Airfares: The return of an annoying rule

I was recently speaking with some cruise industry experts, and they shared with me the following cruise booking tips: Mike Driscoll, editor of Cruise Week, says: “Generally speaking one doesn't need to book six months in advance for a short hop Caribbean cruise out of Miami; there's space available one month out in most cases except the peak summer season. But if booking a European cruise, the traveler is best served by booking a minimum of five months in advance. At issue here is not only the cost of the cruise, but the cost of airfare to Europe; it's already high by historical standards and predictions are space will be minimal.” Paul Motter, editor of CruiseMates, the online guide to cruise travel, says: "The best prices on ships can be found by being flexible with dates. The same exact ship, cabin and itinerary may vary as much as 40 percent based on sail date availability alone." For example, Motter recently checked out cruisedeals.com and found that a seven-night trip to Bermuda on Norwegian Cruise Line costs $749 for a Sunday, June 1 departure, compared to $1,419 for a Sunday, July 6 sailing in the same interior cabin class. You can also save money if you drive, instead of fly, to your departure port. For tips on how to do that at five "drive-up ports," see our story Take a Cruise Without Getting On an Airplane. And here's a tip from Budget Travel's How to Travel Now guide: Let cruise brokers fight over you CruiseCompete.com is a website where you post info on the cruise you want to take, and then agents bid against each other to get your business. You're under no obligation to buy anything if you don't like what you see.

A new agreement will make it easier to fly to Australia. But prices aren't likely to drop anytime soon. That's because there are no Australian or U.S. airlines that have planes on hand to launch new routes this year. An Open Skies agreement goes into effect soon after its formal signing this year, allowing U.S. and Australian airlines to operate transpacific flights between any cities they like. V Australia, a soon-to-be-born spinoff of Virgin Blue, the discount carrier spawned by Richard Branson, could operate cheap flights between Sydney-Honolulu or Sydney-New York City. V Australia expects to have 10 weekly frequencies between the countries once it debuts at the end of this year. U.S. airline Hawaiian may also start offering flights, but it needs to increase its plane capacity first. Up until now, only United and Qantas could offer direct flights. Now other airlines will be able to get into the fray and set prices and routes at will. But, as the blog Global Traveller has noted, Singapore Airlines and Emirates have been shut out of this deal, even though their entry could have lowered prices. Sigh. [A similar accord will open up flights into and out of Heathrow, England. For a long time, American and British Airways had special rights to gates at Heathrow--but the gates are being opened up to other airlines this March.]

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today about the trend of hotels fining guests up to $250 for being caught smoking in a non-smoking room. As long as the policy is clearly spelled out for people, that seems reasonable. But if the Swissotel Chicago really is giving housekeepers "a $10 bonus for every smoker they catch" (in the WSJ's words), I'm creeped out. Does anyone really want housekeeping to be incentivized to sift through guests' trash?

Amtrak is officially announcing today that it'll begin random searches of passengers' carry-on bags—the system is modeled after the one used in New York City subway stations. Does this strike anyone else as a waste of time and money, or worse, something that's bound to lead to racial profiling? If the system really is random, can Amtrak truly expect to catch someone planning a terrorist attack? And if it's not random, then how will the security screeners decide who to search? What are the odds they'd single out someone like, say, Timothy McVeigh? As much as I don't like the TSA screening process at airports, I feel a heck of a lot safer on an airplane than I do riding the New York City subway every day to and from work.