I’ve been intrigued with gosimply for some time and decided to try it today. The promise is inviting:

Relax in 1st class comfort and treat yourself to an executive airport lounge. From £13.50 per person
With 97 airport lounges across 38 countries we guarantee you’ll find the right lounge at the best prices.
Each airport lounge is uniquely designed and offers a haven of calm away from the airport crowds.
Enjoy some V.I.P treatment whether you’re on business or that much deserved holiday break!

I arrived at the airport a whopping 4.5 hours before my Alaska Airlines flight from Newark to Seattle was due to depart. (My intent was to get an exit row seat no matter what…) Due to weather issues, my flight from Newark to Seattle was delayed by 3.5 hours, so I had plenty of time on my hands. I thought it would be a great time to try out one of the services that (for a fee) can get you into an airline lounge. Here is my experience with gosimply:

1. Logged into gosimply.com and entered the airport and date/time of flight. The system responded with availability in one of the several President’s Club lounges. One was in the same building I was — and in the concourse adjacent to my flight. (2 minutes.)
2. Got a quote that for £20.00 (pounds?? wha…? No auto-detect of locale?) I could get a pass for 3 hours. Google tells me that converts to $32.00. I go for it. I enter my charge card data and I get a confirmation screen and an email of same. The system tells me repeatedly to “print” it. Hmmm. Might this be a problem down the road? I ponder… No matter, I can show them the email onscreen, and can forward it to them as required.
   (2 minutes.)
3. Headed for the Lounge. Wait in the security line. When I hit the point that they are reviewing my ticket, they won’t let me go any further since my plane departs from a gate on another concourse. They don’t care about what my laptop says. They insist I go back to the Continental desk and get a “gate pass.”
   (7 minutes.)
4. Waited in line at Continental counter.
   (10 minutes.)
5. Talked to counter agent. She had no idea what gosimply was or what I was talking about. Calls the President’s Club. They have never heard of me or my lounge booking. They think for some reason that I think that I have reserved a conference room. After some back and forth they say come on out, and I better bring a printout as pixels are meaningless to them. Forget emailing it, as THEY HAVE NO PRINTER(!) My impression is that they don’t get reimbursed unless I provide them with an atom-based representation. Luckily, I have an efax account, so I say “hey, can I fax you a copy?” They say that is fine and that I should bring my Pet Shop Boys cassettes with me. I head to the gate with my gate pass.
   (15 minutes.)
6. Show up at the lounge. Am greeted by what the Wall Street Journal used to call a “Bully Broad.” She has never heard of gosimply. As I get on wifi to fax my confirmation — she and her cohorts Patty, and Selma unceremoniously reject at least two other prospective entrants with a hearty “no lounge for you!!” Their Platinum cards are meaningless here. It’s clear to me that I better get her the damn printout. I send the efax email and sit down in a lobby chair.
   (5 minutes.)
7. Wait. After several minutes I realize they are not paying any attention to me, and may have even forgotten about my existence. No one is jumping up and telling me the magic fax has landed or not. I also notice that because of the weather, the lounge is starting to fill up. As I get up to inquire if the fax has arrived, I realize that if it has not, I will be forced back out into the utter hell that is the main concourse. Instead, I carefully slink unnoticed into the nirvana that is the President’s Club.
   (5 minutes.)

And here I sit. I have a glass of Stags Leap Artemis before me and am typing this in a well-lit luxury cubicle in a comfortable office chair. I have ample power and all the potato chips I can ingest. The internet access is fast and free. I believe I see a former T.V. newswoman sitting at the bar and have playful banter with what looks like a Fortune 500 CEO. In a nutshell, life is good.

The bottom line is that if you try gosimply, I suggest you:

• Buy your lounge time before you leave home, so you can print it.
• Realize that you may have to get in line to acquire a gate pass before you head to the lounge.
• Be prepared for no one in power having any idea what you are talking about when you show them the piece of paper that grants you access.

It turns out that in most cases, the free membership offer perks that are well worth the hassle of signing up. Their experience at Omni Berkshire Place, for example, caught my attention:

During our Saturday night stay, the free membership let us dodge the hotel’s wireless Internet charge of $9.95 a day and entitled us to free coffee or tea with juice in our room in the morning.

Speaking as someone who is hopelessly addicted to the internet but who does not yet have a traveling internet card from Verizon, Clearwire, Sprint, or whoever else is selling them (I’m waiting for the $29.99 price point - I may have to wait a while), free hotel wi-fi is a great benefit.

You can find run-down of all the hotel programs they checked, which include benefits like check-cashing services and free champagne, over at the Wall Street Journal article.

The reality does not quite live up to the promise however.

I’ve been using the service for over a year and am now (sadly) about to drop it. The problem? Several come to mind. Here they are in order of importance:

1) Delivery takes forever (unless you’re doing the trial!) I signed up for the trial and very soon after I’d hang up, the transcription would appear in my in box. Once I became a paying customer, the lag times steadily increased. I called a transcription in yesterday around 3pm and did not receive the mail from them until after 12 noon today. As a blogger, it makes using the service for timely posts impossible.

2) It’s too expensive. 80 bucks a month(!) If anyone knows of a less pricey alternative that provides more than 30 seconds of talk time, let me know.

3) Inconsistent results. Some texts come in with proper interpretation of what I say, others come in riddled with errors.

1 and 3 are permissible, but not when 2 exists. This is an awesome free service, it’s just a lousy $80 a month service. My two cents.

The service, which has been in the works for a while, is powered by AirCell and called “GoGo.” It’s only available on some routes so far:

The world’s largest airline said its passengers on Boeing 767-200 aircraft can pay $12.95 for Internet access on nonstop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and New York and Miami.

Those cross-country routes don’t come up in my schedule too often (come to think of it, I barely fly American anymore), but I go where the Wi-Fi goes, so if I’m looking forward to checking it out the next chance I get.

It turns out that a new Delta software system has been in development for months, and is now being rolled out to all 1,400 kiosks they have placed in 195 cities:

They actually sent me a PowerPoint deck that shows the new kiosk software, side-by-side with the old, and I can tell you for sure that they’ve streamlined the process a lot. (The kiosks are used 70,000 times a day for check-in, so that translates into a lot of saved time.)

The new software system offers a quick-print option that lets you swipe your card, select your destination and then immediately print your boarding pass.

It also gets rid of the “continue” button, since that’s a little redundant.

Sounds like a good start. If other airlines follow suit and start to streamline their digital check-in process, we could really see some welcome improvement in airport line-speed.

While my illogical habits still hold, business travelers at JFK who weren’t already making an extra effort to fit it all in carry-on were probably pretty disappointed as they were forced to choose between making their flight and staying with their bags.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Handlers are currently sorting baggage manually, and the airline is telling its departing passengers that they can choose whether to go on the flight or not, Wagner wrote in an email to the Terminal. “Once we have the issue resolved, we’ll get the bags that are left behind on their way to the customer’s destination and delivered to them. Until then, we appreciate our customers’ patience as we work through this issue,” Wagner said.

It’s interesting to think about how many of the things we do are enhanced by computers, and how much of a difference that really makes. Without computer assistance, we can’t load planes fast enough for them to fly on schedule.

If you’re United, you go after the ever-growing luxury market. Successfully.

According to the Wall Street Journal, United has taken some of its more popular routes and made the right much more comfortable in exchange for a more expensive ticket:

Take a Boeing 757, remove 40% of the seats and give customers lots more room, better food and flat beds. Does that sound like a typical recipe at a U.S. airline these days?

Hardly, but that’s exactly what UAL Corp.’s United Airlines did with two of its busiest, most-important routes, and last year they were the best routes financially for the airline in the country.

Not a bad strategy. I can’t say I’ve never wished for more legroom on a flight.

The New York Times ran a story yesterday about how rising travel costs are forcing more businesses to adopt virtual meetings in place of good old fashioned I-flew-halfway-across-the-world meetings.

As just one example:

Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.

So virtual meetings are definitely cheaper, not to mention if you’ve got a really good setup it can make you feel like you’re in Minority Report. Do you think that virtual meetings are going to start supplanting the travel in your schedule anytime soon?

“I vould liek to go to ze houtel pleez.”

As many seasoned travelers have no doubt discovered, this rarely works. Thankfully, the Wall Street Journal may have found one answer to the problem:

But interpretation companies are hoping you use another tool: your cellphone. These services aim to give you access to a 24-hour bilingual interpreter; you call the service on your cellphone, explain your dilemma in English, then hand over the phone to whomever you need to speak with — cab driver, waiter, police officer, doctor, or the object of your affection in a bar.

The WSJ tested several of the services to see how well they performed, and the consensus seems to be that they’re work as advertised. There is sometimes a bit of a lag time before you actually get on line with an interpreter, so it’s best to call before you need one if you can plan that far ahead.

It can also get a bit pricey. One dinner order cost about $30 to place, although I think it was purposefully complex.

The bottom line seems to be: it’s a worthwhile service for business.

“No, this is no good. You can’t take this.”

“Why not?”

“It’s serrated.” He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I’ve had for years, is actually smaller and less sharp than the knives currently handed out by my airline to its first- and business-class customers. You’d be hard-pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.

“Oh, come on. It is not.”

“What do you call these?” He runs his finger along the minuscule serrations.

“Those … but … they … it …”

“No serrated knives. You can’t take this.”

“But sir, how can it not be allowed when it’s the same knife they give you on the plane!”

“Those are the rules.”

But beyond the amusing front…in fact, largely on the second page of the article, Patrick Smith dives into an issue that does fall under the radar more often than it should:

Propped up by a culture of fear, TSA has become a bureaucracy with too much power and little accountability. It almost makes you wonder if the Department of Homeland Security made a conscious decision to present bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance as the public face of TSA, hoping that people would then raise enough of a fuss that it could be turned over to the likes of Halliburton. (Funny, how despite this administration’s eagerness to outsource anything and everything, it’s kept its governmental talons wrapped snugly around TSA.)

While I might not put it in such apocalyptic terms, I think we should all be wary of what powers we cede to the government in the name of “safety.”