Consumer Traveler Today: March 30

Consumer Traveler Today: Four secrets for upgrading your next vacation
 
 
Four secrets for upgrading your next vacation
What we’re reading: Easter egg hunt, Ryanair stops infight cell service, AF crash civil suit
Travel by the book — literature that inspires travel
Take-offs and landings with Fairchild-Hillers and F-Troop
7 travel tips during an airline strike — Lufthansa and American may be next
Four secrets for upgrading your next vacation
Posted: 30 Mar 2010 03:15 AM PDT
Sure, the latest customer surveys suggest customer satisfaction scores have plummeted to their lowest levels in years. (How bad is it? In one notable case, the industry celebrated a customer-approval grade of C-.) And if you read this column, you can try to count the many times the travel industry has let its customers down.
       

What we’re reading: Easter egg hunt, Ryanair stops infight cell service, AF crash civil suit
Posted: 30 Mar 2010 03:00 AM PDT
Easter egg hunt at the Joule, Ryanair takes cell phone service off the air, Air France crash victims' relatives sue in U.S.
       

Travel by the book — literature that inspires travel
Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:30 AM PDT
Going back to when I was about ten, I remember pouncing on the Harlequin romances a relative left sitting around. I couldn’t wait to read them — not for the romance (which was admittedly tame back then) but because many of them featured stories set in exotic (to me then) locales — Italy, Greece, or Australia. While thin on plot, the books were often chock full of lavish descriptions of local points-of-interest and lush landscapes.
       

Take-offs and landings with Fairchild-Hillers and F-Troop
Posted: 29 Mar 2010 07:30 AM PDT
The Fairchild FH227B was quite commonly used both here and in Europe (the original design was built by Fokker in Germany and built under license by Fairchild here in the United States) for this kind of flying before the market was ceded to commuter airlines. It was a commuter workhorse.
       

7 travel tips during an airline strike — Lufthansa and American may be next
Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:28 AM PDT
One way to be pre-emptive is to either ask a travel agent or do some online research to see if an airline you are considering is having labor problems, but often you might need to book before those problems surface. To make matters more difficult, some airlines keep their troubles under the radar until it is close to the actual dates flights could be disrupted.