Tag: Gulliver

2016 was not a great year for business travellers. In Britain, the Brexit referendum and related collapse in the value of the pound made travelling abroad costly; transport strikes meant getting around was an ordeal for those who stayed put. In continental Europe, terror attacks targeted airports and tourist spots, while striking workers blockaded sea ports, grounded airlines and nobbled the air-traffic control system. America, meanwhile, had to deal with mammoth security lines at airports and Asian travellers had to contend with a slowdown in China, the world’s biggest business-travel market.

Sadly, 2017 does not look like it is going to be any better. Indeed, things could get worse. First of all there are oil prices. For travellers, the low cost of fuel was a rare bright spot in 2016. Cheaper flights meant more chance to chip away at the corporate-travel budget. Now the oil price is creeping back up, which means purse-strings may be tightened. Indeed, some airlines are already looking to offset rising costs by charging for drinks on long haul…Continue reading

DONALD TRUMP’S election has generated much uncertainty about the future of travel to America, but one group of travellers might have reason to celebrate: those who hope to ride in driverless cars.

The Obama administration hasn’t exactly cracked down on this emerging technology. The 15-point guidelines released in September by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which cover everything from data protection to allowing a sober person to take control of the vehicle in the event of a malfunction, are voluntary for now, although the agency does plan to formalise them soon. But under Mr Trump, regulation of autonomous vehicles could be far more laissez-faire—or even actively supportive.

The first clues come from his early appointments. Most notable is Elaine Chao, the former secretary of labour under George W Bush (and wife of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell) whom Mr Trump has tapped to become secretary of transportation. Ms Chao…Continue reading

NEWS that a domestic flight operated by Afriqiyah Airways, a state-owned Libyan airline, has been hijacked and flown to Europe should shock and appal an industry that has, since 9/11, spared no expense to end the scourge of such horrors. Events are still unfolding, but it is clear that two men claiming to have grenades forced the aircraft, an Airbus A320, to bypass its intended destination of Tripoli and fly on to Malta, the tiny Mediterranean island nation situated between Libya and Italy. Few details have emerged about the motives or demands of the hijackers. But, at the time of writing, all passengers and some crew had been released, signalling a peaceful end to the crisis.

Aviation in Libya is a messy affair. Afriqiyah lost one aircraft during the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qaddafi, and another two during the 2014 assault by Islamist militias on Tripoli International Airport. Several other planes are awaiting repairs after that assault, which all but destroyed the capital’s main airport (flights are now operated from the nearby Mitiga Airport, a former military base). Another of Afriqiyah’s planes was supposed to be leased to Turkish Airlines, but has been impounded…Continue reading

SOME 45.2m passengers are expected to fly on America’s airlines during the three-week holiday season that began last Friday. That is 3.5% more than flew during the same period last year, adding volume to an already-high baseline: the days around Christmas and New Year typically see 23% more travel than the rest of the year.

That is likely to exacerbate the woes that plagued American airports in 2016 even when travel volumes were normal. The main problem has been that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in its wisdom, cut the number of screeners at security checkpoints. It did so anticipating that 25m people would sign up for its PreCheck programme, which allows pre-cleared passengers to bypass some security elements and speed up the process. Instead, fewer than 10m did. The result, predictably, was a worsening bottleneck at airports across the country. (The TSA is so desperate to encourage more people to sign up that it has hired a company to drive coaches around the country recruiting PreCheck members. We’ll see how that…Continue reading

DELTA AIR LINES found itself at the centre of a social-media storm when Adam Saleh, a YouTube personality who posts about life as a Muslim American, was removed from one of its flights for—apparently—no greater crime than speaking Arabic. Mr Saleh is not the first passenger of Middle Eastern descent to allege discriminatory treatment by airline staff and passengers. But, true to his profession, he may be the first to have recorded an encounter in real time (see link). At the time of writing, nine hours after disembarkation, his video had been retweeted an incredible 556,000 times on Twitter.

According to Mr Saleh, who has 2.2m followers on YouTube, the incident began when he telephoned his Arabic-speaking mother while waiting to depart from London for New York. At this point, he claims, a female passenger told him to speak in English—kicking off an angry exchange between him, the woman and her husband. At some point between that encounter and the beginning of the video, more than 20 passengers reported feeling uncomfortable about Mr Saleh’s behaviour. He was subsequently removed from the…Continue reading

CHRISTMAS in New York is a time when, in the words of Meyer Berger, the city tries “to match the gems from her endless treasure chest against the winking and sparking brilliants in Heaven’s vault”. Only grinches fail to succumb to the seasonal spirit when the snow is falling in Manhattan, the steam is rising from the pavements and the lights twinkle. For many, though, Christmas means one thing: the chance to shop. New York may be magical, but is it the best place to stock up on gifts? Gulliver decided to compare the Big Apple with other shopping draws around the world. 

To be a good place to shop, a city first needs a wide selection of things to buy. We used a ranking by CB Richard Ellis, a real-estate firm, to assess the penetration of global retailers in cities around the world. Second, it must not break the bank. So we applied cost-of-living data from The Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, both on the average cost of a night’s stay and the price of the sort of items Christmas…Continue reading

EVERY December, more than 1,000 female high school students, some as young as 15, take part in a “bikini competition” held in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao. The event, hosted by Oriental Beauty, a modelling agency, provides a platform for aspiring flight attendants to show off their bikini bodies to eager recruiters from the Chinese airline industry. Those deemed the most attractive are invited to join a fast-track flight attendant trainee scheme, which can open the door to a dream job at one of China’s big airlines.

Many Chinese and other Asian airlines shamelessly exploit female sexuality. At China Southern Airlines, air hostesses must be 25 or younger and must not have “X or O shaped legs”. Stewardesses at Japan Airlines need to have “good skin complexion”. Indonesia’s flag carrier, Garuda Indonesia, which Skytrax declared had the world’s best cabin staff in 2016 (not a single Western airline made the shortlist), refuses to hire older, married women. VietJet…Continue reading

A POST on this blog from earlier this month talked about how airlines are sweeping the issue of pilot fatigue under the carpet. The London School of Economics had surveyed some 7,000 European captains and first officers—around 14% of all commercial pilots in the region—on various issues. Although most said that airline managers take safety seriously, they have a blindspot when it comes to tiredness. Close to 60% of pilots said that they and their colleagues were often fatigued and half said that their employers do not pay enough heed to the issue.

Right on cue, Thomas Cook Airlines, a British carrier, has been forced to apologise to a pilot who refused to take to the air because he was too knackered to fly. Captain Mike Simkins was suspended for six months and told he faced the sack after refusing to fly his Boeing 767 with over 200 passengers. According to BALPA, a pilots’ union, Mr Simkins took the difficult decision not to take off “after three extremely early starts…Continue reading

WHEN the England cricket team travelled to play Australia in the first ever Test match in 1887, the journey down under took around 50 days by steamship. (The Aussies won, as they have mostly continued to do over the subsequent 129 years.) When the team flies out to compete in the latest installment of the Ashes next year, the journey time will be much reduced. If they fly from London to Perth on Qantas, they could conceivably do it in under 17 hours, nonstop.

The Australian flag carrier announced over the weekend that it is to launch a direct service from Western Australia to London. According to Forbes the 14,498-kilometre journey will slot in behind Air India’s Delhi to San Francisco route (15,140 kilometres) to become the second longest nonstop flight in the world—although the Qantas plane will in fact be in the air for two hours longer because the India-America route takes advantage of the jet stream.

We don’t have to look back to the 19th century to see just how far things have improved. According to Alan Joyce,…Continue reading

AS A rule, when Gulliver first arrives at a hotel, he would prefer not to have to deal with another human. There are three main reasons for this. The first is that he is, by nature, cantankerous. The forced jollity of the initial exchange with a receptionist does not come easily after an exhausting trip. The second, perhaps not unrelated, is the fear that a porter might latch on to him and insist on showing him to his room. What is it about Gulliver’s demeanour that suggests he is incapable of counting room numbers sequentially, or is unable to identify which of the two chambers in his room is the toilet? (If in doubt, it is usually the smaller one.) Being pressured to tip a porter whose sole purpose seems to be to point out which of the Gulliver-length objects in the room is for sleeping in, and which he might fill with bubble bath, is always riling. Finally there is the annoyance of having to hang around at the front desk, with the heating on full blast, while the receptionist deals with a queue of other people. At that point all he really wants to do is head to his room and peel off a few of the layers that have been protecting him from the arctic conditions…Continue reading