My understanding is that if you book on codeshared flights A and B and if flight A is delayed or canceled so that you miss flight B, you will not be penalized for missing flight B. On the other hand, if you book on competing airlines for A and B, the airline for flight B will charge you a rebooking fee if you miss that flight. To me, this is the big advantage of codesharing arrangements -- more itineraries are available without risking a financial penalty for missed connections.

I'm curious -- have you known an airline selling an interline ticket to not charge a rebooking fee if you miss a connection?

Unfortunately, while Kevin's misconception is common (and at times encouraged by airlines), the fine print in airlines' conditions of carriage invariably specifies that airlines never guarantee connections regardless of whether the flights are operated by, or labeled with a codeshare flight number of, the same or different airlines.

If you miss a connection for any reason, the airline is legally entitled to charge you any penalty or fee applicable under its tariff for changing to a different onward flight.

That said, it's equally true that airlines often waive these change fees or penalties, also regardless of whether the onward flight is operated by, or or labeled with a codeshare flight number of, the same or a different airline.

To answer Kevin's specific questions: Airlines sometimes charge rebooking fees for missed online connections, and routinely rebook missed interline connections (and, in many cases, endorse tickets to other airlines if that's necessary) without charge.

The decisive factors in whether the airlines will charge you for rebooking your onward flight(s) if you miss a connection are much less likely to be whether you were booked on flights labeled with the same airline's flight numbers than any of the following:

The Macmillan publishing conglomerate demanded that Amazon raise the retail prices for Kindle Editions of e-books licensed from, and originally published in hardcopy by, Mcmillan's multitudinous imprints, and allow Macmillan to dictate both the retail price and the division of revenues between Amazon and Macmillan (a small fraction of which is sometimes, although not always, passed on by Macmillan to the authors of the e-books).

Amazon responded that it would sell e-books licensed from Macmillan at a markup or loss-leader markdown of its (Amazon's) choosing, or not at all. When negotiations broke down, Amazon temporarily stopped selling any Macmillan publications in electronic or hardcopy formats, leaving the listings on Amazon.com but removing the "buy" buttons.

Since then Amazon has said that, "ultimately... we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms", but as of now that doesn't seem to have happened -- the "buy" buttons are still missing from Macmillan titles on Amazon.com.

Rupert Murdock, owner of HarperCollins parent News Corp., joined the fray today during a conference call with investment analysts: "We don't like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99."

So what? Left in the dirt, as often happens when behemoths battle in the spotlight, have been the interests of the little people on the margins: individual readers and writers, who too often have been forced to relate to each other through, and on terms set by, those centralized publishing and distribution intermediaries.

But this dispute does matter, a great deal, to both readers and writers, who have a common interest opposed to those of Macmillan, Murdock, and other print publishers. Here's how:

And all this was deliberate.

What was going on? And what could possibly have justified the hit to both current and future revenues (JetBlue wouldn't say how much they expected it to cost) from these disruptions?

JetBlue was switching the hosting of its reservation and e-ticket databases from one Computerized Reservation System (CRS) to another, from Navitaire, to Sabre.

The transition seems to have gone as well as might have been expected.

But the effects on travellers won't be over for months, and there are a couple of important lessons about how the airline business works:

If you bought tickets before the transition for flights in the future, check your reservations as soon as it's convenient -- while there is time to fix any problems before you show up for your flight -- to make sure that everything in your PNR (flight arrival and departure airports, dates, times, flight numbers, names, Secure Flight data, frequent flyer numbers, reservation status, record locators (there will probably a new one in Sabre along with the original one from Navitaire), ticket numbers, special meals, seat assignments, special meals, other special services, etc. -- was properly migrated.

If you have to deal with JetBlue in the next few months, either on the phone or at the airport, expect it to take extra time, and double-check your reservations, tickets, boarding passes, and baggage claim checks before you leave the counter. Mistakes will be made.

I've been through a few CRS conversions, and managed one, on a dramatically smaller scale (although still mission-critical for that business) at a travel agency. It's a painful process, not so much because of difficulty in converting Passenger Name Records (PNR's) from one system to another, but because of the need for workers to switch from one set of command formats and procedures to another without interruption. Unless the staff are already using multiple CRS's on a daily basis (not too uncommon at the most sophisticated travel agencies, but rare at an airline), it's likely to take at least a few weeks of practice for them to get mostly back up to to speed.

Typically, reservations staff will have been through several full days of training in advance, and for the first week or two they'll have extra Sabre support staff and trainers on site or on call. They'll learn the basic commands they use all the time in a matter of days. But some command formats are needed only rarely, and less common tasks will go slowly for many months to come.

If it's going to cause all these problems, why would an airline bother?

Differences in mere database hosting and transaction processing functionality wouldn't be reason enough to change. Real-time, 24/7, large-scale, mission-critical, globally connected distributed hosting and processing isn't easy, but the major CRS's all offer roughly comparable capabilities.

There are some differences in connectivity: A CRS serves not merely as an airlines' outsourced host for an internal data, but as its connection to other airlines and travel agencies, either directly or through the CRS's "backbone" connections to the other major CRS's. By migrating to one of the big four CRS's, an airline connects itself to a global network of networks that includes hundreds of large and small airlines (basically all airlines except a few "low-fare" airlines that run their own isolated reservation systems) and a hundred thousand or more travel agency points of sale around the world. That connectivity provides bidirectional messaging, flight schedule and seat availability information, payment processing and ticketing, and support for interline reservations, ticketing, check-in, and baggage checking.

A few years ago, connectivity would have been the main reason for an airline to move to one of the big four CRS's. But XML messaging standards adopted by the Open Travel Alliance provide an increasingly viable (although still limited) alternative to the traditional AIRIMP protocol for messaging between airlines, CRS's, and travel agencies.

At this point, the payoff for an airline like JetBlue from migrating its reservations to Sabre is likely to come from the ability to deploy more of Sabre's other integrated software products for pricing, "yield management" (real-time decision-making on the availability of seat confirmations, and allocation of availability between booking classes), flight and equipment and crew scheduling (if you think the "travelling salesman problem" is hard, imagine the problem of thousands of simultaneously travelling pilots and flight atttendants!), and so forth.

CRS's compete vigorously on the (precisely measurable) performance of all of these optimization software packages, most of which only work, or work best, in conjunction with their own hosting systems. A switch to a new yield management package that achieves a sustainable 1% increase in average revenue per available seat-mile will recoup the cost of a two-day transitional shut-down in less than a year. (If this leads you to suspect that CRS's are at the pinnacle of applied operations research, you're right.)

More efficient airline operations are, of course, in the interests of travellers as much as of the airlines. But there's an unfortunate (for travellers) corollary to the role of CRS's in the air travel industry: They are paid by, and optimized for, airlines. Not travellers, and not (despite ongoing debate) travel agencies. And the only way to access these systems is through toolsets and query languages provided by those CRS's themselves, and optimized to serve the interests of their paying customers, the airlines. Their goal, on which they compete, is to ensure that each traveller pays as much as they are willing to pay, and no less.

That means that anyone -- an online travel agency, an offline travel agent, a "search" or "metasearch" 'bot, or an individual traveller -- trying to use the tools they provide to enable travellers to pay as little as possible is trying to use them against the best, and very skillful, competitive efforts of their designers and maintainers to achieve exactly the opposite result.

It's in that sense of trying to use software tools against their designers' intent that those travel agents who work as agents of travellers, rather than as agents of suppliers of travel services, necessarily have a "hacker-like" attitude toward the CRS's they use, and are constantly looking for undocumented "features", exploitable back-doors, and the like.

I've often said that asking the airline how much they want you to pay for a ticket is like asking the IRS how much tax they want you pay. They'll give you an answer, but it's unlikely to be the one that's in your best interest. The same, unfortunately, goes for asking a CRS.

[Follow-up: Tnooz reports, "Navitaire admits that Sabre has one advantage in that Sabre’s revenue management system supports O & D (Origin & Destination) forecasting and Navitaire’s SkyPrice revenue-management system does not. JetBlue had been using a revenue-management system from a third party, which does not support O & D, and presumably will be switching to Sabre’s."]

Among the more significant recent commentaries on the settlement other than the court filings is a piece by Larry Lessig in the current issue of The New Republic. I posted a reply to Lessig in a comment on James Grimmelmann's blog, which was noted in today's Chronicle of Higher Education. Since it gets to the heart of some of the misunderstandings about the issue, it seems worth reposting here:

We've got a winner, commenter "Ben", who predicted 31 December 2009, midway between the dates of release of two contenders for the title of first Kindle ripping app: unswindle was released on 17 December 2009 (and reported in The Register on 23 December 2009), and Kindle PC Converter for Windows was announced in a comment to my original blog post on 16 January 2010.

"unswindle" actually decrypts the Kindle file, making it vulnerable to any changes in the Kindle encryption system. And few naive users will use a set of python scripts if they aren't distributed with a one-click installer or clear step-by-step cookbook instructions. But it's free, and at least for now, it apparently works.

The commercial "Kindle PC Converter" is, to me, more significant if less of a technical accomplishment. It's a Windows app with a one-click installer and a GUI that anyone can use. And it doesn't even try to decrypt the Kindle file: it lets the Kindle for PC app decrypt the file and display it on screen, and captures the pages as displayed on the screen. Amazon could change the Kindle GUI to force the developers of the Kindle PC Converter to change their image capture system, but that's easy compared to cracking a new or modified encryption scheme. There's no way to build an app that will display anything on screen without exposing that display to capture into an image file or PDF.

The developers of the Kindle PC Converter have released a Google Books Download app for Windows that applies the same approach to Google Books: it "reads" the book on Google's Web site in a browser, and captures it to a PDF.

Either the Google Books or Kindle ripping apps will be useful for those who want to read these books offline and on Linux, Symbian, or other devices.

If the proposed Google Books settlement is approved, they will also come in handy not just for those who want to "share" their Google Books purchases with friends or over file-sharing networks, but for would-be readers of Google Books in other countries. And it exposes the complete bankruptcy of the claim (and the technical ignorance of those who adhere to it), reiterated by Paul Aiken of the Authors Guild during the panel I was part of in New York on Wednesday, that Google Books downloads will only be available to authorized purchasers in the USA.

The National Writers Union helped organize this event for writers and another on the same topic Friday in Berkeley because we think that the proposed Google Book settlement is a bad deal for working writers. Why is that? Let me count the ways:

(1) First, the money is grossly inadequate. Writers should realize that:

• As compensation for past infringement, there's been a lot of talk about “$60 a book”. But that's the total per book for all the "rightsholders”. For books in print, the entire amount will be paid to your publisher, and it will be up to your publisher to decide how much of it, if any, they think they are supposed to pass on to you. Authors may get only a small fraction of the $60, most of which is likely to go to print publishers. Authors' shares will only be determined later, after it's too late to opt out.
  
• There's no guarantee how much you might get for future uses of your work. But better deals than the settlement are already available. If you own the rights, you can submit your book directly to Google through its “Partner Program”, and get a larger share of the revenue for the same uses by Google than if you remain in the settlement. Or you can have Amazon offer a Kindle edition. Or you can sell PDF's on your own Web site, and keep 100% of the revenue.

(2) The second fundamental unfairness is the opt-out process in which authors who do nothing not only will get no money, but will irrevocably forfeit, through inaction, some rights and control over their work. Worse, anyone who does nothing will be bound by whatever the settlement is determined, after the fact, to mean. We can argue, as we have here, about what the settlement means. But the honest answer is that we don't know, and the people on this stage aren't the people who will decide. Inherent in remaining in the settlement is gambling on how the settlement will be interpreted, and allowing your future rights to your own work to be determined by people and procedures that have not yet been decided.

(3) Third, writers need to know that the proposed settlement would affect not just your relationship with Google, but your existing relationships with print publishers, overriding some of their terms, and subjecting them to interpretation and binding arbitration by players to be named later: the Book Rights Registry and the arbitrators. And this will happen, of course, in the context of the ongoing, across-the-board rights grab by those same publishers, who are making sweeping and bogus claims to exclusive ownership of e-book rights, and to owing only royalty percentages on e-book sales, even when authors never signed over e-book rights, or e-books are covered by a “subsidiary rights” clause with a much higher revenue share for the author. Assuming that print publishers make the same claims to e-book rights under the settlement that they have made in every other dispute with writers, what's the guarantee that authors will get their fair share of the per-book payouts, rather than having most or all of that money go to print publishers?

[Follow-up: Audio podcast of the complete New York event, thanks to Joly MacFie and the Internet Society. Audio podcast of the Berkeley event. Video of New York event and streaming audio of both events. News and blog coverage: Publishers Weekly, Booksprung, suricattus, Flogging Babel, Open Book Alliance. If you come across other coverage or commentary, please leave a comment with a link.]

The Google Book Settlement:
What's in it for writers?

Free public informational events with writers' groups and legal experts:

New York City: Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 2 p.m.
256 W. 38th St., 12th floor (NWU/UAW meeting space)

Berkeley, CA: Friday, January 22, 2010, 7 p.m.
2070 Allston Way, 1 block from Berkeley BART (UAW local 2865, U.C. academic student employees union)

Calling all writers! If you've ever written anything that might be in the collection of a major library -- including authored books, anthology collections, essays and articles -- you might be affected by the latest proposed settlement of a lawsuit on copyright infringement involving the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google.

The National Writers Union is organizing two public meetings, in New York and in the San Francisco Bay Area, to update local writers on the pros and cons of the revised settlement pending before the courts.

The first of these is in New York City (Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 2 p.m., at 256 W. 38th St., 12th floor) and is a collaborative effort of the NWU, the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), three writers groups that oppose the settlement.

In addition to representatives of the three writers' groups, the confirmed New York speakers list includes New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann (creator of ThePublicIndex.org , the most comprehensive Web site about the proposed settlement); attorney, author and literary agent Lynn Chu, who served as co-counsel for the NWU, ASJA, and 58 individual authors who objected to the first settlement proposal; and Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, the proponents of the settlement.

The Bay Area forum is in Berkeley, CA (Friday, January 22, 2010, 7 p.m., at 2070 Allston Way). Along with Edward Hasbrouck, co-chair of the Book Division of the NWU, confirmed speakers include U.C. Berkeley law school professor Pamela Samuelson, the initiator of a joint letter to the court by academic authors who object to the settlement, and attorney Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who represents authors who object to the proposed settlement on privacy grounds. [Some of you may have heard Pam Samuelson and me together earlier on All Things Considered and at more length on this program KQED's "Forum with Michael Krasny".]

"All writers need to be fully aware of the settlement's provisions in order to make informed decisions," said NWU President Larry Goldbetter. "Writers have a second chance, regardless of whether you received official notice or what you did about the original settlement proposal. This is especially important with the new 'opt-out' date set for January 28."

While some people may think they aren't affected because they don't write "books", the definition of "book" in the proposed settlement also includes offprints of articles, articles in irregular serials, monographs, chapbooks, ephemera, unpublished dissertations, etc. In my own case, Google classified a 20-page article, word processed and photocopied on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper, with a staple in the corner, as a "book".

Both meetings are open to the public. We especially welcome, lapsed, returning, and of course new and prospective NWU members. (The NWU is among my top recommended resources for both established and aspiring travel writers.)

Both programs will be recorded, and there are plans to make them available as audio podcasts as well as hold a conference call for at-large and other NWU members who still have questions. (A live webcast of the New York City event may be possible, but is not yet confirmed.)

We've assembled all-star panels of legal experts on both coasts to advise writers, but that took time and there's little time left to spread the word. Please forward this announcement , link to it from your blog, talk to fellow writers about, and put up notices in Bay Area and New York bookstores, cafes, campuses, and other writers' hangouts.

[Follow-up: Text of my opening comments and audio and video of both the New York and Berkeley events.]

We’ve been having a hard time keeping up with events over the last few weeks. Every time we think the keystone cops from the Department of Homeland Security can’t come up with anything dumber to do, they prove us wrong. At this point we’re not sure who is most deserving of derision: (1) the would-be terrorist who tried but failed to explode his underpants, and succeeded only in burning his balls, (2) the goons the TSA sent to intimidate bloggers who tried to tell travelers what to expect when they got to the airport, and find out who had “leaked” the TSA’s secrets, but who left their own notebook of “secret” notes about their investigation of this and other cases behind in a public place, or (3) the TSA agents who felt so ill at the smell of honey they found in checked luggage that they checked themselves into a hospital and shut down the airport. It’s a tough call. Leave your votes, or other nominations, in the comments.

What’s most striking about the government’s response to this unsuccessful bombing attempt is the complete lack of any rational relationship between the actions that have been taken and are being proposed, any analysis of which of these and similar tactics did or did not contribute to the success or failure of the Christmas Day attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253, and any likelihood that they would make future attempts at terrorism less likely to succeed.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, perhaps it’s time to survey the security, security theater, surveillance, and travel control techniques at issue:...

[continued at PapersPlease.org]

I've updated my FAQ about Airline Bankruptcies accordingly.

In a press release announcing the filing, headlined "Business Will Continue Unaffected", Mesa claimed that, "Customers can be assured that tickets will continue to be sold and honored, all terms and conditions governing tickets purchased remain the same, and our frequent flyer program remains intact."

That's a lie. False, obviously intended to give potential customers false reassurance, and clearly fraudulent. This press release is a "deceptive business practice", and if the U.S.Department of Transportation were doing its job in policing airline truth-in-advertising, it would be the subject of immediate and severe enforcement action and sanctions.

Later in the same press release, Mesa gives a more accurate statement of the facts:

To ensure the Company operates without interruption, Mesa is seeking authority from the Court to continue all of its normal operations. The requests include authority to continue to pay employee salary and benefits, fulfill code-share partner agreements, honor customer programs, and pay vendors and suppliers for post-petition goods and services. These requests are standard and the Company anticipates receiving approval in the next few days. [emphasis added]

There's a huge gulf between what "can be assured" or what a company "will" do, and what it is "seeking authority from the Court" to do, even if it "anticipates" approval (which may not be granted, and which if granted could be revoked at any time).

The bottom line is that now that the company has (voluntarily) placed itself under the protection and supervision of the court, whether it will be allowed to continue to operate is out of the hands of company management, and in the hands of the bankruptcy judge. Except to the extent that holders of paid tickets are considered creditors (as they should be, and as they should be represented in the creditors' committee), the judge is required to make that decision not on the basis of any desire for continuity of service, but solely on the basis of what will maximize how many pennies on the dollar the company may eventually return to its creditors.

Ironically, Mesa Air wasn't even in the running in the current betting with an Irish bookie taking bets on which airline will be the next to go bankrupt.

As complex as travel may seem today, it was far more inefficient previously.... Passengers have to purchase only one ticket, have to check in bags on only one airline and have to clear security only once. Before code-sharing, passengers needed to buy tickets on separate airlines, often needed to claim and recheck bags, and might have needed to clear security in multiple terminals.

That's an out-and-out lie, and the RAA must know it's a lie.

Decades before code sharing was ever imagined, passengers could, in fact, buy a single ticket for a journey on multiple airlines, and check their bags through. (Today, of course, thanks to a different airline fraud called a "direct" flight with a change of equipment, inbound passengers on what is labelled as a single flight with a single number may have to claim and recheck their bags as well as change planes and perhaps terminals at an international gateway.)

Not one of these services requires code sharing or special "alliances". They are all aspects of "interlining", in which "regional", national, and international airlines, including competitors, all had interline ticketing and baggage agreements in place from the earliest days of the airline industry. All airlines in the USA were regional in the early days, and interlining was essential to coast-to-coast travel. Just as it had been for the railroads, from whom the earliest airlines developed their interline protocols: Until Amtrak, no single railroad crossed the USA. Interlining is one of the oldest and most fundamental foundations of the airline industry, in the USA and worldwide.

The international standards that the airlines themselves established decades ago through IATA permit all IATA member airlines, not just code-share or alliance partners, to publish through fares and establish interline ticketing and baggage transfer agreements. Any IATA-appointed travel agency can sell tickets on any IATA airline, including tickets at a single through fare for a multi-airline journey. Different airlines that want to facilitate interline transfers can use close-together gates at the same terminals, so that passengers don't need to go through extra security checkpoints, regardless of which airlines' flight number(s) they use. And even airlines that are members of the major marketing alliances often give frequent flyer mileage credit for travel on non-alliance airlines, without code sharing. Interline ticketing agreements -- not code sharing -- are also what enable airlines to endorse their tickets to other airlines, even competitors if necessary, if their own flights are cancelled, delayed, or overbooked.

Code sharing is unnecessary for, indeed irrelevant to, any legitimate purpose or actual service. Code sharing doesn't enable an airline to fly to any more places. It just enables the airline to mislead travellers into thinking that they fly to places they don't, and mislead them as to which airline will actually be operating their flights. Major USA-based airlines, regional airlines, and foreign airlines all participate in codesharing, when they can get away with it, because they correctly believe that customers are more likely to buy tickets, and will pay more for those tickets, if they are for flights on Air Established than on Air Unknown or Air Foreign. I call that fraud.

Both code sharing and "change-of-equipment" flight labels also serve to "game" the Computerized Reservations Systems used by both offline and online travel agencies for fraudulent purposes, to travellers' detriment. All else except the labelling being equal, CRS's rank and display purportedly same-airline connections ahead of honestly described interline connections, and purportedly "through" change-of-equipment flights ahead of honestly described connections between multiple flights.

USA Today rightly editorializes that codesharing "presents a truth-in-advertising problem", an issue entirely ignored in the RAA rebuttal. In another recent press release the RAA claims that, "The identity of the airline is clearly displayed on every single ticket." But that's a lie, too. As I pointed out in the most recent USA Department of Transportation rulemaking on disclosure of code shares:

While itineraries usually indicate the operating airline, tickets and boarding passes -- the things travellers are required to have in hand while searching for a flight or gate, even if they don't have a printed itinerary -- do not. Indeed, IATA and airline rules provide no field on a ticket or boarding pass for the designation of the operating airline, and forbid the entry of other information in those fields. A travel agent who wants to indicate on a ticket which airline actually operates a code-share flight is forbidden from doing so by airline ticket issuance rules and procedures.

It's airline lies like today's from the RAA that demonstrate the need for Federal action to protect consumers against airline fraud, including fraudulent code sharing, as I've been saying for years.

[A shorter version of this article was published in USA Today 22 December 2009 as a letter to the editor.]

The Identity Project has previously obtained portions of this document in response to our requests under the Freedom of Information Act, and is currently appealing the TSA's failure to act on our pending request for the complete current version of the SOP.

The version released confirms that discriminatory practices are part of explicit TSA policy. In addiition, the TSA's statements this week strongly suggest that the TSA was trying to deceive us, and the public, either in its response to our previous FOIA request, or in its press statements this week, or in both.

There will be a Congressional hearing on this issue Wednesday, and we've already filed additional FOIA requests based on the Screening Management SOP.

I've posted an analysis of the TSA document and its significance on the Identity Project Web site, and will be posting updates there as we continue to pursue our FOIA requests and our complaint against the TSA's discriminatory procedures.

Any payouts to card users will be stayed while these appeals are pending.

I haven't yet received the full appeals, just the notices of appeal, but so far as I can tell, it doesn't look like any of the appeals will raise the objections I raised in the District Court.

As an objector in the court below, I'm entitled to participate in briefing and argument of any appeal, but I can't do so effectively without professional legal assistance, which I can't afford. If anyone wants to volunteer legal assistance to raise these issues related to expatriates and long-term travellers in the appeal, or to pay for legal assistance to do so, please get in touch.

The Amazing Race 15 ended tonight in Las Vegas, thanks to "promotional consideration" from casino complexes that paid CBS to showcase them on the show.

Why are Las Vegas casinos (and the hotels they operate "to give gamblers a place to rest and recover, so that they can gamble more", as I once heard a casino-hotel pricing executive describe them) so much in need of publicity?

All hotels are hurting, of course, as I discussed during the previous season of The Amazing Race last spring and summer. But Las Vegas is truly one of the bomb craters of the implosion of the lodging industry in the USA, along with other largely fly-in destinations Hawaii (the outer islands more than O'ahu) and Orlando. Because both business and leisure travellers in all budget categories have cut their budgets and are choosing cheaper accommodations than previously, shifting occupancy to lower-priced hotels, the crisis is most severe for owners of luxury hotels at the top of the scale.

Drive-in visitors from Southern California can make up for some of the numbers of people who can no longer afford to fly to Las Vegas, but they are spending less on all aspects of their visits, including crucially how much money per person day they are able (or able to borrow) and willing to lose in the slot machines and at the gambling tables.

Existing hotels in Las Vegas, especially those currently at the high end, are also threatened by new and even more over-the-top hotels, such as the more than 6,000 rooms and almost 1000 condos in the four hotels (the first of which open this week) in the US$8 billion CityCenter complex. Do the math: The developers really did spend more than US$1 million per room -- mostly other people's money, but when it was lent a couple of years ago, who was counting?

Las Vegas (again, followed by Hawaii and then Orlando) is the extreme case of all of this in the USA, as is Dubai (as we saw earlier in this season of the race) in the rest of the world.

Something has to give, and in the calculus of supply and demand, that "something" is the average daily rate (ADR) per room that hotel owners can get away with charging.

I was just in Orlando for the PhoCusWright conference of travel executives, as some of you may have seen from my Twitter messages. Attendance at the conference exceeded the organizers' expectations, but there were still so many empty rooms at the 5-star conference venue that walk-ins who hadn't booked ahead reported being offered rooms at half the "early-bird" conference rate.

Near the cheaper hotel where I was staying (I had made the mistake of hedging my bets by booking a couple of months ahead on Hotwire.com), the marquee of a Ramada Inn -- not a Motel 6, mind you -- on the strip just outside the entrance to Disney World was flashing its offer, "Walk-Ins ... $29". With deals like that, who needs Hotwire? Not only can you travel more cheaply, but you can travel more independently, since there's less reason to commit in advance to where you'll be each night in order to be sure of finding an affordable place to sleep. There hasn't been a better time since just after 11 September 2001 for unplanned travel.

And the good news for travellers is that's it's going to get worse for hotel owners (which means better for travellers) before it gets better for them and worse for us.

I was underwhelmed by the "innovations" presented at the PhoCusWright conference, few of which really addressed travellers' basic needs or most common trip types. The award for innovation went to Amadeus -- appropriately challenging those who write off "legacy" CRS/GDS companies who "were practicing cloud computing years before the term was invented" and "were engaged in e-commerce decades before the Internet" with "industrial strength" stable and reliable applications -- for a new travel planning tool, but not one that I think will make a difference for most travellers. Most leisure air travel in the USA is to visit friends and family, not hotels or resorts, but I have yet to see a travel planning service optimized for the "VFR" user case.

Perhaps the most telling admission came from Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi: "There's a lot of really basic [search] stuff that a lot of us aren't doing yet." But when I asked him about some of the features they could easily add to improve their search results -- weight flights from Oakland as $20 more expensive than those from San Francisco because it costs me more money and time to get there, weight flights that earn American AAdvantage Miles at 2 cents per mile of credit, weight flights that arrive at SFO after the last BART train by $40 for the greater cost of a taxi home, or other similar preferences I could define in my user profile -- his only reply was that travellers don't really know what we want, or what our priorities are. So, presumably, there's no reason for his travel company to invest in tools to even try to show us the choices according to our stated priorities.

Lame, but typical of the industry. A more honest answer would be that intermediaries like Expedia have chosen to work for suppliers of travel services, not for consumers. They prioritize the options they show us, and the preferences they program their systems to take into account, according to what they think will most effectively sell us the most profitable products and services for them. Our preferences aren't their priority at all.

The highlight of the conference was a pair of presentations on the economic prospects for the lodging industry by PhoCusWright hospitality industry analysts and their partners from the Cornell Hotel School. In March of this year, they reported on the outlook for hotel and resort owners as dismal but not desperate . By the time of last month's conference, they had backed away from the "'not desperate" assessment, although of course, "The desperation isn't for the consumer, but for asset owners", according to Bill Carroll of PhoCusWright and Cornell.

It takes 2-3 years from financing to completion of a major hotel, longer for some mega-projects. That means that there are still lots more hotel rooms in the construction pipeline, for which funding was committed shortly before the recession, to add to the current glut.

Gary Loveland, CEO of Harrah's, noted in his presentation at PhoCusWright that since the recession developers have walked away, gone bankrupt, and/or suspended construction on casino-hotel projects even when they were "a billion dollars pregnant" with sunk costs.

The Trump casinos and hotels in Atlantic City went bankrupt and were sold for about 20% of their previous valuation earlier this year, while completion of the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas (including filling the topped-out shell of a 60-story hotel tower) awaits new financing from whoever buys it at the pending bankruptcy auction. As of now, the high bidder for the Fontainebleau is offering about US$150 million for a project on which more than US$1.5 billion has been spent, or less than 10 cents on the dollar. And as Bill Carroll pointed out at PhoCusWright, "Someone who buys a property for 10 cents on the dollar can rent it for 20 cents on the dollar" and still make money -- driving down rates for competing hotels (and possibly driving them into bankruptcy too, in a vicious cycle).

On top of that, many people are selling their vacation houses or condos to cover the mortgages on their primary residences or simply their costs of living, or renting out vacation homes that they can't afford to use themselves. As consumers exhaust their savings, severance pay, or other assets, that will continue to increase the supply of vacation rentals.

The bottom line according to PhoCusWright is that overall occupancy of hotels and vacation rental accommodations in the USA will remain below 60% for at least 2 years, through 2011.

Room rates in the USA will continue to go down in the coming year, bottoming out in late 2010 but not returning to levels they were at in 2007, just before the crash, until 2013.

Elsewhere in the world, Carroll predicts that hotel rates in the BRIC countries may not decline as much. But especially in China these are already such great value compared to hotels in most of the rest of the world thta they will remain a bargain, and increases in rates in local currency in Brazil have been offset by the decline of the Brazilian Real (BRL) against the US dollar (USD).

I've previously listed some of my favorite accommodations booking Web sites for different parts of the world, and how they work . "These channels for unloading distressed inventory aren't as well developed in much of the rest of the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific region," Carroll says (and I concur). So, "Tour operators and aggregators are in the catbird seat" if they have contracts with hotels that give them access to discounted rates for their clients.

Many tour operators will make bookings for independent travelllers, even if you aren't on a tour. Many Asia-Pacific hotel discount Web sites are operated as offshoots of tour operators or agencies like this. But to get their rates, you have to prepay the tour operator, and there is really nothing you can do to force a hotel to honor the booking if you show up and the hotel claims never to have heard of you, or the tour operator, or claims that the operator hasn't paid them for your room or that the voucher you were given is invalid. On the other hand, as long as (1) occupancy is low, (2) there are competing hotels nearby that also have empty rooms, and (3) you are genuinely ready and able to go elsewhere if the price isn't right, walk-up prices at almost any hotel, anywhere in the world, are negotiable at check-in.

Pain for hotel owners can mean pleasure for travellers, but intermediaries can go either way. Online travel agencies first became profitable on the high markups they could charge on discounted hotel rooms after 11 September 2001. This year at PhoCusWright, I was greatly surprised to see to see hardly any of the bottom-feeder "distressed inventory" business models I expected to dominate the event. Instead, most participants wanted to ignore the present, and focus on the "inevitable" recovery to come.

Time will tell whether or not they've got their heads in the sand, but if I were a gambler, I'd be selling short hotel stock, not putting my money on the table in Vegas or investing for any travel industry recovery. The real bottom line is that the window of opportunity for affordable, spontaneous, independent travel without reservations is likely to last for several years -- plenty of time to plan for, and take, that big trip you've always wanted, if you commit yourself now to do it as soon as you can get organized.

Bon voyage!

Lessons in travel bureaucracy

This week in Franz Kafka's home town, the cast of The Amazing Race 15 faced some of their most difficult challenges yet. Harlem Globetrotter teammates Nathaniel and Herbert were defeated by a bizarre task involving an anagram of "Franz" composed of letters provided by voices on five of several hundred simultaneously ringing telephones filling a room at the Kafka museum, to be filled in along with a panoply of other irrelevant personal information on a form submitted for approval to a pair of silent and inscrutable "Supervisors". Unable to unscramble the anagram after several hours of guesswork, the Globetrotters gave up on the challenge, and took a four-hour penalty that eliminated them from the race.

In reality, travel isn't usually this Kafkaesque, though it sometimes seems that way. Unlike in Kafka's stories or in this episode of the race, even bureaucrats generally aren't trying to torment you with inscrutable forms or requirements. Their procedures have, in their own minds, a logic, and the key to understanding them is for you to see them from their point of view. The essential task of the traveller as amateur anthropologist, if you want to get things done with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle, is to grasp the perspective of the people you are dealing with, and their understanding of the meaning of their interaction with you and the roles they see themselves and you as playing, rather than to figure out the official "rules" that might (or might not) nominally govern the interaction.

There's also a lesson in the Globetrotters' decision to give up and take the penalty. Sometimes it's a rational choice for a traveller to give up on someplace you wanted to go or something you wanted to do or see, or to take a penalty of time or money rather than carrying on with what had seemed a better alternative but that has become intolerable or interminable. More often, however, if your approach to a travel task seems to have led you into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that should be your clue that there is probably an easier way to accomplish your goal.

Rather than continuing to beat your head against the wall, or giving up entirely, take a break. Ask for help from local people, language or gestures or pantomime permitting. Observe what other people are doing. Consider whether there is some completely different way to pursue your goal -- perhaps another day, after a mental and physical rest.

One corollary, of course, is that haste is a major contributor to frustration with bureaucratic delay. If you aren't in a hurry, it's not necessarily a problem to come back tomorrow when the paperwork will be complete or the proper official will be in the office.

There are places where people spend much of their time negotiating bureaucratic mazes, but they are rare. And even in the worst of such places, local people have, of necessity, learned the paths of least resistance. Unless you are trying to do something strongly counter to prevailing community values (or the values of any local counterculture from within which you might find assistance, if helping you wouldn't endanger your helpers), most people are usually happy to steer you, too, to those paths of least resistance. Often, doing it the locally normal and expected way is easier for them as well as for you than trying to do it your way.

Most of the time, you'll get better results if you start by telling people your goal, and at least listen to how they suggest that you try to accomplish it. Say what you want, and let them suggest how best to get there. If you ask specifically about the bus schedule, you can't blame your informant for not telling you that you'd be better off taking a train or hiring a car and driver. That requires a higher degree of trust in strangers, of course, but there's a very direct trade-off: the more willing you are to trust others to figure out routes and methods, the more efficiently you'll get things done -- and the more you will learn about local ways of doing things. You don't have to take their advice, but it's educational to hear what it is, even if you then insist, for your own reasons, on doing otherwise.

Rarely in The Amazing Race have we seen a team give up trying to complete a challenge, as the Globetrotters did this week. But even more rarely have we seen a team stop, take a break -- sit down, perhaps have a copy of tea, enjoy some music or light reading or a chat with a passer-by about something unrelated to the task at hand to clear their minds -- and ask themselves, "If it's so difficult to do it this way, is there a completely different and better way to approach this problem?"

In the case of the Kafka anagram, the Globetrotters filled out the entire long form to submit to the "Supervisors" with each of their random guesses. But there are only 120 permutations of the letters FRANZ. It took me only 10 or 15 minutes to write them all down on a piece of scrap paper. I know no Czech, but once I had written down all the letter sequences, it was obvious that only a a handful were even conceivably words in any European language.

If the racers had thought about it before throwing in the towel, they might have realized that systematically exhausting the possibilities would have taken them less time than they thought, and almost certainly less than the four-hour penalty. As it was, the Globetrotters had no chance to catch up after their penalty, leaving the three other remaining teams to race back to Las Vegas to the finish line and the million-dollar prize next week.

"Keeping Track of Travelers’ Personal Information"
(by JoAnn Merrigan, 25 November 2009

They interviewed me remotely from the CNN studios in Boston, where I'm visiting family for Thanksgiving after speaking at the Hostelling International convention. They used excerpts on the air, and posted an additional 20 minutes of video from the interview on their Web site. Together, they provide a good overview of the U.S. government's travel surveillance programs.

Among other things, we talked about my work with the Identity Project and the comments I recently filed with the FTC (on behalf of the Consumer Travel Alliance, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights) for the FTC's forthcoming roundtables on the privacy of consumer information.