So you need to book some flights and you hit the usual suspects online to find the best prices: Kayak, Orbitz, Travelocity or even Fare Compare. But when you look at the results, it is all about the price and you are not told the whole story. The other sites don’t tell you what seats are like, what snacks or drinks you may expect or what fees you might be charged for who knows what. Things are now changing with RouteHappy.com, which puts Passenger Experience (#PaxEx) into the equation.
Routehappy takes what the old Metasearch websites (like Kayak) did by aggregating all the flight prices into the one site, but it takes it one step further. For some flyers, price is everything. But for many of us, we are willing to pay for some of the nicer things. Routehappy calls these ’œHappiness Factors’.
Image from PlaneFinder.net via NYCAviation.com.
Watching airline activity live via social media can have interesting consequences. Last week, I happened to see the #7700 tweet [which are tweets that are auto generated that go out any time an aircraft in coverage squawks 7700] from Planefinder.net as soon as it was posted and went to check out what was happening. Normally when you catch these emergencies, not much happens immediately, and the aircraft either continues on to its destination, or diverts to another airport.
This time I noticed that the aircraft immediately entered a very rapid descent [see an image of normal descent]. In my experience, something like that is usually caused by a loss of cabin pressure, where the pilots level off at 10,000 feet to asses the situation. However, this aircraft passed 10,000 and continued to rapidly descent, which was worrying. Was this a huge emergency, website error or just standard procedure for some issue on the flight?
Flying Qantas First Class – Photo: Mal Muir | AirlineReporter.com
I was beginning my day off the way any premium cabin passenger should; spending time in the lounge prior to my flight. But this wasn’t just any lounge and this wasn’t just any flight. For two and a half years I had dreamed and worked towards this day. I had been earning Qantas points purely for this reason: First Class flight on a Qantas Airbus A380.
Arriving at Melbourne Airport I was dropped off in front of the dedicated First Class check-in area, which can be easily missed if you don’t know where to look. Thankfully my driver did know as the check in was hiding behind a line of trees. I was a little too early to check in for my flight, but was able to sit down in the lobby area (which looks almost identical to the First Class lounge).
The completed A350 XWB MSN001 is welcomed by Airbus employees in Toulouse. Photo from Airbus.
The painting of the first Airbus A350 XWB was completed today in Toulouse, France. The aircraft is sporting the typcial Airbus livery that took about seven days to complete.
The aircraft, MSN001, has also completed flight-test-instrumentation (FTI) verification, engine installation and a subsequent intensive phase of ground vibration tests. Airbus is expecting MSN001 to complete its maiden flight this summer.
Frontier Airlines new livery. Image from Frontier.
Do not worry, the cute animals are not going away! But Frontier has updated their livery to promote their website versus just the silver “Frontier” titles seen previously on the aircraft. The first animal to see the new livery is Mickey the Moose, who was previously on a Q400 and Boeing 737 before being brought out of retirement to be on this Airbus A319.
“Changing our livery provided us an opportunity to promote FlyFrontier.com,” Frontier spokesperson explained to AirlineReporter.com. “We won’t change the rest of our fleet all at once, but when we add aircraft to our fleet or older aircraft need to be painted, we’ll add the FlyFrontier.com to those aircraft as well.”
