I’ve been reading a lot about the plans by British Airways to begin charging for those who’d like to select their seat.  Here’s a BBC story on the subject:

British Airways passengers will have to pay to choose their seats before they travel from October, the airline says.

The charges will affect those seeking to ensure they sit together on a flight and people with a preference for window, aisle or emergency exit seats.

Prices range from £10 per person for European economy flights, to £60 for long haul trips in business class.

via BBC NEWS | UK | British Airways sets seat charges.

I say bring it on.

I much prefer the option choice.  If it’s just a 50 minute flight to Scotland, then fine, I’ll sit wherever I’m allocated.  But if it’s more than a few hours, I’d like to select my seat.  And I’ll happily pay extra for that privilege.  Because it means I get to skip the virtual scrum, 24 hours before the flight departs — and because it means I don’t need to get to the airport early.

I’m also a big fan of upgrading at the airport anyway.  For instance, Virgin America offer a brilliant discount if you’d like to upgrade at the gate — $100 gets you upgraded to their ‘premium economy’ whilst $250 gets you upgraded to their first class offering (which is simply fantastic).  That’s typically a $600 saving over the ‘list’ price if you bought online.

I like the control that comes with this kind of price choice.  If you’re on a budget, sit wherever you’re told.  If you’d like to choose 10D, because it’s on the aisle/near the loo/whatever, then stump up the extra cash and it’s yours.

I was standing waiting for my bag at the airport at Stuttgart when I noticed a witch hat on top of a green bag in the queue on the baggage conveyor.

My attention was piqued.

Who the hell would travel with a witch hat stuck to their green suitcase?

Heh.

I looked as the case came by me…

It’s an advert — or a ‘prop advert’ — for the musical, Wicked.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant marketing. I reckon they must just chuck these into each of the arriving baggage queues. Very smart.

This is absolute tip-top flipping genius! Look at this!

Pony up $599 and you can fly anywhere you like on JetBlue’s network between September 8th and October 8th.

And that’s it.

No catches.

You’ll need to pay the annoying taxes which, apart from flying to Puerto Rico, will set you back roughly $15ish plus a second bag fee of $30.

Still, it’s an absolute genius offer. I love the innovation.

You know, I might even consider doing a non-stop MIR Mixer mobile event tour of every US city served by JetBlue. (And that’s quite a lot)

I wonder how long it’ll take the likes of RyanAir or Easyjet here in the UK to introduce something similar?

All the details are on JetBlue’s site: http://www.jetblue.com/deals/all-you-can-jet/

I arrived in at Heathrow yesterday and headed over to the official London taxi stand.

I expected this last bit of my globe-trotting journey to be reasonably run-of-the-mill.

There was an officious looking chap in a high visibility jacket holding some kind of electronic gizmo at the top of the queue. He asked me for my destination.

“Chiswick,” I said, thinking it was rather cool Heathrow Airport had finally implemented some kind of taxi master / wrangler to organise things.

The taxi driver at the top of the queue got out and asked me, “Where to mate?”

“Chiswick,” I said again, whilst the officious chap fiddled with his machine.

“Where in Chiswick?” the taxi driver asked. I gave him the name of the road.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“Well,” I replied, “I don’t exactly know, but I have it on Google Maps.”

Stupid.

“Yeah, it’s just I’ve been waiting here for quite a while,” the taxi driver continued, “and that’s not a big fare you see.”

I looked at the guy.

I waited for him to say something.

“It’s just, if you actually want to go to Chiswick, I don’t get a ticket right.”

I gave him another stare.

“But if where you want to go is a bit further away, I’ll need to come back and join the end of the queue.”

What a total arse.

Here I am, waiting to give the guy no-doubt ridiculous amounts of money for a short taxi ride and he’s really concerned with losing his spot in the taxi queue.

Total arse.

Once again, a brilliant example of the self-serving couldn’t-give-a-toss-about-you service culture in Britain.

I eventually got out Google Maps, pointed to the exact location and the Taxi Driver jumped with glee.

“See,” he said, thrusting my iPhone at the official with the gizmo, “That means I get a ticket to come back to the front of the queue, right?”

The official nodded.

The taxi driver grinned and walked round and jumped in the front of the cab.

Meanwhile I lifted my own sodding bags into the taxi and we headed off.

Bollocks. Total bollocks.

I’m heading back to San Francisco on Monday. If you’d like to meet whilst I’m there — I’m particularly interested in profiling mobile developers for Mobile Developer TV, drop me a note! I’m ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv.

I made a decision a while ago to use British Airways as my carrier of choice.

I applied for the Virgin Flying Club card — and I flew them to the CTIA Las Vegas show in March. I closely evaluated spending the extra thousand pounds on an Upper Class experience, but eventually decided I’d get more use out spending the same amount on a new Mac Pro workstation and screens. I enjoyed the general Virgin Atlantic service but I was extremely surprised to find an antiquated entertainment system that ‘rolled’ videos. It wasn’t on-demand. You had to wait for a film or TV show to finish and then loop in order to watch stuff. For someone who rarely sleeps on-board, lining up a series of movies, on-demand, is one of the best ways of eating up the 11 hours it takes from London to San Francisco. Despite being a big fan of Mr Branson I wasn’t that impressed with the on-board service.

So I’ve been flying British Airways more and more often though. I’ve been finding their pricing pretty competitive and we used them for a lot of the European jaunts for Mobile Industry Review recently.

For the first time I began clocking up airmiles.

I simply never bothered until recently. I either didn’t fly enough or I was carrier agnostic — I’m still in some degree of mourning at the failure of MaxJet/SilverJet (Those services were phenomenal — £800 return to Los Angeles in a business class seat? Nice!)

Every British Airways flight I’ve been on has, generally speaking, been expertly staffed — and the entertainment has been brilliant.

I’ve experienced the odd delay but, well, what can you do about that? Provided the priority is always safety, I’m fine — and I just take a very big book just in case the iPhone battery wears down unexpectedly.

I was quite disappointed on Saturday though. Severely. I was trying to check-in for my British Airways flight back to England using my T-Mobile G1 Android handset. The main page worked. I clicked straight in from the reminder email and browsed the site.. but when I tried to bring up the check-in window, that failed on the G1. I think it’s because the system generated a new window and didn’t maintain a persistent connection — so when the new window opened, I just saw the main BA homepage and not the available seats.

I took out my frustration on Twitter.

I gather Terence from Vodafone had a similar experience this morning — Lisa Whelan pointed this out on Twitter.

And then British_Airways jumped in with a reply:

@lisawhelan @edent @ew4n thanks for letting us know – i’ll pass this on

Bring it on!

It is nice to feel like you’re being listened to, eh? I’m hoping that the web team at British Airways are going to get this feedback soon and do something about it. Why no mobile version of BA? Or… an iPhone app, maybe?

I hopped on a British Airways flight from San Francisco at 430pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 11am on Sunday.

It was a reasonably enjoyable experience arriving into Terminal five. There was a short walk to immigration and a short queue there too. Very strange.

“What city have you come from?” the chap asked me.

Given that the whole plane had disembarked from San Francisco at that 400 people now queuing up were going to give the same answer, I didn’t think that was a particularly challenging question.

“San Francisco,” I responded — with a smile.

“OK,” the chap said, handing me back my passport. Alright then. That works.

After a good night’s sleep, I’m ready to rock. I’ve got a ton of meetings and interviews this week.

If you’d like to meet in London, shoot me a mail — the best is ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.

… You should wear some flowers in your hair. That’s what the song says, but I’m not going to. I don’t think my hair is ever long enough to support flowers. There’s a lot going on again. I’m now going through another excessively busy period after a relatively simple CTIA here in Las Vegas.

Instead of heading back to London today, I’m taking a US Airways Jet over to SFO. Bring it on. It’ll be good to be back in the City By The Bay. It’s been almost 6 months since I was there!