My life as a flight coordinator

Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I worked for a couple years for a company that sells a whole lot of airline tickets and things like that. I had a card that said I was a travel agent, but in truth I was more of a web developer, webmaster, and systems administrator. But it was interesting, and I learned a lot about travel. I even did a little traveling for things like training, meeting with prospective vendors, and so on - maybe 25,000 to 35,000 miles a year. (If you think that's a lot, you probably haven't lived in Hawaii.) And I got to see some new places and people as a result - Portland, Atlanta, Austin, and George W. Bush.

That ended, a couple years passed, and I found myself doing some other things that required a bit more travel. 28,000 miles in the second half of 2004. 70,000 miles in 2005. 111,000 miles in 2006. 28,000 miles in the first quarter of 2007. And around the end of 2006, some of the other folks involved talked amongst themselves and decided that since I had an actual background in travel, and was good with the 'net, they should talk me into helping out with flight coordination for the others.

Sound good so far? Well, there were four minor things that complicated matters a wee bit:

First, lest the process become too simple, "the others" were about 60 people who came from 30 different countries. The inevitable visa issues were, thankfully, not my problem!

Second, to make things even more fun, a fair portion of them were working, studying, or just wandering around aimlessly in or between entirely different countries. And someone was always moving. Like the Swede who moved from Sri Lanka to Thailand. Or the Russian who moved from Australia to Kenya a month after that. Or the South African who moved from the Bay Area to the Southeast a month after that. "Where are you flying from, these days?" is a common conversation-starter.

Third, they needed to go a lot of different places. Even places you probably don't hear about unless you're in a geography bee. In the first few months I helped with flights there were teams on the ground in Buenos Aires, Dhaka, Montréal, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Nusa Dua, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Yaoundé. Do you know all three of those italicized ones without looking them up?  There were days where I booked over 100,000 miles of air travel for various people in a 24-hour period!

Fourth, like everyone else on the planet, they did have their preferences. "Aisle or window?" was merely the beginning. There were preferred airlines and alliances, which I can relate to completely as a frequent flyer. There were meal preferences, departure-time preferences, preferred airports to depart from. Many wanted to arrive early, stay late, or stop en route for sightseeing. And of course, there are the dislikes - certain people, myself included, simply loathe certain airlines and airports!

So it could be pretty interesting and pretty chaotic. But through extensive use of e-mail, instant messengers and VoIP, and a little occasional help from real travel agents we worked with in countries where it's just about impossible to find fares, I managed to get everyone where they needed to be, and most of them seemed happy that I was doing it.  I stayed with it for two and a half years, then handed the duties off to a teammate in the summer of 2009 so that I could focus on my full-time job and school.

Tools of the Flight Coordinator Trade

I have a lot of travel web sites bookmarked. Of course there are the usual airline sites, yawn, everyone knows about those. More interesting are the search sites and some of the supplemental information sites.

ITA Software QPX

ITA provides the back-ends for a bunch of travel web sites. This demonstration of the technology on their own web site doesn't sell tickets, but it does show what fares published by the airlines should theoretically be "out there" somewhere.

Kayak

Kayak.com doesn't sell tickets either, but it checks a whole bunch of airline websites and web fare search sites to come up with a huge comparison price list, which can then be narrowed down by price, time, airlines, and other factors.

Expedia

Expedia.com is the only major fare search site based in the US that will find fares originating in most other countries too - others tend to allow origins only in the US and a few other countries. It's also recently started offering delivery of paper tickets to several other countries, which is handy when e-tickets simply aren't available.

Cheap Tickets and Orbitz

Owned by the same company since 2001, these two brands now use the same technology - their web sites are different colors, but you'll notice very similar "more options" search menus. They usually have very similar prices, but sometimes an airline will put a special deal on just one or the other.

Travelocity

The oldest and to my eyes clunkiest of the sites, Travelocity.com still occasionally gets a good deal from one airline or another, so I check it "just in case." It's run by the same folks as the SABRE reservation system, which has ties to American Airlines.

Opodo

Opodo.co.uk is virtually unknown within the US - I was tipped off to it by a former co-worker who's now with Expedia. It's owned by a bunch of European airlines and Amadeus, the big reservation system there. It prices everything in pounds instead of dollars, but doesn't have to deal with US politics and can thus offer flights to countries US sites don't.

SeatGuru

Seatguru.com must be on-screen when doing seat selection. It's got the seat maps for every type of plane on every airline anyone cares about, with colors and annotations showing which seats are best or worst, and why. Also very handy for finding out whether your next flight has laptop power!

FlyerTalk

If there were a religion of frequent flyers... Flyertalk.com would be its Jerusalem. Everything you could possibly want to know (and probably a lot you couldn't possibly want to know) about every airline, airport, hotel chain, frequent-flyer program, reward credit card or whatever, out there.

FIeld & Stream 2-piece Solid Rainsuit

In January, I headed for the inauguration equipped with warm clothing, but I didn't own anything properly waterproof or windproof. My dad got me this jacket and pant rainsuit (thanks, Dad!) in case weather that day was inclement. It didn't end up raining, but there was a bit of a breeze, which this suit blocked handily.

Back home, I've had more opportunities to put it through its paces. My city is the rainiest in the USA (sorry, Seattle, we get four times as much rain as you), and I also frequently go up the mountains, where we get some high winds. Today, I wore the set over a t-shirt and shorts for my bicycle ride to work in scattered light rain, wore it again in cold and wind at 9,200 feet, and wore it again for my ride home in torrential rain, getting only my face and feet soaked - everything else stayed dry!

Since this rainsuit doesn't have vents or "breathe" a whole lot, it will feel hot if worn during physically strenuous activity somewhere warm, and since it isn't insulated, keeping warm somewhere very cold will still require a warm layer under it. Those are really the only caveats.

On the positive side, other than blocking wind and rain very well, it has a hood, diagonal pockets in the jacket, cargo pockets on the outsides of the pantlegs, a roomy fit for easy movement, lower leg zippers to make it easy to put on or take off over shoes, and pantleg cuff snaps to keep it out of my bicycle gears. 

You can find this set at Dick's Sporting Goods, typically for less than $80.

ESPN - the story of Jason McElwain

ESPN tells the inspiring story of Jason McElwain, an autistic teen who worked as manager of his school's varsity basketball team. In the final home game of the 2005-2006 season, coach Jim Johnson had McElwain suit up, and with 4 minutes to play and a comfortable lead, let him play.

McElwain went on to score 20 points in the final 3 minutes, 12 seconds of the game, going 7-for-13 and 6-for-10 from three-point range, and was the game's high scorer. Very cool story. 

What would we do without the internet?

 

The Power of a Wish, or, Little Sarah's Dream Comes True

The Make-A-Wish Foundation is a charitable organization that grants the wishes of children who will never have the chance to live their dreams, due to terminal or chronic illness or other debilitating conditions.  I greatly respect their efforts, and since a co-worker organizes tours and such for Make-A-Wish kids from time to time, I've been able to help out a little, once or twice.

I want to tell you the story of a special girl who dreamed big, and thanks to the people's generosity, got to have the experience of a lifetime.  Her name is Sarah.  But she's not a Make-a-Wish kid.  No, this girl is Sarah Palin, and she's the political version of a Make-a-Wish kid.  She knows there are some things she'll just never be able to do, and everyone around her knows it, but by golly, we're all going to make her dream come true, if only for a day.

End Poverty - Be the Generation

This video is about the newly launched "inmyname" campaign against poverty. I attended the star-studded launch event at Dag Hammarskjald Plaza in New York this morning. (It was star-studded because of who was there other than me.)

Why I don't really care about Bristol Palin

Lots of people, especially those in the media, are all excited about Bristol Palin, the daughter of Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and presumptive Republican nominee for Vice President, being pregnant.

There are one or two reasons for this excitement that are sensible enough.  First, Mrs. Palin has gone on the record as opposing teaching anything other than abstinence in sex ed, and, well, that kinda didn't work out in Bristol's case.  And a few people have glommed onto Mrs. Palin's statement that Bristol "chose" to keep the baby, in light of Mrs. Palin's stated position that abortion should be illegal in all cases except those where the mother's life is at risk.

But other commentators and pundits have pointed out that basically everyone in America has either gotten pregnant out of wedlock, or knows someone who has.  And I don't think that's far off the mark.  Heck, Barack Obama's parents got married after he was conceived, and Sarah Palin herself eloped with her husband (ostensibly "because they couldn't afford a big wedding") a month pregnant with her first son, Track.

In fact, between the two tickets (presuming McCain-Palin is the ticket), let's see... Biden's first wife and daughter were killed in a car crash and he was a single dad for a while; McCain's first wife was maimed in a car crash and he went off philandering and wound up with a beer heiress; Obama's dad ran off when he was a tot and only saw him again once in his whole life; Palin's got the abstinence-for-everyone-but-us vibe and a Down's baby; Obama was raised by his single mom and his grandmom; the McCains adopted a girl from Bangladesh or somewhere who hardly ever shows up in their family pictures...

Yeah, I get the feeling that the whole "family" issue isn't going to be a very valid way to compare these candidates.  Unless "compare" involves standing slack-jawed, pointing at the performers in a carnival side-show. :)

So yeah, I don't much care.  The only thing I've learned from all this is that I'm clearly unqualified to seek higher office, since my daughter didn't arrive until I'd been married for nearly three years.