Missed Business Travel News

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But it doesn’t end there. Starting in February, Lufthansa's new Italian division will begin service from Milan's Malpensa Airport, a potentially profitable hub inexplicably abandoned earlier this year by Alitalia. Lufthansa also has a strong presence in Scandinavia via its Star Alliance partnership with SAS. The Star Alliance also brings partnership with solid Asian carriers (Singapore, All Nippon, and Thai) and three North American airlines: Air Canada, United, and US Airways. Lufthansa also hedged its American bets last year by purchasing a 20 percent stake in JetBlue Airways.

Passenger Rights, Wrong-Headed Crusaders
When Northwest Airlines stranded thousands of passengers and hundreds of flights at Detroit's Metro Airport during a 1999 blizzard, a "passenger’s rights" movement sprung up and was quickly crushed by the airlines and their Congressional allies. When ferocious thunderstorms in Dallas in December 2006 forced American Airlines to divert flights to other airports, travelers were trapped on planes for hours without food, water, or adequate lavatory facilities. A California real estate broker named Kate Hanni was one of the victims and her energy and determination re-ignited the passenger's rights movement.

Even though Hanni's proposed Passenger's Bill of Rights is practically unenforceable, she became a media darling. She was, after all, glib and attractive and able to talk in sound bites. She had the added benefits of crusading for a populist cause (who doesn't hate how airlines treat us?) and being met by furious opposition from the big carriers, who won't accept any meaningful form of customer-service accountability.

Hanni's bill has gone nowhere—and it stands little chance of passage in 2009, when Congressional attention will be diverted to matters of economic survival. And, unfortunately, Hanni has been a victim of mission creep. She's now a frequent television presence, babbling about a wide variety of travel issues where she is clearly out of her depth. That's made it easier for the airlines and its media mouthpieces to marginalize her.

Nevertheless, Hanni's crusade hasn't been for naught. Just this month, the Air Travel Consumer Report compiled by the Department of Transportation began listing specific flights that subject passengers to long tarmac delays. And the D.O.T. has even proposed airlines codify their treatment of delayed passengers in their contracts of carriage. That extraordinary bureaucratic step would allow unhappy and mistreated fliers to sue airlines in state courts. The 1978 law that deregulated air transportation currently requires travelers to sue airlines in federal court, an impossibly high bar for most individuals.

The airlines are terrified by the D.O.T. proposal and vehemently oppose its adoption. And they have an unlikely ally in the fight: Hanni herself, who doesn't seem to understand that shifting the battle for passenger redress to state courts would be a gigantic victory for beleaguered fliers.

The Fine Print…
When most airlines adopted new fees for checked bags earlier this year, it raised an obvious question: Are airport baggage scales accurate? The results so far have been mixed. Weights-and-measures regulators in several cities have tested the scales and found that anywhere between 4 and 20 percent were wrong. None were egregiously off-the-mark, however, and a few in Phoenix were inaccurate in the traveler's favor.

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