Archive for October, 2004

The Travel Agent From Hell

You’re stuck in Orlando as yet another hurricane takes aim at Florida. The airport is closed and the best advice you can get is to sit tight and hang with the locals because you can’t extend your hotel reservation. Not that it matters. Your “garden view” room actually looks out on a concrete pad that holds the dumpsters. Congratulations. You may have the travel agent from hell. Let me be perfectly clear about this: If you handle your own travel arrangements then you have only yourself to blame when something…

Who’s Next? A Chapter 7 Oddsmaker

Which airline is going out of business first? No network carrier is immune to a bankruptcy filing – or a liquidation – but some are less immune than others. (And if they don’t go out of business, then they’ll at least get an extreme makeover.) Conventional wisdom says US Airways will be toast soon. Some of the travel trade bulletin boards look like Vegas odds sheets predicting the day it stops flying. But I don’t think that calendar is in print yet. US Airways is in a really bad situation…