Rob Huddleston's Blog - Travel

13,375 miles

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:40:00 -0600

This month has been absolutely insane. I've been on the road more than I've been home, and I've hardly had any time off. Yikes! Given that I haven't been a good blogger lately, I thought I'd share a few things I've picked up this month about airlines.

The travel began on Oct. 3, when I flew down to LA to attend the Community Summit before MAX. Most folks who know me likely know that I run an Adobe User Group and that I'm an Adobe Community Expert. I get a lot of folks asking why I invest a lot of time and money into those two things when I'm not getting paid, and I can sum it up in one word: community. Through the User Group and Community Expert programs, I've had the opportunity to meet and become friends with an amazing group of people around the nation.

A few years ago, Adobe began a tradition of holding a Community Summit, where all of the User Group Managers and Community Experts could get together, learn new things, and more important (at least to me) socialize and network. This year, the decision was made to hold the Summit on the day before MAX. While I was quite disappointed when I found out that I would not get to attend MAX itself (especially when I learned that missing MAX meant missing Mark Hamill), I decided early on that I would fly down to LA for the Summit.

As I almost always do when I fly to LA, I took Southwest. While I may joke that they are "Greyhound with wings", they really do what they do well. I'm discovering that they manage to provide more in their "no-frills" approach to travel than many of their competitors do with the "frills". So I am and will likely remain a big fan of Southwest.

The reason I couldn't attend MAX was that I had accepted a teaching assignment in Fort Lauderdale, beginning Monday morning - the day after the Summit. So I made arrangements to fly from LA to Fort Lauderdale. I had heard people raving about AirTran, and since they met my two main requirements, cheap and at the time I needed, I decided to go with them. And I regretted it.

First off: I'm glad that some airlines are waking up that it's the 21st century and installing WiFi on their planes. But you know what? On a 4 or 5 hour flight, WiFi doesn't do me a lick of good without power. To me, offering WiFi on a flight without installing power jacks at the seats is like eating pizza without being able to drink Coke. I'm supposed to be excited that I can pay to surf the Internet and drain my battery even faster? Really?

And second: you want to know something that Southwest does right? Comfort. Maybe it's a Boeing thing: Southwest's fleet is made up entirely of 737s, while my AirTran flight was an Airbus A320. But whatever the reason, the seat wasn't comfortable at all. And I was in First Class to boot!

To be fair, they did have one thing I liked - satellite radio at the seat. It's nice to have a ton of channels, instead of the 5 or 6 that "real" airlines offer.

When the time came to return home, I thought I had booked a flight on United to come home. But it turns out that I didn't, thanks to "code-share", which is airline speak for "screw customers over." Because you see, there is one airline that I already know I hate, so much so that when I search for fares, I immediately ignore theirs: US Airways. So imagine my surprise when I go to check in and discover that the flight I had booked via United.com, the flight I had paid United for, was in fact a US Airways flight. Screw you, United.

(And on a side note: when I tried to check in on United.com, I got a message that said, "Your flight is being handled by another carrier, and you need to check in on their site." That was it. Notice what's missing there? Really, United? It's that damn hard to tell me which airline I need to check in on? Maybe even provide a link? So again, screw you, United.)

The flight home was fine, even if I was flying on the World's Worst Airline, and even if I was still feeling slighted by having been screwed over by the winner of the World's Worst Customer Service Award, 50 years and counting... The upside was that I flew through Philadelphia, which to the best of my knowledge I had never been to before.

I got home from my LA-Ft. Lauderdale trip on Thursday. I spent Friday with the kids, and then Kelley and I got up at stupid o'clock to drive to San Francisco and catch our flight to Seattle. Why SF, you ask? Well, because we had been talking about a trip for a long time, and then found out that Virgin America had $49 each way fares to Seattle. So that settled it. The only catch is that we had to fly out of SFO.

Virgin America is, of course, the domestic off-shoot of Virgin Atlantic. They only fly to a few cities here in the US, all of them along one of the coasts. So I bet that I lot of people haven't flown them. But if you get the chance, do it. They rock. They really make flying an "experience" again.

What's so cool? Well, for starters, the plane itself. The interior lights are pink and purple. Seriously. Boarding a VA flight is like boarding some sort of space ship. Second, in SFO, they had a special boarding process: of course they started with First Class and handicapped folks, but then, rather than boarding back-to-front, they said that anyone who was travelling light - anyone whose only carry-on was a backpack or purse or something similar that could fit under the seat - could board. Then, they had the people with the rollers. So that was cool. (Well, I thought it was cool because we got to board early, but still...)

Every seat has one of those little TV screens, and you can watch live satellite TV, listen to a wide variety of music, and even play games. All for free. (They do have pay-per-view movies as well.) You can also watch a map of your flight. And it's all controlled from a remote in the armrest that actually comes out, so you don't have to contort yourself around to use it.

They offer WiFi, which I assume you have to pay for. But guess what? They also have power. Real, normal power jacks, as well as USB jacks. At every seat. Kel and I were able to spend the entire flight watching movies on her laptop, without having to worry about the battery.

I actually think that Virgin America rocks so much that, once they begin service to Ft. Lauderdale next month, I'm going to seriously consider taking the extra time to get to SF just so I can fly with them. I know that that seems silly, but time on a flight or train tends to be my most productive time. While I appreciate and use the 2 hours I can get on battery, being able to write for the entirety of a 5 hour cross-country flight would be awesome.

After our return from Seattle (we also went up to Olympic National Park, Victoria and Vancouver, and loved it), I got to be home for a whopping 3 days. Then began my Two Weeks From Hell (which isn't even over yet...)

My hellish schedule was entirely my fault. Let me explain. I had agreed to do a class in Ft. Lauderdale on the Wednesday - Friday of that week; shortly thereafter, agreed to the class I'm currently teaching in SF the following week (today through Wednesday). A bit later, I heard from both of those training centers that the classes had low attendance and would be unlikely to run. So when I was offered a class on the Monday and Tuesday of last week, and the Thursday of this week, I took them, assuming that those would be the only three days I would work in that two-week span.

In addition, I had applied for and been accepted as a speaker at BFlex and BFusion, a conference sponsored by the University of Indiana and hosted at their campus in Bloomington, IN. The conference was Saturday and Sunday. Things were looking OK: I would teach Monday and Tuesday, fly to Indianapolis on Friday, do the conference, come home Monday, and teach Thursday. Not a bad two weeks.

But then, within the span of about two days, I heard from both of those other training centers. Despite the low enrollments (2 students each, as it turned out), both centers had decided to run the classes. So now, I would be teaching in Sacramento on Monday and Tuesday. Somehow I would have to get from Sacramento to Ft. Lauderdale Tuesday night to teach starting Wednesday morning. Then Friday, I would fly to Indianapolis and drive to Bloomington (about an hour south), only to drive back to Indy Sunday night to fly to San Francisco and teach Monday - Wednesday. I'd then come home Wednesday night, and teach in Sac again Thursday. In essence, 11 straight days of work, in 4 cities on opposite sides of the country. Sound exhausting? Yeah.

The most efficient way to fly from Sacramento - Ft. Lauderdale - Indianapolis - San Francisco, I discovered, was to book a series of one-way tickets. And thus began my little Odyssey: six flights in as many days, on three different airlines.

I began by getting from Sacramento to Ft. Lauderdale Tuesday night. This time, I picked another airline I had heard nice things about: JetBlue. Unfortunately, all you need to do is go reread that paragraphs above about AirTran, and replace references to AirTran with JetBlue. The only difference? JetBlue didn't have the satellite radio, but they do have satellite TV in the seat back in front of you.

I flew from Sacramento to Long Beach, the world's strangest airport. No jet bridges - you board the planes via ramps - and the airport isn't even a single building. I actually had to walk outside to get from one set of gates to the next, and all of those gates are housed in what really look like temporary buildings.

At about 9:30 at night, my flight left for Ft. Lauderdale, due to arrive at 5:30 AM. Yup - I'd be flying all night. If you haven't done that before, let me assure you that it is exactly has horrible as it sounds.

My Ft. Lauderdale to Indiapolis flight was on Delta, so that of course meant that I had to change planes in Atlanta. I seriously wonder if it's even legal to fly Delta without a stop in Atlanta. This was a nice enough flight - it was a 757, and they let me choose an exit row seat when I checked in, and didn't charge me for it. (I assume that that was a mistake, and that whomever was responsible for missing this chance to milk customers out of more money has been fired.) Once I arrived in Atlanta, I headed to my gate, thinking I had 2 hours to kill, but then I noticed that there was another flight leaving for Indy in only 20 minutes. Figuring there wasn't any harm in asking, I went to that gate, and got right on board the flight. That ended up meaning that I was checking into my hotel in Bloomington at about the time I had originally been scheduled to arrive in Indy.

My homeward bound flight was on United. Yeah, I know - why do I do that to myself? Well, in this case there wasn't a choice. It turns out that for some stupid reason, you can get a late-evening flight (due to the time the conference ended and the time needed to drive to Indy, I wasn't able to get a flight that left before 8pm) from Indianapolis to Sacramento on a Sunday night, but you can't fly to San Francisco. However, you have to be willing to fly United to do it. I know, it doesn't make sense, but in this case, I didn't have a choice.

There was a bright spot: when I bought the seats, I was given the opportunity to upgrade to First Class for only $50, and knowing how tired I'd be by then, I took it. When I went to check in this time, I was of course surprised that I wasn't being told to go to some other airline. Just as you must always go through Atlanta if you're on Delta, flying from anywhere to anywhere in the East on United means a stop in Chicago. Out flight was fast, and actually arrived about 20 minutes early, which was awesome since I knew that I only had 20 minutes scheduled between my flights, but of course it's against corporate policy at United to do anything nice for customers, so they made us sit on the tarmac. Not for 20 minutes, mind you, but 30. I sprinted off the plane, only to discover that I would need to wait 10 minutes to catch the shuttle to the other concourse. Chicago, it seems, figures that even if the airport is insanely busy (as it was that night), they only need a single 14 passenger van to serve as the shuttle between concourses. Ugh. But in the end, I made my flight, all went well, and I got home.

I got home, that is, at 12:15 AM, only to drop immediately into bed since I needed to wake up at 4 to make my train to SF, since the stupid airlines couldn't get me directly to San Francisco. Grrr...

So anyway, here's my breakdown. I've done a total of 13 legs of flights this month, on 7 different airlines. According to WebFlyer.com's mileage calculator, I flew for 13,375 miles. (The really bad thing about flying all those different airlines is that those miles are scattered across 7 different frequent flyer programs.)

My rankings of the airlines:

Virgin America. They freaking rock. Five stars out of five.
Southwest. They do what they do well. Three and a half stars out of five.
Delta. For a "traditional" airline, they still seem to get you where you need to go, so long as you need to go through Atlanta. They do nickel-and-dime for most things, but again, I like the exit-row-without-a-charge thing. Three stars out of five.
JetBlue and AirTran. These two are all but indistinguishable. They're trying to market themselves as discount carriers like Southwest, but then they also want to be taken seriously. The resulting schizophrenia doesn't work. Two stars out of five.
United. Proof that companies can survive, and by all appearances thrive, purely on momentum. Have you seen United Breaks Guitars? Pretty much sums it up. (Here's the story behind it.) It would be nice, by the way, if United employed even a single web designer who actually knew what he or she was doing. Oh, and I forgot to mention something above: in First Class, they have the life preservers between the seats, which results in a great big box under the seats. This means that there isn't actually the normal amount of room under the seats for your carry-on. That's right: you pay extra for less room. Nice. One star out of five.
US Airways. There's really nothing at all I can say about them that's even vaguely polite. So I won't. Zero stars out of five.

In closing, let me just say that I can't wait until I get home from work on Thursday and can relax, at long last.

Unexpected day in Milwaukee

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:35:00 -0600

I'm speaking at the Creative Transitions conference at the end of the week in Milwaukee, so when an offer came through to teach a class for the first part of the week, I thought it'd be great: I could spend the entire week here, teaching the first half and conferencing the second.

Well, I'm not going to get into the details here, but let's just say that the scheduling of the class was FUBAR (although not by me). So it turned out that I have two days to kill in Milwaukee.

Downtown is very cool. There are a lot of cool buildings. The first touristy thing I saw was this statue of Gertie the Duck. It seems that during World War II, the city was about to tear down a bridge and found this duck and its babies under it. They saved the ducks, and the story spread around, somehow inspiring the troops overseas.

I continued on down to the lakefront, where I shot a few pictures of the Milwaukee Art Museum, named Time's Building of the Year in 2001. Most days, they actually open the panels on the roof, making it look like a bird taking off. Unfortunately, they were doing some sort of maintenance, so I didn't get to see it open. Still, very cool building.

Nearby was the Milwaukee War Memorial with a cool statue of Abraham Lincoln.

Later in the afternoon, I went to Miller Park to see the Brewers take on the Nationals. This makes my third MLB game this year, in the third city and third ballpark. Miller Park is nice (although Pac Bell is still nicer), but I had a great seat - right down the third base line.

The game was good: the Brewers won, and it was nice to be in a ballpark that was actually full of fans, unlike in Tampa and Miami. But the best part was finally getting to see, live, the famous sausage race.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do tomorrow.

My flight path

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:15:00 -0600

As promised, here's the picture of the path my plane took to get from Chicago to Sacramento:

My flight home from TODCon

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:20:00 -0600

I ended up having a bit of an interesting flight home yesterday. I got to the airport about 2 hours early, because while I had already upgraded to Economy Plus (United's "pay to be comfortable" program), the online system would not let me select an exit row. So I waited in line forever, and finally got up to the desk where a woman confirmed me for 10C on the flight to Chicago and 12C on the flight home. Remember that second seat number for a bit.

As I headed towards the gate, I happened to glance over at another gate and see that a Chicago flight that was supposed to have already left was delayed. Uh, oh. When I got to my gate, sure enough: delayed. I looked around, and every Chicago flight was delayed. Someone eventually came on and said that there had been tornadoes near O'Hare, and that the airport had been completely closed for over an hour.

At that point, I got on the phone to my dad (a former United customer service rep) to have him start searching for alternatives. There was a flight leaving at 6:30 (mine was supposed to go at 4) to Denver, from which I could connect to Sacramento and actually only arrive about ten minutes late. So when one of the other gate agents was freed up, I went over and asked if she had seats on that flight, which she did. So she was very nice and confirmed a seat for me for each leg - she said they were the last seats on each plane - while still keeping me on my original flight. And that was a good thing, because the weather cleared in Chicago and while the earlier flights were still delayed, mine left pretty much on time.

When we arrived at O'Hare, it was pandemonium. I don't know how anyone could work there without going insane. I had about 2 hours to kill, though, so I grabbed a sandwich and then got lucky in that I found a place where I could sit down near an outlet and recharge my laptop.

When it got time to go to my gate, I wondered over there. O'Hare has these flat-screen TVs at each gate that show all of the details about the flight. The first thing I noticed was that my flight was less than half full, so that pretty much guaranteed that I'd have a row to myself. Cool. But then it showed the seating layout of the plane, and quite clearly indicated that Economy Plus ended at row 11. Remember what row the ticket agent at Orlando had put me in? Yup - 12. So I went up to the gate agent to complain, and she said that while row 12 was technically not in Economy Plus, it was an exit row and would have the leg room. OK, fine. I could assume that she had had a pretty bad day, and I decided not to argue ... until I got on the plane and discovered that the exit rows were 10 and 11, and that not only was row 12 the first row of steerage ... I mean, of regular economy, but it was the row behind the exit row, and had the normal amount of leg room, which of course is none at all. So I went up to the flight attendant and explained the situation. He went to check with the gate agent, and they moved me up to row 10. I was lucky since the plane was empty (I did have the row to myself, and in fact I'm pretty sure that the only folks who didn't were people traveling together), but if it had been full and I had had to sit in a regular row - after having paid for the leg room, well to say I would have been mad would be an understatement.

We took off a few minutes late, but then the fun began again. Almost as soon as we were in the air, the pilot came on the speakers and explained that there was a nasty storm to the west, so we were going around it, meaning that we would fly from Chicago to Sacramento by passing over St. Louis, and it would add about an hour to the flight time. An hour or so later, he announced that we would have to go further south - in fact, we ended up passing near Dallas before being able to turn west. So while we pretty much left on time, we arrived close to 2 hours late. They even showed two movies (neither of which I watched) because the flight was so long. Of course, the longer flight did not translate into more food for us, but fortunately I had brought my own on board.

There's a cool website called FBOWeb.com where you can get a real-time tracking of a flight, and it shows clearly how far out of the way we had to go. I'm writing this right now from a training center that (annoyingly) does not allow FTP access, so while I have a screen shot of the route, I won't be able to post it until I get home, but it's amazing.

So I finally got home at about 1:30, at long last ending my long month and a half of travel. I had a great time, met lots of awesome people, and got to end it by going to my favorite conference, hang out with friends and meet some new ones. But I am definitely not looking at doing that much travel again in the near future.