Do-It-Yourself China

Our anonymous confessor has worked as both a ticket agent and a departure-gate agent for a major airline. He has since left the industry. NO TRAINING New airline ticket and departure-gate agents are hard to find these days. Not only are the wages awful, but flying for free—the one perk of the job—is becoming virtually impossible because planes are always packed with paying customers. To save money, many airlines also aren't giving new employees the same job training they once received, leaving inexperienced agents on the front line to deal with passenger complaints. Once, on a trip I took after I had stopped working as a ticket agent, I had to show a new hire where to look in the system to find my reservation—she had no idea what she was doing. CUT OFF The airline I worked for had a very antiquated computer system. We had about a dozen operating systems in the company. There were separate systems for mapping flight routes, filing lost-luggage claims, and keeping track of reservations—but not all of them could relay data to each other. To top it all off, the computers at the departure gates didn't have Internet access. The popular belief among disgruntled travelers that gate agents purposely keep passengers in the dark about flight delays isn't really true—sometimes the agent is the last one to know what's going on. GOOD BEHAVIOR It used to be that if you tried a little smooth talking or even brought a cookie to the gate agent, you might be able to score an upgrade. Not anymore. Because the airlines are increasingly focused on the bottom line, free upgrades are incredibly hard to come by. Still, it pays to be nice to the agents: After a few kind words, they may go out of their way to reroute you on a partner airline if your flight is delayed. I turned on the charm myself one time when I was facing a long delay on the way to the Caribbean. Smiling politely, I went to a partner airline's ticket counter and asked the agent to please re­route me. Several hours later, I was lying on the beach, sipping a tropical drink. PERSONAL INFO Ticket agents are always updating Passenger Name Records, or PNRs—these computer files, which contain basic details on passengers' trips, are accessible to most agents at check-in counters and departure gates. Agents generally use PNRs to record special requests by passengers, but sometimes they also comment on a person's behavior. A friend of mine discovered this after she had a heated argument with a ticket agent about getting an upgrade on a flight to London. When she reached her gate and inquired again, the agent remarked on her "inappropriate behavior" at check-in, and my friend was stuck with her economy-class seat. The details in PNRs are also fodder for airline-employee gossip, especially when shocking behavior is involved. Passengers once complained about a woman breast-feeding her Chihuahua (I kid you not) on board a flight, and an airport supervisor in the arrival city put the incident in her PNR. Within hours, a gate agent came upon the PNR and shared it with countless other agents across the country. In fact, my former colleagues and I still talk about it to this day!

At a noteworthy new website, Zicasso, travel agents and tour operators bid for your business. Here's how it works: You describe what you're looking for—flights, lodging, excursions, transfers, whatever—and within a few days, you'll receive up to four competing trip itineraries. You can ignore them (the matching process is free), request changes to the itineraries, or proceed with one (you pay the agent directly). The service works for countries all around the world.

1. TRIPQUALITY DASHBOARD InsideTrip starts with 12 basic categories to tabulate a flight's TripQuality score. To customize a search, just unclick the factors in the dashboard that aren't important to you and then click Recalculate TripQuality. (If you only have a carry-on bag, for instance, you won't care about the airline's lost-luggage ranking.) The site, unfortunately, doesn't take into account everything that affects a flight experience—you can't select amenities like seat-back TVs or other in-flight entertainment options. Some of the factors used to determine the score, meanwhile, seem less relevant than others, such as the historical load factor (the average percentage of seats occupied on the airline's flights a year before the booking date). Most flights run at near-full capacity these days anyway. 2. BOOKING A FLIGHT If you want to buy a ticket, InsideTrip directs you to Orbitz. Keep in mind, though, that Orbitz charges a fee of $5 to $13 (InsideTrip factors in the fee), so you may want to buy the ticket on the airline's website instead. Orbitz and InsideTrip search the same airlines, including some (but not all) international carriers. The only major domestic airline the two sites don't search is Southwest. 3. CONNECTION TIME One of the most user-friendly features of the site is the bar showing exactly how long you'll be sitting in an airport during a layover. (Move your cursor over the bar to make layover details appear in a box.) To eliminate flights with long layovers, adjust the tabs on the Connection Time ruler on the left side of the page, and the site will quickly refine the search results. 4. EASE RATINGS A lot of the data on the site isn't available anywhere else. InsideTrip researched gate locations at major airports, for example, because one of the factors it uses to determine a flight's ease is whether you have to take a bus or a train to reach the gate. For connection times, the website considers between 45 and 90 minutes to be ideal; a flight loses TripQuality points if a layover is longer or if it's so brief that you risk missing your connecting flight. 5. OVERALL SCORE InsideTrip uses statistics from the government and the airlines, as well as its own research on flights, to determine the TripQuality ratings. The best possible TripQuality score is 100, but perfection is nearly impossible. Great flights receive scores from the mid-80s to the 90s. Some factors are weighed more heavily than others in determining the final tally—nonstops, for one, generally score much higher than flights with layovers. The top score on this route was an 85 for a nonstop flight on Northwest. Whether it's worth $357 is your call.

Joining Starwood's Aloft and InterContinental's Indigo in the craze to make hotel chains hip is another boutique brand with a quirky name: NYLO. "Our guests drive Mini Coopers, fly JetBlue, and drink Starbucks," says CEO John Russell. "We're tapping into a certain lifestyle." Rooms have a loftlike aesthetic, but initially, the hotels will be in some rather surprising markets. The first NYLO property just opened in Plano, Tex.; the second one is set to open this summer in Warwick, R.I.