jcole’s weblog

In the mail today, I got a reply from Citibank‘s Executive Communications Department. Basically a form letter saying that they had received my complaint and to be assured that it would be shared with the senior management. At least I got a reply!

Until today, I hadn’t ridden my bike for exactly a month, due to some broken spokes, and a two-week trip to Europe.

I finally got my spokes fixed the other day, and today I made my first lengthy trek on the bike. I set my goal at 20 miles—a little low—since I hadn’t ridden in so long. I made it, and even made pretty good time. It was a bit painful, as expected, though. Here’s my stats:

• Distance: 20.3 miles
• Avg. Speed: 10.4 mph
• Max. Speed: 21.3 mph
• Time Taken: 1h 57m

I tried some of those energy gels, they’re not bad. It’s hard to tell if they gave me a boost, but I’m leaning towards yes. I’ll try them a few more times and see if it helps at all.

I also acquired a chain cleaner while I was out, and now my chain and everything is spiffy clean!

I am getting the weirdest blog spams lately: Spams with links to websites about lighthouses.

What.. the.. hell? Lighthouse spam?!

People talk about the most random things while they walk around the hallways in a cubicle farm. Heard today from two women heading to a meeting:

Woman1: At least we got the sex offender off there.
Woman2: Yeah I know!

Oy.

So I logged into SallieMae.com today to make the final payment on one of my student loans (yay!) but I’m in a kind of weird position now. According to the billing summary and the “Make a payment” page, I should pay $239.34. But when I go to actually make that payment, I get this error:

The following errors were encountered:
1. The payment amount for a billing group cannot exceed the 5 day payoff amount of $238.83

What do I do now? Guess I have to call them. It won’t let me pay the amount I supposedly owe, and I can only imagine the mess if I underpaid by 51 cents. Ugh.

From Yahoo! Messenger today:

Eric Bergen: I think I boycotted U2 for life but I don’t remember

Not a very effective boycotting strategy.

Since when did they up the ante? While most Americans are simply struggling to rent a place paycheck to paycheck, and can’t even think about buying anything, in their article Buying the American Dream, Forbes has now declared that the “American Dream” involves:

a nice, but not opulent, life–private schools for the kids, a large house in an upscale neighborhood, a weekend retreat, a pricey night out once a week, a couple of very nice cars

And it costs, too, to live their version of the American Dream out here in California, you’d have to be making nearly $370,000 per year—after taxes. By “large house in an upscale neighborhood” they mean a $3M house. By “weekend retreat” they mean another $950k for a house at Lake Tahoe. By “nice cars” they mean a BMW 325i and a Lexus RX 330. Who the hell dreamt up this version of the American Dream? When did it go from “a small house, maybe a couple of acres of land” to “a rich playboy’s life”? Oh wait, maybe this is only the dream of Forbes editors.

Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny for providing the link.

Today I’ve been talking to Rob as he’s sitting around in Chicago O’Hare Airport on standby for hours on end. It’s his own fault, he missed his flight this morning. As he’s complaining that every flight he’s been bumped to has been overbooked, I was thinking that I should blog about overbooking of flights. Having travelled quite extensively, hopefully I’m qualified to talk about it. This is one of the nastiest little secrets of the airline industry.

Overbooking (of flights) is the practice of selling more seats on each flight than there actually are on the plane. At first blush, the concept is simple. The airlines claim that since passengers typically don’t notify the airline to cancel their reservation when their plans change, there are many no-shows for a given flight. All major airlines overbook flights, with few exceptions¹. An un-used seat is wasted revenue.

A given flight might be overbooked by as little as 10% or as much as 100%. When they estimate wrongly, and too many people show up for the flight, they have to “bump” some passengers to the next flight. You’ll notice this all the time at the airport: They’ll be asking for people to voluntarily give up their seat for some sort of compensation. Often they pay cash, sometimes airline vouchers and other incentives.

I understand the airlines’ plight. I myself have many times booked a flight and not shown up for it, without notifying the airline. This isn’t so simple as blaming the passengers for not notifying the airline though. This is a bigger issue. Most no-shows (mine included) can be attributed to one of two causes:

• One-way penalties— Most airlines (in the US) charge steep penalties for booking one-way flights, versus round trips. They do this in the hopes of penalizing and extracting more money from business travellers, who are likely to book many one-way trips to visit different customers, without returning home.
• Non-refundable tickets— Most tickets sold by major airlines in the US are the “non-refundable” type, and have steep fees to change—on the order of $150 or more, plus possible fare differences. This means that the passenger has absolutely no incentive to notify the airline in the case that they change their mind or their plans, especially if they can book a new ticket for less than the change fee.

Airlines have caused this mess themselves, but they continue to try to blame it on the customer. Charge reasonable prices, don’t try to extract money from the business travellers, and be honest, and this problem wouldn’t exist. Airlines that allow easy cancellation, with full or even partial refunds don’t have this problem. Airlines that don’t charge one-way penalties don’t have this problem.

¹ JetBlue is one notable exception, here.

I mentioned the snafu with our hotel in Grenoble in my last post, but I thought I’d expand on things. First, for some background:

Yahoo! has a new internal travel system, in order to reduce the volume of people booking with the travel agents at the travel desk. I figured I’d give it a try for this trip. Man, did it suck. It’s outsourced to KDS International, and internally re-branded as “Yahoo! U-Book”. It takes hours to do the simplest of things. I booked a single hotel from my trip with it before giving up and using Expedia, Orbitz, and HRS. I kept my sanity.

The hotel that I booked on U-Book was for Grenoble, France. We arrived into Paris on Saturday, and took the SNCF TGV train to Grenoble on Sunday afternoon. When we arrived at the Grenoble train station, I checked the map, but couldn’t find the address of the hotel on it. I asked the person at the information desk, and after some scratching his head, all he could initially tell me was: “far, very far”. Not good. I asked if I could take the tram or bus there; “No, only taxi, very far” was his response.

The hotel was in Saint Rambert d’Albon, which is really far from Grenoble. He knew that initially from the postal code—the hotel’s postal code is 26140, while central Grenoble is 38000. He was willing to figure out how I could get there, but I told him, no, if it’s really that far, I need a different hotel. He pointed me to the IBIS Grenoble Gare hotel, right down the road. The guy at the front desk of the hotel spoke excellent English and helped me cancel the other hotel without penalty and rebook there.

I got back in the office today, so I checked the U-Book system to make sure that I’m not crazy, and that it really isn’t my fault. I was right. Here’s a screen shot of the U-Book’s map of hotels, with my mouse over where it thinks the hotel I booked is:

You can see Kelkoo on there, which is the Yahoo! office I was headed to. Nice and close, right?

And now, where it really is, courtesy of Mappy. The hotel is on the left, Grenoble on the right, and the driving directions between. Click to get a bigger version. It’s 138km to drive this route:

I reported the problem to KDS today, by phone, so hopefully they’ll fix it.