A Bed and a Parking Spot
The latest case study interview being given at McKinsey has nothing on this dilemma: Early morning flight. Airport 100 miles away. Need place to park wheels long-term, preferably for free. Hmmm …
Waking up in the middle of the night to catch the flight is happily not the only option. Business travelers are increasingly taking advantage of various airport hotels' park, sleep, and fly packages, says Tom Lombardi, president of www.parksleepfly.com, which has seen its online reservation business triple since it was created in January 2002.
The trend was fueled by the events of September 11. Air travel fell by 25 percent, and airport hotels, hit particularly hard, had to look at other ways of attracting local business, he explains. "Also, the proliferation of low-cost carriers started drawing people from wider areas. People started driving 150 miles to take Southwest or JetBlue."
Business travelers, who tend to take early morning flights, are taking advantage of these packages because they get a solid night's sleep before their flight, hitch a ride on the hotel's shuttle service to the airport, and get to park their cars in the hotel's parking lot for up to 14 days for free or for a small fee. On the road warriors' return, they take the hotel shuttle back to the hotel parking lot, get in their cars, and head for home.
"In many cases, it's cheaper than parking at the airport parking garage," says Lombardi, who also heads www.airportparkingreservations.com. For example, the site was listing a Wyndham Hotel deal at $99 a night with free parking up to 14 days. By the way, it costs $20 a day to park at O'Hare Airport.
Flying Low
A new policy introduced at a large, publicly held firm has its consultants up in arms. Now, consultants who are contracted by a client for six months or more will have to pay state income taxes related to the client's state as well as the consultant's state of residence. Accounting procedures to "make up" for the difference in income do not ease the new burden of responsibility, they tell us.
Flying Highs
CSC consultants say they have one perk that may seem trivial but spares them headaches in the long run: They do not have to submit receipts for expenses under $25.
A Summer Job Finally Pays Off
On an American Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Booz Allen Hamilton's Marty Bollinger, a senior vice president, sat in first class next to a middle-age woman who looked vaguely familiar. When he asked her what she did, she responded, "I'm an actress and a producer."
After he asked her if he would recognize her name, she responded, "Lee Grant."
"I immediately replied with, 'Oh, you won the Oscar for Shampoo in 1975,'" writes Bollinger, 46. "This bit of trivia was available to me only because I was a theater usher in 1975 and saw the movie Shampoo at least 20 times — not that it was ever one of my favorites."
Grant, clearly pleased, thought that she had been seated next to a movie junkie — not a former employee of the Hartford Mall Cinemas in Bel Air, MD, who earned $1.70 an hour back then.
Bollinger adds: "Unfortunately, when she learned what my career was, the level of interest declined considerably."
How to Keep a Royal Flush
If the world's barons, countesses, duchesses, and princes — not to mention swamis — were feeling a bit slighted by the planet's egalitarian societies, not to worry: American Airlines has preserved a vestige of an earlier age.
When purchasing a ticket at the airline's Web site, future fliers can choose from among 76 different honorifics what to put before their name, as first reported in ThisIsBroken.com. Why stop at boring Mister and Missus when you can have Lord and Lady — valid options at AA.com — before your name? This alone may be reason enough to choose AA over its competitors. Delta, for example, offers travelers a paltry list of humdrum titles.
So what prompted American to create such an expansive list? Did Charles and Camilla try to book their honeymoon online and become bereaved over the common moniker Mr. & Mrs. Windsor? If there was a juicy story to be told, company spokesman Billy Sanez was not about to spill, citing privacy issues.
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