Coalition for Airline Passengers Bill of Rights.

Read more from Peter’s Travel Detective Files blog.