Spendthrift Shoestring

The Traveller's Tree

I've just begun Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree, an account of the author's journey through the Caribbean in the 1940s. It's a dense, appealing book that beautifully ensnares a vanquished Caribbean, before the dawn of the region's dependence on tourism. Thus far, my excitement has me reading out of turn, drawn by remarkable phrasings. Examining the social codes of racism in Barbados, for example, Fermor describes overhearing "voices of blood-curdling gentility" among white Barbadians discussing the tea and garden parties to which their black neighbors would never be invited.

I wonder how it's possible that this book has eluded me for so long.

Air Berlin's Good March

I know I've been blogging a lot about budget airlines lately. This is mostly due to the fact that the previous month's airline stats have just been released. Budget airlines are also on my mind because, in gearing up for my extended stay in London, I've just booked a bunch of tickets on European LCCs. And also because EuroCheapo just launched a new budget air section, no doubt.

All of which brings me, circuitously, to news of Air Berlin's March performance. The airline did quite well this past month, with a modest 5.5 percent improvement in passenger numbers (accounting for over 2,175,000 passengers) against last March's figures. Air Berlin managed a 4 percent rise in load factor in March in comparison to last March, filling 77.8 percent of its seats.

Air Berlin trailed Ryanair by about a percentage point on March load factor (77.8 percent to 79 percent), while they lead SkyEurope by over four percentage points (77.8 percent to 73.6 percent).

It will be interesting to see how the summer season and various sales, like Ryanair's near-constant state of sale, will affect load factor over the next few months.

Monday List: Porter, Skybus, Cheap Trains

1. According to Amy Verner in the Globe and Mail, flying Porter between Toronto City Centre and Newark really is far superior to flying from Pearson or Buffalo to NYC. No surprise there. It's just that C$361.41 (US$357.34 as of this moment) seems like a lot of money to me for a short jaunt. I know that Porter isn't a low-cost carrier, but I can fly on JetBlue to Chicago roundtrip for about half that amount. Am I being unreasonable? Shoestring allegiances aside, Verner's article did nothing to quell my personal Portermania.

2. Another note on Skybus. When the airline got compared to Ryanair, I would find myself feeing itchy.  Ryanair exploits secondary airports near big, highly-trafficked cities as their bases. Yes, there's often a hassle involved with getting between these airports and the cities they represent, but for the most part the distances are reasonable. London Stansted, for example, is a doable 45 minutes from London by train. Skybus chose Columbus, not New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles as its base. I wonder how things would have played out if their primary base had been Islip or the Sonoma County Airport or Long Beach. Possibly not that much better; after all, this is a tough time to launch an airline.

3. Mark Smith, also known as the Man in Seat Sixty-One, has put together a truly fab list of reasonable rail alternatives to luxury train itineraries for the Guardian.

Skybus, R.I.P., Plus Tel Aviv on Clickair

How did I miss this? The Skybus business model struck me as likely to fail but I found the inclusion of all sorts of underserved airports on their route map exciting. There's a great analysis of the situation at Airline Bulletin.

Meanwhile, I noticed earlier this week that Clickair is selling Barcelona-Tel Aviv fares. I thought that Ryanair would be the first European low-cost carrier to fly to Tel Aviv, but it turns out that Clickair has beaten them to the punch. The fares themselves aren't dirt cheap—in a quick search, the best roundtrip fare I found runs €239. Still, this is an interesting development, particularly in a week in which Clickair, the airline in question, is pursuing a merger with Vueling.

SkyEurope: Disjointed March Stats

SkyEurope's March was an odd one. The airline experienced a 16.2 percent rise in the number of passengers flown in March, against last March's performance, carrying over 307,000 passengers over the course of the month. Load factor is down over 14 percent to 73.6 percent in comparison with March 2007, a fact that the airline attributes to a dramatic, nearly 40 percent rise in "seat capacity."

Against Ryanair's performance, SkyEurope lagged on both criteria this past month, with a lower rise in the number of passengers flown (16.2 percent to Ryanair's 19 percent), and lower load factor (73.6 percent to Ryanair's 79 percent).

Ryanair: Not Too Shabby

The European low-cost airline industry just seems to burrow deeper and deeper into trouble on a daily basis. There are almost daily portents of worse times ahead. Air Berlin just lowered profit expectations for 2008. Clickair and Vueling are in merger talks. Centralwings has cut tons of flghts. Ryanair is closing a call center and freezing senior management pay.

With all that in the background, Ryanair's March performance was pretty impressive. The airline posts a 19 percent jump in passengers in March 2008 against March 2007, from 3.77 to 4.48 million. Its load factor (to review: "the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of seats available for passengers") rises one percent, from 78 to 79 percent.

I'll look forward to tossing these numbers around in comparison with other LCC stats tomorrow or next week.

Thanks as always to Air Scoop for the top-notch European budget airline news digest.

EuroCheapo's New Budget Flights Search Engine!

It's ambitious and bold and it looks good, too.

EuroCheapo has launched a brand new low-cost carrier search engine called CheapoSearch Flights. It's a massive tower of information power, with the low-down on Europe's budget airlines, a route finder, airport mapping, a set of useful articles, and an actual flight search engine.

(I should acknowledge that I spent many weeks this past fall researching and writing material for the guide, so my excitement in seeing the flight content launch isn't abstract.)

Bravo, EuroCheapo!

Real Housewives of NYC, Olivia Giovetti, and Me

The 'flu is something I wouldn't wish on very many people. I'm just today emerging from a terrible few days of sickness, which were useful for very little. I couldn't get any work done and accordingly fell behind on some freelance work.

I did learn a few things during my sickness hibernation, while I sat, mesmerized yet lifeless, watching all four episodes of the Real Housewives of New York City back-to-back. Among the lessons: certain rich people are not very sophisticated about travel. Example: raving about St. Barts as your favorite place in the Caribbean, because it's, you know, so European. Why go to the Caribbean in the first place? Or why not dig just a little bit deeper and come up with someplace less clichéd, like, say, Les Saintes, an island with a quaint little village and lovely beaches that feels awfully European yet also Caribbean, a place where few Americans travel? It's the desire for a Caribbean stripped of any regional characteristics that bugs me. That and the lack of imagination. Limitless amounts of money mean unlimited imagination, right? Apparently not.

What else did I learn? It's completely kosher to knock your friend for going to St. Barts during the summer—and to actually sound aggrieved because said friend paid $300 (versus your own $2000 outlay) for a night at a hotel, as long as you do it in a confessional and not to your friend's face. Let's see, what else...oh yes, the Lower East Side is scary and bad. I learned that as well.

It's nice to emerge from sickness to see my guest playlist on Olivia Giovetti's amazing blog, High Culture on a Low Budget. HC/LB is chock-full of tips and suggestions for blazing a budget-savvy trail across Europe. If you haven't bookmarked and favorited it to bits, you should. Thanks, Olivia, for the opportunity to reminisce!