All stories about "Manifesto"

Now that the Open Skies agreement has been in effect for a week, international travelers are enjoying drastically slashed airfares, huge increases in route options, more variety in carrier choice, better customer service from a range of competing airlines, and ... oh forget it, of course I'm joking. In fact, Open Skies -- which allows European carriers to fly to and from the US and any European city, rather than only the carrier's home country -- hasn't substantively affected prices because of soaring (har!) fuel costs. But there are so many more planes flying around, surely volume will exceed demand and depress prices? Supposedly, London's Heathrow Airport alone is already seeing an additional 100 trans-Atlantic flights per week. Barring discovery of a giant oil reserve in Arkansas or Belgium, fuel prices won't seasonably drop until fall 2008, if then. Fuel surcharges will compensate for most volume savings. And don't forget that airlines knew exactly how this would play out, and they planned it quite carefully to avoid long-term price reductions. They will most certainly screw you. And by "they," I mean Europe, and by "you," I mean everyone.

Travel blogs are one of the most common blog types . . . right behind high school sex fantasy diaries. And one would think travel blogs would be insanely popular, given that most everyone travels to some degree. But just like travel writing in general, there's a huge gulf between the number of people who travel and the number of people who care to read about travel. Even Gridskipper, a veritable colossus of travel blog traffic, is easily outmatched by blogs about cat pictures, salad recipes, or, say, knitting. On top of this handicap, the sad truth is that many, many travel blogs (amateur and professional alike) are shit. They wouldn't be readworthy if their subject concerned daily giveaways of gold bars. Fortunately, the reasons why travel blogs suck are very easy -- often painfully easy -- to comprehend.

So JetBlue has announced they'll start charging extra for four more inches of legroom -- $10 to $20 more (depending on length of flight) for rows 2-5 and exit rows 10-11. But why stop there? "Even More Legroom" is nice, but now that airlines are breaking free of their decades-long insistence on fascist conformity, I suggest an entire suite of value-addeds to help defray spiraling costs. If I can choose from an a la carte menu of extra services and bennies to customize my flight experience, I'll be a much happier though poorer consumer. For example!

There's no travel biz jabberwock more sadly mythical than the airline passengers' bill of rights, and few such myths excite such customer passion, industry fear, and amateur pedantry. These codified lists of rights have been kicked around for the past decade in various forms, though only the European Union has dared to actually make it official. In the United States, such ideas pop up whenever a particularly egregious case of airline-on-customer violence makes the news, and they run the gamut from the tediously satirical to the exhaustively detailed. When JetBlue passengers were stranded for hours on a frozen JFK runway earlier this year, the airline responded to the bad press by instituting its own Customer Bill of Rights, a document which makes comically serious use of the phrase "Controllable Irregularity."