United Airlines booking system to erase Continental this weekend

The public face of Continental Airlines will vanish for good this weekend when the carrier and United Airlines adopt a single passenger reservation system, a step that -- at least in the public eye -- will finally cement their 2010 merger.

The move to a unified platform is by far the most significant change customers will experience since the merger of United and Continental to form the world's largest airline, known as United Airlines and owned by United Continental Holdings Inc.

"This, from the customer perspective, is probably the biggest thing that they will see," Martin Hand, United's senior vice president of customer experience, said on Wednesday.

"This truly brings the two carriers together from the customer side," he said.

Hand said United Airlines has adopted the reservation platform of the former Continental Airlines and has spent months training about 15,000 employees -- including reservations agents -- on the software.

United has already moved millions of passenger records to the Continental platform and has notified its frequent flyers of the upcoming change.

"That will come to a culmination overnight Friday night to Saturday morning," Hand said.

Early Saturday morning, the Continental.com website will disappear in favor of the United branded site.

Hand said the company chose the Continental platform over United partly because it offered more flexibility to users making reservations on the site.

He declined to disclose the cost of migrating to the single platform.

United and Continental closed their $3.17 billion merger more than a year ago. Former Continental Chief Executive Jeff Smisek leads the combined carrier.

The new United Continental spent much of 2011 rebranding itself and combining some of its customer service functions to slowly erase the line separating the two airlines. The company won government approval last year to operate as a single carrier.

United Continental has painted most of the old Continental planes in the United livery and is finishing the rest.

Out of public view, however, United Continental faces the tall order of blending its separate unionized work forces and achieving joint labor contracts.

Migration to a single reservation system comes with risk, as US Airways Group learned in 2007 when it attempted to combine the reservation systems of the former America West Airlines and US Airways. The two airlines merged in 2005.

A glitch in their combined system caused the self-service kiosks to fail, forcing passengers to stand in extraordinarily long lines and check in with ticket agents. Thousands of travelers waited in the lines and about 500 travelers at the Charlotte, N.C., hub missed their flights.

Hand said United consulted US Airways, its partner in the global Star Alliance, about the pitfalls of moving to a single reservation system.

Delta Air Lines had a much smoother transition to a single reservation system following its 2008 merger with Northwest Airlines.

"Whenever you combine different technology there's risk," said Ray Neidl, an aerospace analyst at Maxim Group.

"In the case of United, they have done a lot of planning. But you never can tell," he said. "At the last minute, there's always likely to be some bugs that pop up."

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XL passengers invade my economy-class seat -- and airlines let them

When Elisabeth Haas took her window seat on an American Airlines flight from Orlando to Dallas earlier this year, she discovered a problem -- a very big problem.

"A morbidly obese seatmate encroached into my personal space," she says. "He required a seat-belt extender and that the armrest divider be raised to accommodate his girth during the entire flight, including takeoff and landing. He also had to walk down the aisle oriented sideways and moved quite slowly."

The problem of XL passengers on planes is hardly new, but their interactions with other passengers are creating a lot more friction lately. I know because over the American Thanksgiving holiday week, I reported about a man who says he had to stand on a flight between Anchorage and Philadelphia, and it became the talk of the town for about half a news cycle.

I heard from lots of passengers who said they, too, have tussled with oversized seatmates.

Haas, who was returning from a trip to see her dying grandmother in Florida, says she couldn't comfortably fit in her seat or stow her luggage under her seat because of the encroachment. She only had access to about one-third of her economy-class seat for the duration of the flight.

"Do you understand the horrific discomfort of feeling someone's massive, unrelenting, hot and sweaty flesh pressed into your body from shoulder to ankle?" she asks.

The American Airlines flight attendants were compassionate, and because it was a sold-out flight, they allowed her to sit in their jump seats. But when she wrote a polite letter suggesting that American Airlines change its rules to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, the best it could manage was to reply with a form letter.

"We are sorry for your discomfort on your recent flight with us to Dallas/Fort Worth," it wrote to her. "Our airport personnel must walk a fine line in order to satisfy the needs and rights of all of our customers. I am disappointed to hear that we were not more successful on this occasion, and I am genuinely sorry that the enjoyment of your flight was diminished as a result."

American Airlines didn't address any of her safety concerns, nor did it pledge to change its rules.

Airline policies on XL passengers are at best, amorphous. Only Southwest Airlines has a clearly defined and well-publicized policy -- it calls them "customers of size" -- but the other major airlines tend to dance around the issue. It's hard to find their policies online and they seem to be unevenly enforced.

When airlines do talk about their weighted customers, they do so as in gentle tones, as if at any moment, these big passengers could shatter into a thousand pieces because someone called them fat. (Come to think of it, isn't that how society deals with the problem of obesity?)

But the focus is on the wrong person. It isn't the morbidly obese who are in need of special protection, but the folks seated next to them. When the armrest is up, it can mean serious trouble for the other guy.

Norman Chance was the other guy on a recent flight between Anchorage and Chicago. Like Haas, he had a window seat in economy class, but found himself next to two "very large" people in the seats next to him.

"I had to sit sideways for the entire flight, in agony and pain," says Chance, who owns an aviation company in Indianapolis. "They both fell asleep and would not move despite my requests. I ended up injuring my back, which was only resolved after visits to a chiropractor."

He's angry that airlines can allow two XL passengers to fly in economy-class seats that are obviously too small, and he and Haas are upset that there isn't a law to prevent a situation like this from repeating itself.

"This type of incident happens far too often," he says.

And that's the thing. There are no rules about passengers having to fit into the economy-class seats. The closest the Federal Aviation Administration comes to addressing this issue is when it issues its guidance on passengers with disabilities, but it doesn't specifically classify a passenger's weight or size as a disability that is in need of protection. If it did, airlines would probably have to give every tall guy like me a first-class seat, which, now that I think about it, wouldn't be so bad.

But I think we'd all settle for a rule that says passengers are entitled to a minimum amount of legroom and personal space, whether they're on American Airlines or any other airline. The Transportation Department already has those requirements in place for animals that fly, but curiously, not for humans seated in economy class.

Such a rule would prevent a bulk of these XL passenger incidents from happening, and make flying a far more humane experience -- for all of us.

(Christopher Elliott is the author of "Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals" (Wiley). He's also the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and the co-founder of the Consumer Travel Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for travelers. Read more tips on his blog, elliott.org or e-mail him at chris@elliott.org. Christopher Elliott receives a great deal of reader mail, and though he answers them as quickly as possible, your story may not be published for several months because of a backlog of cases.)

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Do airlines give their best fares to the search engines?

Airfare monitor Airfarewatchdog (www.airfarewatchdog.com) recently posted a report showing that search sites promising to find the "lowest fares" often don't make good on this promise. The specific instance involved a search for a New York-Bermuda trip where Priceline found a fare that was $20 lower than the best deal Kayak found. A reader wanted to know what might be going on and what it means to consumers.

Basically, what happened here is that JetBlue had the lowest fare; Priceline's search included JetBlue, but Kayak's did not. It wasn't a case that JetBlue selectively withheld some fares from Kayak; instead, Kayak didn't (and doesn't) include JetBlue in its search at all.

This is by no means the only situation where a site's claim that it can "search once for all the fares" really doesn't work. For a variety of reasons, the big third-party search engines don't cover all the feasible options:

-- In some cases, this omission may be due to an argument over the fees between an airline and an individual search engine. For a while, for example, American was feuding with Orbitz over some fee issues.

-- In other cases, an airline actively doesn't want search engines to include its fares. The most visible case is Southwest, which runs ads highlighting that the only way to find its fares online is through its own website.

Other lines that the big search engines usually skip include Allegiant and Direct Air, as well as some smaller foreign lines. I'm not sure whether these omissions are due to fees or policies.

As far as I can tell, gaps in search engine coverage are a part of a larger and ongoing fight between airlines and third-party agencies over who "owns" you, the consumer. Certainly, both airlines and third-party agencies want to be your "go to" source for air tickets -- and, they hope, for associated hotel accommodations, rental cars, travel insurance, and anything else you buy as part of a trip. The airlines want to keep you because they want to be your first choice for air travel, plus they want to gain additional revenue from selling the rest of the travel you buy. Third-party agents, on the other hand, obviously want to get their hands on the same revenue streams.

The current fight isn't limited to airfare searches. Currently, American and Southwest are separately fighting with several sites, such as AwardWallet, MileWise, GoMiles and UsingMiles, which help you manage your frequent flyer mileage and accounts and help you decide whether to buy a ticket or use miles for a trip you're considering. The lines cite a number of flimsy excuses for their opposition to these sites, but the real reasons have to do with control. And in exercising control, the airlines fall back on a technicality that many frequent flyers don't even realize exists: You don't really own your miles; the airlines do. That's an absurd position, on the face of it -- after all, they keep pushing you to "buy" more miles, and, at least to me, "buy" implies ownership. That situation cries out for legal or regulatory relief, but don't hold your breath until you get any relief. Meanwhile, the airlines hold all the cards.

For you as a consumer, however, knowing the reason for something, even if that something is a gouge or a deception, doesn't really help overcome it. What you need to do is figure a way around an obstacle, and here the way around it is obvious: Never accept the claim that any one online agency will really search all feasible alternatives. Instead, you have to be a wary consumer:

-- You have to know which airlines the search sites omit. And if any of these lines is of interest to you, you have to check that line separately.

-- Even when a search engine includes all the airlines of interest, always check with that line's individual sites to verify that the search engine found the best deal.

Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Perkins' new book for small business and independent professionals, "Business Travel When It's Your Money," is now available through www.mybusinesstravel.com or www.amazon.com

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Airlines attempt to raise fares for 1st time since summer

SAMANTHA BOMKAMP AP Airlines Writer

12:41 p.m. CDT, October 19, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Holiday travelers may want to lock in airfares now, because they're going up.

At least two U.S. airlines are raising prices for the first time since late summer and others may follow.

Delta Air Lines Inc. raised one-way fares by $4 to $10 across most of their U.S. routes late Tuesday, according to Rick Seaney of Farecompare.com. Soon after, United Continental Holdings Inc. matched the increases. It's the first widespread fare increase attempt since early August and the 17th try this year.

The increase may not stick. Airlines often roll back fare increases if enough competitors don't match them. A recent attempt to raise prices in smaller cities met resistance, Seaney said.

Of the 16 previous attempts to increase prices this year, half of them failed. The eight that succeeded have brought average fares up by $58 to $70, said Citi analyst Will Randow.

The current fare hikes come as airlines begin reporting third-quarter financial results. While higher ticket prices annoy travelers, they send a positive signal to airline investors because it's a sign of strong demand.

Still, higher fares weren't enough to prevent another loss at American Airlines parent AMR Corp., which blamed it on high fuel costs. On Wednesday AMR reported it lost $162 million in the third quarter — its fourth straight losing quarter. Southwest Airlines Co. is set to report results Thursday morning.

Some travelers may avoid higher fares by taking advantage of fare sales. Many airlines recently matched a winter fare sale from Southwest that runs through Thursday. It excludes most peak travel days around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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Follow Samantha Bomkamp on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/samwilltravel

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Airlines abandon Northeast, N.Y. closes subways

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. airlines cancelled more than 10,000 flights due to Hurricane Irene by late Saturday, while New York and other eastern cities initiated sweeping storm-related shutdowns of rail and mass transit systems.

Tens of millions of air travellers, train passengers and subway and bus riders scrambled to adjust their routines, work commutes and vacations as transportation networks gradually scaled back operations.

Coordinated transportation-related closures or slowdowns, often seen during winter storms in the Northeast, were mostly announced on Friday to try to give travellers enough time to adjust and ensure they stay away from Irene's fury.

They were left to contemplate transportation service cuts lasting into Monday and possibly longer, depending on how hard Irene hits the Northeast on Sunday.

New York's subway system, which carries 7 million riders daily and operates the largest fleet in the world, had never closed due to weather.

"There is no mass transit available," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, advising New Yorkers in evacuation zones who had not yet left where they could board special buses headed for safer locations. "The airports are basically all closed."

He said it was unlikely that subway and other mass transit operations would be up and running by Monday morning's commute.

Airlines cancelled more than 10,000 flights from Friday through Monday, according to the online flight tracking service Flightaware.com.

The Northeast is the most congested area of U.S. air space and the three New York-area airports -- John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York and Newark airport in New Jersey -- bore the brunt of East Coast cancellations.

The three facilities handle about 6,000 flights on an average weekend day, and nearly 100 million domestic and international passengers annually. Disruptions in the region were felt across the country and overseas.

The New York-area airports closed at 5 p.m. BST for arrivals and the last departures occurred in the early evening. Those airports were effectively closed and service would not resume until post-storm conditions were assessed, officials said.

The virtually empty rain- and wind-swept tarmac at Reagan National in Washington handled sparse Saturday traffic, usually the lightest day of the week. The nation's capital was not expecting a head-on hit from the storm.

Posted schedules showed flights only heading west to Detroit, Milwaukee and other cities. Reagan National, Washington Dulles, and Baltimore-Washington airports all planned to stay open through the storm even though airlines were halting service.

Philadelphia International Airport closed until late Sunday afternoon at the earliest, a spokeswoman said. Airlines pulled out of there as well.

Airports have backup generators that are usually reserved for maintaining power at air traffic towers and for public safety. But expectations were that Washington airports would be back in operation quickly.

"If it goes through and is all over by late (Sunday) morning or early afternoon, things should get back on track," said Tara Hamilton, spokeswoman for Reagan National and Washington Dulles.

As at New York airports, airlines moved jetliners to safer areas like Chicago and other Midwest airports.

"We are not keeping any aircraft in Irene's path," said Andrea Huguely, a spokeswoman for American Airlines, a unit of AMR Corp.

Other carriers heavily affected include US Airways, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines.

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Airlines cancel more than 8,000 flights as Hurricane Irene hits land

NEW YORK (AP) — Travelers across the country are facing days of grief ahead as thousands of flights are being cancelled because of Hurricane Irene.

Airlines are scrapping more than 8,300 flights this weekend from North Carolina to Boston, grounding passengers as Irene sweeps up the East Coast. There were more than 3,600 cancellations on Saturday alone.

All New York City-area airports closed to arriving flights at noon on Saturday, when the city's public transportation system shut down. The biggest airlines, United Continental Holdings Inc. and Delta Air Lines Inc., canceled thousands of flights each. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport were both open as of noon, but most flights had been cancelled.

Airlines declined to say how many passengers would be affected by the hurricane, but the numbers will likely reach into the millions. That's because so many flights, both domestic and international, make connections through major East Coast hub airports. Even passengers not flying anywhere near the East coast could be delayed for days as airlines work to get planes and crews back into position.

Train and bus service is also extremely limited. Greyhound has suspended service between Richmond, Va. and Boston. Amtrak is reducing its Northeast schedule Saturday and cancelling all trains from Washington to Boston Sunday. It wasn't immediately clear how many passengers were affected by the cancellations.

Hurricane-force winds first arrived near Jacksonville, North Carolina, at dawn. A little more than an hour later, the storm's center passed near the southern tip of North Carolina's Outer Banks.

The last time the airlines were hit with a huge natural disaster was this winter, when they cancelled thousands of flights ahead of a pair of massive snowstorms. Both storms in December and February led to more than 10,000 cancellations over several days and left many stranded at airports.

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Samantha Bomkamp can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/samwilltravel

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Airlines warn of in-flight tears, orgasms

(CNNGo) -- Such is the evolution of in-flight entertainment that travelers can now fulfill their own needs on flights. One-flick-suits-all journeys are relics of the past.

But what exactly is that person watching next to you? And why are they getting so excited? And now why are they crying?

Orgasms and tears are on the menu for some airplane movie watchers, it seems -- but they arrive with warnings.

Qantas has taken in-flight entertainment to dizzying heights by including among its offerings a 50-minute French documentary "The Female Orgasm Explained," which comes inclusive of naked scenes and reveals the mysteries of female sexual pleasure, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

The documentary is part of the airline's "The Edge" channel, which gives new meaning to videos on demand.

"With The Edge, we source programs that are out of the ordinary across all genres," Qantas said in a statement.

"The Female Orgasm Explained" runs until November. It does come with a warning that the film is for mature audiences only.

For crying out loud

While Qantas is warning about sexually explicit material, Virgin Atlantic is giving warnings on a different topic: tears.

The Australian reports that Richard Branson's airline surveyed travelers and found that 55 percent had heightened emotions during flight --- funny, that.

What's more, 40 percent of men hid under their blankets to hide their tears. (What are Qantas travelers doing under that blanket?)

The stories most likely to jerk the tears of those surveyed by Virgin were "Toy Story 3," "Blind Side" and "Eat Pray Love." Oh, cherub, would you like a handkerchief?

The first two films to carry the new Virgin Atlantic tear warnings will be "Water for Elephants" and "Just Go With It." The warnings will flash on passengers' screens.

So it seems crying and female orgasms require warnings. Laughter remains without warnings --- maybe because passengers can do it above their blankets?

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How airlines handle the 'mishandled' luggage problem

Jaime Sigal's suitcase felt a little light when he picked it up from the conveyor belt in Sao Paolo, Brazil, so he gave the heavy-duty ballistic nylon bag a careful once-over.

Sure enough, the zipper appeared to have been forced open. Sigal, who works for an export management company in Miami, made a beeline for the LAN Airlines counter. Three items were missing from his luggage: a blazer, a leather jacket and boots. He'd paid a total of $1,700 for the items last year.

Every day, the same scenario repeats itself in airports everywhere. Luggage is lost or pilfered, and airlines do their best -- or not -- to find or replace it.

Last year, there were more than 2 million reports of mishandled luggage among domestic airlines, according to the Transportation Department. That's down slightly from the year before, when roughly 2.1 million bags went astray. (While the government doesn't distinguish among lost, damaged, delayed and pilfered baggage -- referring to it all as simply "mishandled" -- airline passengers certainly do.)

The biggest offender? Among the major non-regional carriers, American Airlines had the worst record, with 3.82 reports per 1,000 passengers. Interestingly, American was the first of the big carriers to institute a fee for all checked bags, back in 2008. The second- and third-most loss-prone were Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines.

The problem isn't just lost luggage; it's what happens next. The rules vary, depending on where you lost the bag and how long it takes to recover it.

Consider what happened to Sigal. After he filed a claim, LAN offered to pay him either $300 or cut him a $600 flight voucher. He refused both. "I feel that while in the custody of the airline, the suitcase was opened and the items were stolen," he told me. "The reimbursement is not even close to the replacement cost of the items."

Under the Montreal Convention, an international treaty that governs compensation for the victims of air disasters, Sigal was entitled to a maximum of about $1,800. (The amount fluctuates, because it's based on a combination of worldwide currencies.)

I suggested that Sigal mention to LAN that its offer came nowhere near to what the Montreal Convention calls for. When he did, LAN asked for receipts for the stolen items, which he sent. The airline offered him about $1,800 in flight vouchers, which he accepted.

There isn't always a happy ending, though. Earlier this year, reader Leonard Henderson contacted me after his ski gear got lost on a flight to Telluride, Colo. He had to buy new clothes, for which US Airways promised to reimburse him. But when the time came for the airline to pay up, it balked. Henderson had paid $2,500 for new gear, but the airline covered only $800.

"The airline will not give me an explanation of how they came up with the reimbursement figure," he told me. "I feel like the tiny little guy versus the corporate giant."

Part of the problem is that Henderson's luggage was eventually recovered. According to federal law, the airline is liable for a minimum of $3,300 per customer if lost bags are never found.

But when luggage is delayed, the rules say that an airline must reimburse passengers for "reasonable" expenses caused by the delay, such as tuxedo rental for a wedding or purchase of underwear and toiletries, or a bathing suit at a beach resort.

US Airways' policy is more noncommittal. "We'll consider reimbursement for reasonable items such as toiletries while you're waiting for us to return your property," it says on its website.

Effective Aug. 23, new rules will require airlines to refund any fee for checked luggage if the bag is lost. However, the current requirements for compensating passengers for reasonable expenses won't change, nor will the maximum compensation for lost luggage.

How do airlines persuade us to accept less? They ask for original receipts that they know we don't have. They claim that they don't cover fragile items, such as electronics and collectibles. They take forever to process our claims, dragging things out for so long that we forget what we lost.

For the past three years, checked luggage has been a huge profit maker for air carriers. The industry collected more than $3 billion in baggage fees in 2010, compared with just $464 million in 2007, the year before the legacy airlines adopted a fee for the first checked bag. And for three years, the industry has essentially had it both ways -- collecting our money and then losing our luggage without any meaningful consequences.

But that's changing. Anticipating the new rule that will force airlines to reimburse baggage fees when they lose a piece of checked luggage, carriers have become more cautious about how they treat your property. The DOT last year fined Delta $100,000 for capping expense reimbursements on lost luggage. Perhaps not coincidentally, Delta recently introduced a new tracking system for bags that lets you follow your luggage online and presumably will ensure that fewer bags will be "misplaced."

Wouldn't it be something if the government also set minimum compensation amounts for passengers whose luggage just went astray for a day or two? I wonder how it would affect the mishandled baggage tally -- and how it would move the needle on the billions of dollars in luggage fees the airlines collect every year.

Christopher Elliott is the author of "Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals" (Wiley). He's also the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and the co-founder of the Consumer Travel Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for travelers. Read more tips on his blog, elliott.org or e-mail him at chris@elliott.org. Christopher Elliott receives a great deal of reader mail, and though he answers them as quickly as possible, your story may not be published for several months because of a backlog of cases.

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