Best Day to Buy or Fly?

    The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)  says that in researching air ticket purchases they found the best prices on Sunday for both domestic and International flights .

That common belief that Tuesday is the best day to buy your plane tickets? Not so much. Really, not even close.  ARC examined close to 1 30 million tickets worth $94 billion purchased in the U.S. during their 19-month study and found Sundays were clearly  the best day to buy. Saturday is still better than Tuesday (11 percent better internationally.  Isolated last-second cheap airfares are also available.

Despite all the research, U.S. travelers never learn. Domestic flights in the study were purchased 32 days ahead of the flight on average for domestic flights, with 24 percent of the tickets purchased in the final seven days before flying.

 24 weeks ahead of departure, fares were a whopping 27 percent below the average fare .

MINIMUM SEAT STANDARDS NEED TO BE SET!

Airline seats are shrinking. A wave of air rage incidents has exposed the problem like a thread bare economy class seat on an aging puddle jumper.

Actually, the solution is as simple as developing minimum seat comfort standards and enacting common-sense government regulation to enforce them.

The average “pitch” — an industry term for the amount of space between airline seats — is somewhere between 30 and 31 inches in economy class today. Returning seat pitch to its pre-deregulation 34 inches would help avoid future seat rage incidents, experts say. Even airlines quietly acknowledge it’s a humane amount of legroom when they refer to premium coach seats with 34 inches of pitch as “comfort” class. Likewise, 18 inches across is about the right size for a seat cushion in coach. Anything less and you’re jostling for armrest space or bumping your knees up against the seat in front of you.

If the seat designers didn’t do their math, then neither did the airlines. Over the years, many carriers have quietly moved the seats closer together, reducing both seat pitch and cushion sizes. Time is running out to find an acceptable solution. As the events of this summer suggest, passengers’ patience is limited.  The airlines kept taking and taking, and since most of us can’t get across the country or the ocean any other way, we let them.

That must end. One fix is for a pro-consumer U.S. senator to slip a sentence into the next FAA Re-authorization Bill, asking the Transportation Department to establish minimum seat space standards. FlyersRights.org is also pushing for the FAA to set seat standards.

By the way, that doesn’t necessarily mean airlines will be forced to give up valuable space and the potential revenue that comes with it. 

In the News

Southwest Airlines adopts mobile boarding pass program. Starting last year as a test in Austin Texas they have branched out to iPhone and Android devices for security checkpoints and aircraft boarding at all U.S. airports where Southwest flies.

AMA Waterways adds new ship to Mekong.  Introducing a new vessel, the 124 passenger AmaDara on the Mekong River in 2015 will join sister ship, the AmaLotus.  The inaugural is slated for Aug. 17, 2015, a 16-day river cruise and land tour through Vietnam and Cambodia.

On the move:  For the last several years travelers have been able to pick and choose their dates, resorts, mode of travel and such at the last minute. Not anymore! Travel by cruise ship is just one example. The new River Cruising in Europe is so popular that we are now booking into 2016 just to find the perfect cabin and date.  Even Caribbean cruises are booking into 2015 now and some inventory is low. People are ready to go and they are going! Family and Group tours/cruises are going wild and All Inclusive resorts are reporting record bookings.

Great Plains Foundation, an African conservation company that operates upscale tourist camps in Botswana and Kenya, will for a limited time donate 100% of customer payments for stays at selected camps to help fund a program to remove rhinos form poaching hot zones.