THE BRANCATELLI FILE FOR 2010WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT JOE Joe Brancatelli is a publication consultant, which means that he helps media companies start, fix and reposition newspapers, magazines and Web sites. He's also the former executive editor of Frequent Flyer and has been a consultant to or columnist for more business-travel and leisure-travel publishing operations than he can remember. He began his career as a business journalist and created JoeSentMe.com in the dark days after 9/11 while he was stranded in a hotel room in San Francisco. He lives on the Hudson River in Cold Spring, New York. February 25: NOBODY ASKED ME, BUT... You love the format, I love writing it and we can get though a lot of news--and some snark--with a laugh. So this week, a quick-hit tour through the mindset about airline mergers, the state of hotel check-in, good and bad news about life on the road, and thoughts about Albert Einstein, Tallulah Bankhead, great music for the road, Iran and much more. February 4: NOBODY ASKED ME, BUT... We've reached the dog days of February, which has me wondering why some airlines call its workers "customer-facing" instead of customer service personnel; why I'm having nightmares in French and German; why airport travel patterns are getting odd; why Southwest's traffic continues to grow if passengers have accepted baggage fees; and much more. January 28: WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE I woke up this mornin' to see what condition our condition was in and, to change songs, I realized that we have all been here before. As I look at this week's top stories, I've realized I've covered them all before and nothing has changed. See why airline earnings, Delta's supposed in-flight upgrades, the iPad, the bankruptcy of an off-airport parking firm and even JetBlue's potentially problematic reservation changes this weekend are more of the same old same old. January 21: STUPID SECURITY TRICKS I was going to write about fares this week. Or credit cards. Or any of a dozen things that you've been asking me about in the last few weeks. But here we are talking about airline and airport security once again. Why? Because this insanity is chewing up a lot of our time on the road. January 14: WHEN THINGS WERE LESS ROTTEN I can't pinpoint when life on the road turned rotten, but the events of the last few weeks have certainly confirmed that belief. So I turned to something I wrote back in 1986, about a wonderful flight of fancy that speculated what our lives on the road would be in 2019. Yes, there are middle seats in deep space, but there was still a sense of wonder back then. January 7: GRAND GUIGNOL, SECURITY DIVISION You heard some loon with explosives in his underwear set his privates on fire and you knew it was going to be Grand Guignol all the way. And so it has been. "Great Balls of Fire," as the New York Post offered in a Page One headline. And it gets weirder, with hilariously unconnected dots, missing TSA agents and cameras and a Slovakian "security test" that defies human comprehension. January 3: THE TSA GOES INTO CYA MODE Today's announcement from the Transportation Security Administration that it is implementing new security measures for international flights headed to the United States means the agency has gone into full CYA mode. The announcement is mindless, full of gobbledygook and virtually useless for travelers trying to figure out how to reasonably prepare for a flight to the United States. These columns originally appeared at JoeSentMe.com. Copyright © 1993-2010 by Joe Brancatelli. All rights reserved. |