piran café

Isn’t really all that good. But how important are onboard purchase to these low budget carriers’ bottom lines? According to a story in its in-flight magazine glorifying its bistro selection, GW sells, on average, 400,000 to 450,000 cups per year at €2.60 a pop, totaling €1,040,000 to 1,170,000 ($1,458,420 to 1,640,723).

Ometepe, originally uploaded by pirano.

Just thought someone, somewhere, might find that tidbit useful.

Here’s a cool still life by photog Taryn Simon of food confiscated at New York’s JFK airport over a 48 hour period. I love the hog head center piece.

* that’s pršut in Slovenia

Well, that was fast.

Just six months after beginning service from Maribor, Slovenia’s second city, to London Stansted, it looks as though Ryanair is abandoning the route. Bookings can still be made through 27-March.

It’s not a total loss. Ryanair is one of the Europe’s least loved budget airlines, is notorious for its hidden costs, fleeces customers with its own unique brand of currency conversion, and apparently lists ’surly’ as a requirement for their cabin crews. [Check out Ryanair Campaign for plenty of testimonials and this tidbit about Ryanair's surcharge for passengers traveling with excess 'emotional baggage'.]

Meanwhile, Wizz Air, the Hungary-based airline, flew it’s last Brussels-Charleroi flight out of Ljubljana on the 14th. There’s no word on whether service will be resumed. Slovenian dailies Delo and Vecer both reported last week that Wizz Air is looking into filling the void in Maribor.

About an hour after an interesting discussion Sunday afternoon about the charges brought against Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk –more about what the Nobel prize winner called a “freedom of expression issue” here– I tried to log on to this blog at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and this is what I saw:

No, the locals aren’t just picking on me. Apparently all wordpress sites have been blocked in Turkey. Anyone know exactly what set this off?

Updated: This was a quite recent development. No time to expand, but the reason is provided here [http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/08/19/why-were-blocked-in-turkey/], along with a lengthy debate.

As of Thursday 7 June, that is, with the long-anticipated service between Maribor (MBX), Slovenia’s second city, and London-Stansted (STN). Three flights weekly – Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I’m not a huge fan of RyanAir (although their flights can be memorable), but must concede that both cost and convenience may supercede principle –on occasion.

Cost: I just keyed in a few quick trips and this is what the RyanAir search engine spit out– A quick trip leaving Saturday 9 June, returning Tuesday the 12th came in at €72.28 round trip, taxes included. At the moment, Tuesday outbound and Tuesday return are the cheapest at €57.38 (w/ taxes), giving you an extra €14.90 to indulge yourself with should you spend an entire week in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

Convenience: To keep prices so ridiculously low, RyanAir oftentimes schedules flights at even more ridiculous hours. But with the Maribor flight, they’re quite reasonable. Departure from MBX is at 14:35, and departure from Stansted at 11:11, which generally means that your journey to the airport from northern London won’t have to begin in the pre-dawn hours.

Bear in mind that RyanAir charges for ALL checked bags (15 kg limit) –£5/€6 at time of online booking or £10/€12 at airport check-in–  while excess baggage fees begin at £5.50/€8 per kilo. With the latter, they’re annoyingly strict.

And somewhat related, an important note to Slovenian travelers who are still wondering –or still upset– about Easyjet’s cancellation last year of their Ljubljana – Berlin Shoenefeld flight: The cancellation had little to do with demand, since the flights operated at 90% + capacity. It was cancelled, according to an EasyJet employee I met last week on another flight, because passengers were not spending enough money on board. Those wildly overpriced cups of instant coffee and stale Mars bars are extremely important to the no-frills carriers’ bottom line. I’m sure RyanAir is no different.

And definitely related: RyanAir Campaign is a decent site that chronicles passenger’s problems for the airline that last October was voted the world’s most disliked carrier in a survey of TripAdvisor readers. 

Rec’d a note from easyJet today, telling me that I owed them money –5 GBP (7.42 EUR) to be precise– for a booking I made and paid for on 24 October.

It was to cover the newly-increased Air Passenger Duty (APD) announced in December by British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. The increase doubled the excise tax (aka departure tax) from £5 per trip to £10 for economy short-haul flights, from £20 to £40 for economy class long-haul flights, and from £40 to £80 for classes above economy. [It should be noted that this increase merely reversed a cut he made in 2001.] The increase is to take effect from 1 February 2007, but is also being applied retroactively to all flights purchased prior to 1 Feb.

Predictably, those in the airline industry weren’t too happy with the increase, while Green campaign groups have long called for the APD increase –along with the removal of enormous tax breaks that amount to £9 billion (13.3 bn EUR/17.3 bn USD) annually in the UK alone– and a decrease in flying.

A growing number of us know, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot points out, that flying isn’t particularly good but we do it anyway:

If we want to stop the planet from cooking, we will simply have to stop travelling at the kind of speeds that planes permit.

This is now broadly understood by almost everyone I meet. But it has had no impact whatever on their behaviour. When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.

According to OAG, a travel and transport information service, “the world’s scheduled airlines – including Low Cost Carriers – offered a record 3.3 billion seats (3,297,362,597) on 28.2 million flights (28,240,490) during 2006. That represents an average daily offer of over 9 million seats on 77,371 individual daily flights.”

Projections of how many flights will fly how many passengers next year, or the next, or by 2020 vary wildly –and I’m too lazy at the moment to track down an accurate figure– but suffice it to say that with airports expanding like shopping malls did in the American heartland in the 1970s, those numbers will go up dramatically. And surcharges such as my 7.42 EUR add-on fee and others like it won’t do a thing to keep me from flying. A tenfold increase in the APD probably wouldn’t keep me from flying. Not so long as I –and everyone else– am led to believe, and continue to believe, that I deserve to be able to fly from Ljubljana to London-Stansted, round-trip, for 72 77 EUR, tax included.

All U.S. passports issued after 1 January will come complete with an always-on radio frequency identification (RFID) chip, making if a cinch to retrieve personal info, both for border officials, as well as hackers.

You don’t like that sort of technology following you around? In a brief tutorial, Wired advises that you can simply take a hammer to it. According to USA Today, “If the chip is broken or malfunctions, the holder can continue to use the document as a non-electronic passport.”