Man, I’ve been slacking on blogging lately- at least here. I’ve still been writing my FAA-related blogs on www.faafollies.com but not so much here.

So here’s a little tidbit for travelers. Low cost carriers!

An LCC is an airline that’s basically like your Southwest or AirTran- one that typically flies a single class of jetliner, has higher load factors than “legacy” carriers, and doesn’t offer much in service. The good news is that their tickets are frequently much less expensive than a typical carrier (sometimes called “mainline” in addition to “legacy” or “network” carriers.)

GG and I flew on a couple of LCC to/from Phuket/Bangkok on our last trip to Thailand. Ordinarily we would take Thai Airways, since they have a reciprocal deal with United, but she doesn’t get the discount since she’s on furlough right now.

From Bangkok to Phuket, we flew on Air Asia. They’re an aggressively growing LCC, based primarily in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They also have “Thai Air Asia” and “Indonesia Air Asia”, but they’re all branded the same, use the same website and advertising, and the difference is primarily for technical reasons having to do with being owned/operated in the particular nation in question.

Air Asia seemed easy to deal with upfront. Like many LCC in other nations, they tend to have a base rate for the ticket, and then tack on additional fees for anything and everything under the sun that they can. Want to check a bag? Pay extra. Want to board the aircraft before everyone else? Pay extra. Want a predesignated seat assignment? Pay extra.

In our case, since we travel pretty light (a backpack and a rollaboard carryon each), we can get by pretty easy on the fees. I did do the “Hot Seat” service, which costs an extra 250 Thai baht (about 7 bucks). I was pretty disappointed in it. Not the seat picking; that was nice, we snagged row 2 (the first three rows are their “Hot Seats”) so getting off was quick and easy when we arrived.

But Air Asia also advertises “Xpress Boarding” with the seat selection- and that was a crock of shit. The problem is that the plane was at what they call a “remote gate”, meaning you go through the terminal to a gate… and then instead of going down a jetway onto the plane, you go out a door onto the ramp area, get on a bus, and are driven out to where the plane is parked.

In our case that was about a 5 minute ride across the airport to a big open area where several of their planes were parked. That alone wasn’t so bad, but their gate agents did absolutely NOTHING to keep order in the line. As a result, this asshole with a big group from France cut in the line right in between Ginger and I. The bus was a crazy mad crush of people… just a real goatroap.

As a result, if we can help it, we’ll be skipping Air Asia until we hear they’ve gotten their stuff together. It’s kind of a cultural thing- Luis mentioned the differences between different nations a few days back in his blog- but I don’t like having to put up with it.

From Phuket back to Bangkok, we flew on Nok Air. They use the “old” Bangkok airport, Don Muang. (The newer airport, Suvarnabhumi, is only a few years old.) They were considerably better; I even left a couple of brand-new suits in a carryon in the plane’s closet and didn’t remember them until we’d gotten to the hotel, by which time everyone had gone home for the evening. The next day, I called the airline and they wound up tracking down the bag and holding it for me at the airport; a 400 baht (11 dollar) taxi ride out and back and I had my new suits (I bought two while I was in Phuket).

One thing about LCC; they tend to not be listed in the big international computer databases for flights. For example, if you go to Travelocity, you’re using the reservation system that started life (decades ago) as “SABRE“, the computer/res system that was started by and used to be owned by American Airlines. They later spun SABRE off onto its own, and it’s grown and evolved into the database and the Travelocity travel agency.

(SABRE has an interesting history. I used to use it back when it was still a command-line interface type of system, and you had to know the various commands for searching into the database. It was pretty cool.)

Right now, if I do a search on Travelocity for a round trip from Seattle to Denver, Southwest Airlines doesn’t come up. They don’t pay the same fees as the mainline carriers do, so they’re not always listed in online databases.

There is a terrific web page at Wikipedia, though, that lists LCC for the entire world. This list of low-cost carriers goes by country, so say you’re planning a trip from Singapore to Bali, Indonesia (as we are for next month).

You go to the listing and look for the LCC in Singapore and find Jetstar; Tiger Airways; and Valuair. A quick read of the Wikipedia articles on each airline shows that Jetstar owns Valuair now, so there are effectively two LCC listed for Singapore.

Since we’re going round trip, I also look at Indonesia, and find multiple carriers. Now I’ve got a nice listing of carriers to search to see what kind of ticket prices I can get.

The price difference can be significant. For our proposed dates of flying SIN-DPS (Singapore to Denpasar Airport on Bali) on April 21, and DPS-SIN on April 25, the web site Kayak.com (which, by the way, I strongly recommend as one of the very best airfare searching sites- they not only hit the big services like Travelocity and Expedia, but also search the airlines’ own reservation/pricing services) produces round-trip pricing of $535 on Malaysian Airlines.

Jetstar, on the other hand, has a SIN-DPS flight for 80 Singapore dollars, which converts to $52.55 US dollars. They don’t have any flights available on the 25th, but Lion Airways (an Indonesian carrier) has a flight for 49,000 Indonesian rupiahs- which converts to an almost-too-low-to-believe $4.26 US! The flight schedule sucks, though- midnight departure, 3am arrival in Singapore. Yuck, no wonder it’s so cheap.

Lion Air’s site is a perfect example, though, of what you might be getting in an LCC. They have a web page that brags:

Circumcision of 1500 kids at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah

On June 30, 2004, Lion Air celebrated the third anniversary by holding a mass circumcision for more than 1500 kids lived around Jakarta area at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah. The event was being noted at Museum Record of Indonesia.

Now, maybe something went awry in the translation… but I suspect it means exactly what it says. So yeah, you probably should consider these airlines’ safety records and cultural attitudes at least a little bit!

The point here is that you can’t search just the typical web sites and come up with the best fares; you have to do a little digging, but they’re out there if you have a good starting point.

Another great way to search is to dig around on the net for the web page for the airport in question you’re heading to/from. This way, you can find (for example) flights between Singapore and Bali. More importantly, you get the names of all the airlines doing those flights- so you can go to their individual web sites and keep looking for a good deal on airfare.

Now, all this might seem like a lot of work, but when you compare a total round-trip airfare possibility of about 57 dollars (like I found above) to over 500, you realize pretty quick that it can pay off to do some searching!

Man, these guys have a lot of nerve. The fact is that without the government buying 80% of their company they’d be bankrupt- but they still pay millions in bonuses? And say “if we don’t, we’ll lose these people”?

Um, these people are the ones who lost hundreds of billions in the first place! Let the fuckers walk out the door- hell, give them a shove!

Ridiculous.

One of the more outrageous things you read/hear people saying about the Obamas is that they’re “intentionally” trying to wreck this nation. That’s an outlandish, ridiculous charge, but sadly a considerable number of people believe it.

I didn’t think that Bush and Cheney were intentionally wrecking the nation. I think they WERE hurting it, but I don’t think they set out to do that; they just either didn’t care or honestly believed that their policies would be good in the long run (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).

I think, having read a lot more of the farther-left types over the past several years, that for the most part liberals and progressives tend to give the benefit of the doubt more often than the right-wingers do. Far too many of the righties have zero hesitation in declaring that Obama is some kind of Marxist Muslim who is intentionally trying to destroy America.

One of the memes they often spout is that the Obamas hate the military. Let me ask you something- does the video clip below sound like someone who hates the military?

Of course not. (And note that the right wing has tried to turn Michelle Obama into another Hillary Clinton- a hated and reviled person who holds too much sway over her husband. They hate strong, independent, smart, liberal women.)

She is exactly right. It’s a shame that military families are on food stamps, and we need to fix that ASAP.

So I’m watching the TV show “The Amazing Race” (which I’m pretty hooked on, by the way; I didn’t start watching it until I got Tivo, and now I’ve seen the past few seasons) and of course they take taxis a LOT in the show.

It’s always frustrating to the contestants, and to the home viewers too, when the racers jump into a cab and they’re going along and… the driver doesn’t really know where he’s going.

You see it at least a few times per season, and if I’m getting irritated watching it I can only imagine how the poor people racing are feeling! They’ve got to be going bonkers; they’re in a race for a million dollars and just to make a few bucks some cabbie let them into the cab and figured he’d find the joint they’re going… somehow.

Did you know that the word “taxi” is the same word (pronunciation, etc) in more languages than any other in the world? Or so they say, anyway.

Seattle has some of the worst taxi drivers on Earth, and that’s saying something (although I’m not including the tuk-tuk drivers in Thailand; if I did, they’d rank #1 for their ripoff skills). They drive like they’re the only cars on the road, and particularly frustrating is the way they’ll cruise along s-l-o-w-l-y while they hope for someone to hail them.

Living downtown means dealing with lots of cabs and I hate it. In other cities, they do the same thing sometimes, but not nearly as often because there’s more fares and more designated taxi stands for them to sit and wait for a fare. Seattle has nearly zero taxi stands (there’s only a couple up by the Sheraton and Westin hotels, as far as I know) and thus they’re always cruising around, which had to mean they were losing money back when gasoline was four bucks a gallon.

The taxi drivers in Thailand get under my wife’s skin big time. The reason is simple- like the tuk-tuk drivers, they’re always trying to scam tourists for more money than a given ride should cost. Fares there are dirt cheap, as evidenced by a picture that I can’t find right now but will upload into this post when I do find it.

Anyway, from the main international airport (Suvarnabhumi) to downtown Bangkok should only be 250 to 300 baht, which is less than 10 dollars- pretty amazing for a 25-45 minute ride. But when you jump into the cab, the driver will often try and say “Can you pay the fare of 400 baht?” as though he’s checking to SEE if you have the money. When you agree, off he goes- and he doesn’t turn on the meter, which means when you get to wherever, you gotta shell out 400 baht.

GG absolutely HATES this and any cabbie that tried to jerk us around at ALL on the meter immediately blew any chance of a tip. The ones that quietly and compliantly turned on the meter, she’d usually give them at least another 50 or 100 baht tip- meaning they sometimes got MORE than if they’d tried to pull the “any hotel in downtown is 400 baht” (or sometimes they try and get 500 baht) scam!

The cabbies in Bangkok are also often illiterate, or so it’s seemed the past few trips. When you come through the airport, you should bypass all the guys in the terminal who’re trying to get you to take their taxi- the cheapest ones are actually right outside the doors. You go up to a stand where someone who speaks English asks you for what hotel you want, then writes it on a receipt in a couple of spots, tears off one side, and you give that to the driver… who sometimes can’t read the damn thing and has to ask for help.

The good news is that our hotel in Bangkok (the Courtyard by Marriott) is just off a fairly major road, Rajdamri, between two other very major streets (Sukhumvit and Rama IV Road) and behind the Four Seasons hotel, which all the cabbies know. The Courtyard is new so they don’t know it as well.

The taxis often go from the train station to the airport… and the route they take goes right down Occidental past my building. It’s almost more of an alley than a street, and every once in a while they absolutely FLAME down the street doing at least 40 to 50 miles per hour (it’s a 25 mph street).

That really pisses me off when I’m trying to walk the dog and cross the street, so I yell at them and even hawked an awesome loogie at one guy (I missed, he was going too damn fast). They just give me that stupid cabbie driver blank look like they can’t possibly imagine what I’m yelling about.

I tell you, it’s either 15 mph weaving down the street blocking traffic, or it’s 50 and dangerous. I hate so many Seattle cabbies… which makes my next item ironic, because you wouldn’t think I’d want to help them out.

And my last taxi item is something that’s been bugging me for quite some time, and sooner or later I think I’m going to try and do something about it. Sea-Tac airport is like several other major airports I’ve been through, where the airport authority only allows a single taxi cab company to make pickups at the airport. At Sea-Tac, it’s STITA, and it’s crap that they do that, and here’s why.

STITA (Sea-Tac International Taxi Association) can only make pick-ups at the airport. If you want to hail a STITA cab that you see downtown and take it somewhere other than the airport, you’re out of luck; and I’m pretty sure that they won’t take fares back TO the airport from downtown (or wherever) either.

Likewise, if you grab a Farwest or Orange or Yellow cab from anywhere in King County, and take it to the airport, then that cab can only haul you (or someone else) the one way. Leaving the airport, they’re empty.

This means that effectively 50% of the time, any cab going to/from the airport is driving along… empty.

Even though many are running on natural gas (which, BTW, is one big reason those Bangkok taxis are so cheap) it’s still grossly inefficient and terrible for the environment. We’ve set up a system where 50% of the cabs either coming or going from the airport are driving along empty. It costs the drivers money (any time they’re driving without a fare, they’re losing money) and it pumps more and more carbon into the atmosphere.

The solution is simple: the airport needs to allow ALL cabs to make pickups from the airport, and STITA must be allowed (if they’re prohibited by regulation) to pick up fares anywhere and take them anywhere.

This year would be a good time to change this rule, because STITA is in for losing quite a few fares anyway; Sound Transit will finally be starting the light rail service from downtown (including a station about three blocks from my place- yay!) to the airport. This will almost certainly mean fewer fares for the taxis to/from Sea-Tac; if pitched properly, my idea of allowing full, free competition will be a big hit because now the cabbies can make more money picking up more fares going more places.

Right now, they’re restricted, and that’s stupid and harms everyone in the long run.

And that’s some taxi-related stuff that’s been bubbling in my head for a while!