..idle writings from an idle mind..

US Customs and Border Protection press release

Kinda surprising that it’s been free as long as it has. Basically, if you’re travelling to the US under the Visa Waiver Program, you’ll have to pay USD 14 to obtain the electronic travel authorisation to do so. The authorisation lasts for two years.

Somewhat annoyed by the bulk of the fee ($10) going to a marketing program – I mean, if I’m already paying money to visit the US, why am I paying to convince other people to do the same?

Quick iPhone App review – OnTheFly by ITA Software, the genius behind the fare shopping engine that many airlines use (and they’re nice enough to make it available to the public – try it out for yourself!)

The app allows you to search for fares from A to B, and allows you to define up to three airports at each end – this can help uncover fares you mightn’t have otherwise considered; e.g., flying to London could mean going to LHR, but you might find a better fare going to LGW or (heaven forfend) STN – all of them are about as inconvenient as each other in getting in to London proper, so worth considering if London is your final destination.

You can drill down further by dates (with possibly one of the best date selectors I’ve ever seen), number of pax, departure/arrival times, stops, cabin and a few other things besides. The one annoying thing is that it only offers whY/J/F cabins to be selected – no whY+.

The search results can be rearranged a number of ways – once you’ve chosen outbound/inbound flights, you can then see the flight and fare details – the fare output is particularly good as you see the underlying booking class and fare used to price up the flight, including a full breakdown of taxes and surcharges. Nice!

All in all a great app – while it would have been nice to see options for searching multi-stop fares, for the pricetag you really can’t complain .. a definite must for anyone wanting to see what fares and options are actually available without bias from airlines or travel agents!

Finally managed to get around to trying Qantas’ mobile check-in function that has been rolled out across their domestic network.

First attempt at using it failed abysmally. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but for my flight MEL/BNE I got an error that it was unable to complete mobile check-in, so I had to resort to getting a boarding card at the airport.

The flight back BNE/MEL was a success — having already preselected my favourite economy seat a few days before, I went to the Qantas iPhone site and logged in to my account, selected the booking, tapped the check-in button and confirmed that I would not be carrying knitting needles on board. The end result was a SMS with a weblink which brought up a large 2D barcode (out of interest, it appears to be an Aztec Code), along with other basic flight details (name, status, seat, class, flight, date and so on).

At the airport, the phone is scanned at the gate. Apparently QF staff are under instruction to not touch the phone — you have to hold it under the scanner yourself. Scanning takes a second or so, and a docket with all of the relevant information gets spat out of a thermal printer.

There is a known gotcha in that mobile check-in doesn’t allow for seat selection — this would be a deal breaker for most (lucky dip seating anyone?), but those that have attained oneworld status with Qantas are able to select seats prior to check-in on the Qantas website.

The verdict? Surprisingly decent. If they could fix it such that seat selection is possible (and allow multiple attempts at checking in, in case you wanted to see if a better seat had become available), then I’d happily use this all the time. For now, I’ll stick to using it when I’ve been able to secure a good seat ahead of time.

It seems Qantas are finally getting around to introducing frequent flyer membership cards with a chip embedded in them, in a technology marketing maneuver they’re calling “Intelligent Q”. A fluffy e-mail arrived in my inbox this morning telling me how wonderful it would be – I’d touch my card to a reader at the airport and be automagically checked in for my flight.

2010 and this is leading edge tech? Anyway, Air New Zealand have had this running for some time now, so it’s not quite the feat that Qantas would have everyone believe.

The e-mail goes on to say that the rollout begins at PER domestic on the 28th of July, with other domestic ports to be rolled out later in the year.

A nice little update to Velocity was spotted over on the AFF forums today; Velocity members now earn status credits when flying with EK and MH on qualifying fares.

Of course — finding fares that qualify is a right pain in the ass. The online booking tools for both EK and MH don’t show fare codes for a selected fare, so there’s no easy way of telling whether a given fare will earn Velocity anything. Both Expedia and Zuji are similarly useless, so would definitely need to see a travel agent to be sure.

Fingers crossed that this will expand to offering premium check-in and lounge access on both of these carriers .. EK in particular, as I quite enjoyed flying with them last time. Looks like the status match I got myself is starting to become useful!

- zac.