AirAsia Leads Contenders for Budgies Awards

The World Low Cost Airlines Congress has announced the names of the LCC carriers nominated for this year’s Budgies Awards .

The Congress takes place at the Sofitel, London Heathrow, on September 19-21.

The finalists are:

Best Low Cost Airline

1. Air Asia
2. Indigo
3. Jetstar Airways
4. Cebu Pacific Air
5. Air Arabia
6. Spring Airlines
7. Skymark
8. Ryanair

Best Airport

1. Marseille
2. Sharjah
3. Kuala Lumpur
4. Copenhagen
5. GMR Hyderabad
6. Ibaraki (near Tokyo)
7. Changi

Best Website

1. Ryanair
2. Vueling
3. Air Asia
4. Iceland Express
5. Germanwings
6. Wizzair
7. Pegasus
8. Allegiant
9. Norwegian

CEO of the Year

1. Azran Osman-Rani, AirAsia X
2. Lance Gokongwei/ Garry Kingshott, Cebu Pacific
3. Aditya Ghosh/Rahul Batia, Indigo
4. Tony Fernandes, AirAsia
5. Ben Baldanza, Spirit Airlines
6. Carolyn McCall, easyJet

Technology Foresight Award

1. Cybersource
2. RED
3. Optiontown
4. EzRez
5. Star Alliance apps

Best Ancillary Revenue Innovation

1. Ink
2. AirBaltic
3. Vueling
4. Spirit
5. SkyExpress
6. Qantas

Best Sales and Distribution Innovation

1. Navitaire
2. Virgin Australia - Delta codeshare
3. Virgin – Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand and Etihad
4. easyJet
5. Radixx

Airlines Pacesetter Award

1. Air Asia X
2. Vueling
3. Spring
4. Wizz Air
5. Skymark

(Source: Travelmole.com)

All Blacks and All White in New Zealand

New Zealand is set for an extended ski season this year, with predictions that the ski-fields will be open and operational up until mid-October.

After a slow start to the season, New Zealand has enjoyed an abundant snowfall throughout winter’s latter months leaving ski fields in both the North and South Islands in good shape for an extended season.

A large portion of this snowfall is the direct result of the country’s heaviest snow storm in 50 years which occurred in mid-August - coating ski fields across the country.

The spring ski-season also aligns with the largest international sporting event of the year – Rugby World Cup 2011 being hosted in New Zealand for six weeks commencing September 9.

Favourites for the tournament are the New Zealand All Blacks.

James Coddington, CEO of NZ Ski, said that “we have been thrilled with the support of Australians this season, and expect to see more Aussies on the slopes in spring as they add another layer of excitement to their Rugby World Cup experiences”.

(Source: Travelmole.com)

Find NZ Accommodation on Metrostar.com

Auckland Christchurch Wellington

Dunedin Hamilton Lower Hutt Napier New Plymouth Palmerston North Queenstown Rotorua Takapuna Tauranga Wanganui Whangarei

The Fastest Method to Board your Plane

The most common way of boarding passenger planes is among the least efficient, tests have shown.

The BBC reports that boarding those in window seats first followed by middle and aisle seats results in a 70 percent gain in efficiency.

However, an approach called the Steffen method, alternating rows in the window-middle-aisle strategy, nearly doubles boarding speed.

The approach is named after Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois. Dr Steffen first considered the thorny problem of plane boarding in 2008, when he found himself in a long boarding queue.

He carried out a number of computer simulations to determine a better method than the typical "rear of the plane forwards" approach, publishing the results in the Journal of Air Transport Management.

Several authors had already proposed an order in which those seated in window seats boarded first, followed by middle seats and then aisle seats - dubbed the Wilma method. But Dr Steffen's best results suggested a variant of this.

He suggested boarding in alternate rows, window seats first, progressing from the rear forward: seats 12A, for example, followed by 10A, 8A and so on, then returning for 9A, 7A, 5A and so on, and then filling the middle and aisle seats in the same way.

The approach avoids a situation in which passengers are struggling to use the same physical space at the same time.

Only now, though, has the idea been put to the test. Jon Hotchkiss, a television producer, tested the idea using a mock-up of a 757 plane in Hollywood and 72 luggage-toting volunteers.

The pair tested five different scenarios: "block" boarding in groups of rows from back to front, one by one from back to front, the "Wilma method", the Steffen method, and completely random boarding.

In all cases, parent-child pairs were permitted to board first - reflecting the fact that regardless of the efficiency of any boarding method, families will likely want to stay together.

The block approach fared worst, with the strict back-to-front approach not much better.

Interestingly, a completely random boarding - as practised by several low-cost airlines that have unallocated seating - fared much better, presumably because it randomly avoids space conflicts.

But the Wilma method and the Steffen method were clear winners; while the block approach required nearly seven minutes to seat the passengers, the Steffen method took just over half that time.

(Source: Travelmole.com)

Do Tea Drinkers Get The Short End Of The Hotel Stick?

Coffee coffee everywhere, and not a drop to drink...

When it comes to standard hotel amenities, coffee makers rank up there with pillows, a working toilet, soap. Basic. But for many of us, a bowl of instant coffee packets is about as useful as a hairbrush to a bald person. When it comes to in-room tea options, we've found some hotels to be quite lacking.

Take a look at most in-room tea and coffee amenities and what will you find?. Plenty of coffee! But where's the tea?

Nevermind the inconvenience of trekking to the nearest cafe for an early morning jolt when equally-in-need coffee drinkers can simply reach across their nightstand but it also raises an uglier question. What should be considered an essential hotel room amenity?

Surely, if someone took the time to fold the tip of our toilet paper roll, artfully sealing it with a small hotel-branded sticker, then that person probably had enough time to drop a few bags of Twining's English Breakfast on our desk. No?

Cabin Crew Unfolds Most Unusual Customer Requests

The task of handling Customers and adhering to all their requests is not a matter of joke, more so, if the demands are completely bizarre. Customers right to good hospitality and comfort are the things that they look forward to in a holiday. It is the natural duty of the cabin crew of every airline to look into the needs of the customers and fulfill every possible logical wish. However, there are instances when the cabin crew has to face mind-boggling requests from passengers in flights to which no one can possibly have answers.

Frequent Funny Questions

3000 Virgin Atlantic flight attendants disclose certain questions encountered by them rather frequently. It is quite interesting to note that passengers who fly from one city to another have no ideas about the necessity of windows in an airplane. The most pressing and foolish query faced by cabin crew is "Please can you open the window?” Travelers fail to realize the importance of a pressurized cabin at 35,000 feet.

Another hilarious query is "Could you turn the engines down because they are too noisy?” forgetting the ensuing result of turning down the engines, or requesting to ask the captain stop the turbulence outside. The levels of comfort expected by flyers on board are magnanimous, as they demand for massage parlors and MacDonald’s in flight. Even they have huge imagination of vacant space inside a plane as one lady asked an attendant, to escort her children to the playroom.

Customer relation’s manager of Virgin Atlantic, Caroline Lynam, confirms that they extend maximum service to their passengers but such requests are too challenging to handle.

(Source: Hotelresortinsider.com)

Would You Pay $999 A Night To Get Away From Irene?

A trendy Brooklyn hotel generated a flood of cash from Irene, jacking up the price of a room to $999 a night on Saturday as the powerful storm zeroed in on New York, employees said.

Hotel Le Bleu on Fourth Ave. in Park Slope upped the rates from its typical $250 a night as people poured in looking for a dry place to rest.

"It was just because of high demand," said an employee, who would not give her name. "A lot of hotels did that."

But about 10 blocks away, at the Fairfield Inn & Suites on Third Ave., the rates remained unchanged from the usual $240 a night.

An employee at the Fairfield Inn said about 30% of the guests who arrived there Saturday night were people seeking shelter from Irene's torrential rains, but none of them was charged a premium rate.

A Hotel Le Bleu employee reached by phone, who would not give her name, said the high prices didn't slow business at the hotel with the distinctive exterior bathed in blue light.

"If you can pay, then it's on you," she said.

"There was a lady that booked two nights at that rate."

A Welcome Note You Don't Want To Find In Your Hotel

Here is one of the most interesting (and possibly upsetting) Welcome Note we have ever seen from a Hotel.

It is definitely not the kind of thing you want to see in the information kit in your hotel room: a notice informing you that mosquito nets are available at the front desk.

What makes it worse is that this wasn’t the steamy jungles of Africa or a monsoonal Asian city. This was from a hotel room in Belgium. Bruges may be the prettiest town in Belgium, but that means nothing to the “mossies”.

From all reports, most guests emerge unscathed after their stay at the Grand Hotel Casselbergh, so it appears the hotel may just be being a little over-protective of its guests. Better safe than sorry, I guess.