We always fly economy, especially on short trips. We used to call it "cattle-class", due to the (lack of) treatment. Some other colleagues of mine even call ourselves "self-loading cargo", which we are. Recently I discovered that cattle-class wasn't that bad. I flew Norwegian, and due to their obscure check-in mechanisms (no on-line check-in either), I was in the back of the plane. A place I generally hate, and now I hate it even more. I really think that economic trends has made some airlines change its number of seats on a plane, in a bad way.

In the flight I had, space was so cramped that many people didn't really fit in their seat. They could sit, but they couldn't relax because they lacked the leg room. A one-hour flight can be a long one if you have to keep upright and tight. Luckily, I'm not that big. I could relax a bit.

My situation wasn't that much better though. I couldn't work. I had my mininote with me due to a couple of technical reasons with my TabletPC that needed "some time" to resolve. It barely fit in between myself and the next seat. I only used it to watch a small movie, but then again, I seriously doubt if my TabletPC (a modest 12" screen) would have fit, let alone a standard corporate sized laptop of 14" or 15". I do not think it would physically fit in between the seats and result in a decent working position. Either you don't have enough space to breathe and end up with a keyboard in your stumoch, or you have your screen in a strange angle due to the screen in front of you. Both not really ergonomically sound solutions.

I think that airlines should investigate, now that they are cramping more and more people in the flights that are still popular, what the minimum space requirements for a business user are. I am not talking about business class with it less awfull food and free drinks, but simply providing enough space for a normal business man and his laptop. Some power supply would be nice, but space to breathe and room to work is required for people on business trips....

Posted on Wednesday 01 of July, 2009 [22:31:11 UTC]

I was always taught to judge people by their actions, instead of their words. Real life has shown me that talk is cheap, but that actions generally show how devoted people really are to them. The same goes for companies: they will always tell you that you are a valued customer, until they really have to do something to show it.

I am a very frequent corporate flyer and most airlines say they love corporate travellers. Some obscure higher powers in our organization frequently put me in a plane to some vague destination. One way airlines show their love is by frequent flyer programs. Over the years I have flown most decent airlines, so I am a long-time owner of a frequent flyer card for every airline alliance. To me it is a minor compensation for being folded in a small chair without decent service in a noisy aircraft.

6 years ago, when the airline industry was in a bit of a downturn, I got a letter from KLM. They informed me that they loved the business traveller and even understood business travellers sometimes not flying with them for a long time even though they loved to fly KLM. Cost is a factor, but also routes and timing. And as a business traveller you can not always find a good KLM flight to your destination. To recognize that fact, the frequent flyer miles would last indefinetly. I really liked them for that one.

In fact, their analysis back then was quite a good one. My frequent route to our headquarter in Oslo is a good example. KLM, SAS and Norwegian competed on that route for quite a long time. When flying for business, choosing the flight becomes a business decission: who has the cheapest solution for fitting in with our meetings. To be honest, KLM did not provide a good solution at all since they departed too early and genrally are four times more expensive than Norwegian (or Sterling before that) and twice the price of SAS. I flew up and down to Bristol on a regular basis when I worked for Boeing, and generally we flew EasyJet because they did have decent departure times at an acceptable price. In business travel, preference for a specific airline comes into play when difference with competitors are marginal. The good old days where you could say "I will only fly KLM" are gone, business will never allow it because it will cut into the bottom line.

Today I found out that KLM has changed its frequent flyer program overnight. In fact, they did so three months ago and now people started to find out their points were gone. They didn't bother tell anybody, but luckily some newspapers picked up on it. Apperantly, they have reduced the validity of your membership again: if you don't fly with them within 20 months, you will lose all your points. It annoyed a lot of people: many people who fly for business might end up on a "non-KLM" route for a number of reasons. But also those who go on holliday with them once a year, now can't afford to skip a single year because they would lose their points.

Also they increased the number of points you need for a trip by 50%. Not that that mattered much to most people, since the single biggest complaint is that you never seemed to be allowed to use the points for flights anyway. Somehow the flight was always full or did not qualify for spending frequent flyer miles.

Personally, I would lose about 70.000 points in the comming 3 months. It used to be enough to fly up and down to Seattle twice. Now, I can hardly make it once. Many people already lost all their points. We are not talking the occasional flight of a holliday maker, we are talking frequent flyers which used to have platinum cards but have been out of the game for a year or two due to work or private circumstances (like pregnancy). Or people like me, who simply found out that paying 400 euro for that cup of coffee and a cheap sandwich is a difficult business decission to defend. But on the other hand, I did have projects that made me fly four times a week with KLM for months at a time.

I don't know what they were thinking at KLM. Do they really think that threatning/taking people's points away would make them more likely to fly KLM? That people would think "Oh my, I haven't flown KLM in 20 months and now they want me to fly to keep my points, let's do that". Most peoples reaction is the opposite: they feel they are taken hostage by their airline. That their hard-earned flights, which you could never collect anyway, are taken away from them.

To me, KLM is hopelessly stuck in the past where people would blindly buy KLM flights, regardless of cost. The new reality is that flying has become a commodity market and the best business deal wins on a case-by-case basis. And to be honest, the KLM prices are ridiculous, so they do lose a lot of business. Taking away people's frequent flyer miles certainly does not help this situation. I hope I can use my points, or transfer them to another program quickly, because KLM has become less and less interesting to me as a traveller. Not because of the lack of points, but due to the lack of respect for me as a business traveller and the decissions I have to make.

Posted on Saturday 30 of May, 2009 [08:24:08 UTC]

My TabletPC broke down a couple of days ago. There wasn't too much damage because I had good backups, but a failure of hardware is annoying nonetheless. The practical effect is that I will be without my laptop for over 2 weeks, which puts me in the situation that I work with a laptop that isn't tuned to my working habits. It is the small things: things aren't at exactly on the spot where you expect them to be, you miss some credentials, you can't edit some files, etc..

Then it comes down to which laptop to use. I could have taken a spare company laptop or my wife's laptop. I chose to use my HP Mininote. It is powerful enough to do the normal work, but small and light enough to make sure I don't need my back repaired when my TabletPC returns. The keyboard size is small but just big enough, although the screen size and the compactness of the laptop do make me wonder what happens of you work over 8 hours with it.

Time will tell....

Posted on Saturday 23 of May, 2009 [22:42:34 UTC]

I am amazed by the lack of attention by HP to repairs. To be honest, this complete experience is insulting. Either my laptop is cursed or HP will go bankrupt within a year. I can not inmagine any company can stay in business if you mess up this bad on this scale.

I really love my 2133, but it had a small issue with the speaker grill falling off, a known issue with this particular model. Contradictory to common sense and any economics I know, replacing this glue-on grill requires the replacement of the entire screen. Even when I explicitly asked to send me a grill or tape, they insisted that the only way to replace the $0.10 grill was by replacing the $300 screen, which takes a technician about 2 hours. It was all covered under warrenty, so I did not need to worry about the costs. You can always depend on bureaucracy to turn something simple into something big.

I waived this operation because it would mean that I couldn't take my netbook with me in a periiod with a lot of travelling. Just before the MVP summit, my 2133 completely broke down with a dead motherboard. Quite unfortunate, but life has its little challenges now and then. Since it was going for repairs anyway, I had the HP service employee add the action of replacing the grill to the list as well. When replacing the complete inside of thelaptop, replacing the screen is a small action. It was a pretty easy to spot problem, but when shipping it I added a large note on top stating the two issues.

When it returned, the motherboard was replaced, but the speaker grill wasn't. So there was a 50% successrate on this repair. At least the device worked again. On the other hand, it would really be idiotic if they hadn't fixed the extremely hard to overlook problem of a defective motherboard. So I called the helpdesk again. Fixing only half the issues isn't a good way of doing business, especially for a company with a good reputation like HP. The person on the other side was quite helpful and understood I did not want to ship my laptop back again. She agreed to send along a repairman which would fix it on the spot. This is the point where it all went wrong.

The first repairman came 3 days after the call. After completely taking the laptop apart, taking about two hours, he discovered that he missed one cable the original screen did have. The man in question assumed that it was the camera, confirmed with my wife that the camera wasn't important, put the entire laptop together again and left. Unfortunatly it wasn't the cable of the camera that was missing, it was the cable that made the difference between the inexpensive WSVGA (1024x600) and the much more expensive WXGA (1280x756) screen. So I got stuck with a pretty low-resolution screen, trying to work with Visio.

Luckily, HP repairmen number two came a couple of days later with a large box that contained a WXGA screen with a camera. Unfortunatly, it was an used screen that had a large crack in the middle. The best I can say is that he discovered it before he took the laptop apart. He had to order a new screen, and then some colleague would replace it.

A week later, repairman number three arrived. He took the laptop apart completely, without any manual and without any experience with this specific model. I guess when you seen one laptop, you've seen them all. He replaced the screen and put it all back together again. Two hours of work. When I noticed that I couldn't enter my ExpressCard dummy, he quickly discovered that a screw wasn't inserted completely. When he corrected this, the screw came out on the other side of the laptop, through the plastic. He switched somescrews apperantly. The man even dared to sugges to send the laptop to repairs in Poland again, because it now was the fourth time it was repaired. So I ended up with a good screen and a hole in my laptop. Funny what you consider progress sometimes.

Yet another week later, the fourth repairman arrives. Before he came in, he already started an apology: because he didn't have any spare parts with him. An intern has dumped the spare parts in a recycle bin the night before. They have to order new spare parts again to perform this repair. Sometimes I wonder why people even show up on my doorstep.

A couple of days later, repairman number five arrives. Fully equiped with a new set ofscrews and a laptop cover. Upon request, he checked every screw in the laptop. It turns out he switched about 8 screws, some vital like the CPU cooling. After a bit bigger operation then anticipated, I finally get a working laptop.

To be honest, I am extremely disspointed by HP. They needed 6 tries to replace a simple $0.10 grill. It took me and my wife 5 days where somebody had to stay at home to let some HP repairman in. The level of incompetence involved in this story is so big, I can not inmagine that these people do better on other devices. Not a single word from HP as apology for this catastrophy they call a repairservice.

Posted on Friday 03 of April, 2009 [14:21:54 UTC]

I have always been intrigued by the option to automatically change timezones. It is in the phone settings and it as been in there for years. I have turned it on each device I owned and hopped through all the timezones I can think of, but I never saw it actually work.

Until today. A fellow MVP showed me how to use it. The key to using it is doing nothing. Just leave your timezone selection in the clock settings set to "home". Turn on your phone and it will detect the timezone automatically. Appointments will shift to their right time, just as you like it to be. I do not know if it does this if you just change roaming partner as well (driving from timezone to timezone), but when flying it will work.

To me, this is one less worry when travelling abroad. Timezones are not obvious and it is great that my phone does the hard labour of finding out the right timezone for me

Update:this method isn't foolproof, as I have found out yesterday. When travelling home, I discovered that T-Mobile Netherlands does not provide timezone information in the GSM stations they provide at Schiphol, where I entered again. It is completely dependent on the operator, which collectively didn't do a great job in consistent rollout of this feature. This implies that your phone might get stuck at the previous country where ithe operator did have this feature implemented, So some caution should be taken in account.

Posted on Sunday 01 of March, 2009 [15:45:09 UTC]