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                             THE STANDARD'S
                        T E C H  T R A V E L E R
         Travel and the Travel Industry in the New Millennium
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                                        | http://www.thestandard.com |

Monday, April 2, 2001

NEWS BRIEFS:
* American Airlines' Paper Cut ... The Future of Orbitz ... Forget the
Fees

TOP STORY:
* LAN Ho!

SITE REVIEWS:
* Incheon International Airport
* Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

NEWS BRIEFS
~~~~~~~~~~~
AMERICAN AIRLINES' PAPER CUT: American Airlines is reportedly about to
begin charging passengers who prefer the more traditional paper
tickets instead of electric ones. According to a Business Week report,
the magazine obtained an internal memo indicating that starting April
9, American Airlines will levy a $10 surcharge on all paper tickets,
providing a powerful incentive for consumers who opt for e-tickets.
E-ticketing systems save airlines money by reducing back-end
administrative costs, but they can be less convenient for passengers
who are traveling on multi-carrier itineraries, or for those who need
to switch airlines due to delayed, overbooked or canceled flights. An
American Airlines spokesman confirmed the accuracy of a recent Reuters
report about the paper-ticket surcharge, but said that federal
regulations prevented him from providing specific comments about air
ticket pricing.
Read more about the evolution of e-tickets at TheStandard.com:
http://www.thestandard.com/newsletters/NLdisplay/0,2936,60-2417,00.html

THE FUTURE OF ORBITZ: A report released last Tuesday predicts Orbitz,
the Web travel company backed by several major airlines, could cost
consumers billions of dollars in higher air fares. Commissioned by
three of Orbitz's most vocal opponents - the Interactive Travel
Services Association, Southwest Airlines and the American Society of
Travel Agents - MIT economist Jerry Hausman's study concludes that
Orbitz is likely to chill price competition and hurt low-fare carriers
like Southwest by effectively excluding them from a primary Internet
distribution channel. Orbitz representatives, who maintain the service
will reduce costs and lead to greater competition among airline
retailers, refuted the study as a "repackaging of the same
misinformation and distortions ITSA has been spreading for months."
They also noted that Hausman did not solicit input from Orbitz itself.

SEA CHANGE FOR ONLINE TRAVEL? Airline tickets were not among the top
five types of items purchased online during the fourth quarter of
2000, according to market research firm Greenfield Online. Though
airline ticket sales have long been among the most popular items
purchased online, holiday shopping was cited as the most likely reason
for the increase in sales of toys and games. As part of an ongoing
series of quarterly surveys, Greenfield's latest Digital Consumer
Shopping Index, released March 20, reflects purchases made by a sample
of 3,899 U.S. consumers during the last 90 days of 2000.

FORGET THE FEES: Online travel site Expedia announced Monday that it
has reached an agreement with Northwest Airlines and its alliance
partner, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, to continue selling the air
carriers' tickets without surcharges. The pact follows Northwest
Airlines' announcement in late February that it would no longer pay
commissions to online agencies. Travelocity.com immediately slapped a
$10 fee on Northwest and KLM tickets. Expedia spokeswoman Suzi LeVine
said Expedia would be compensated for selling Northwest and KLM
tickets but wouldn't elaborate on the terms of the agreement.

TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
LAN Ho!

Hoteliers and business travelers attempt to navigate the perilous
waters of in-room Ethernet access in search of a safe port.

By Morris Dye

When Daffyd Roderick, a Hong Kong-based staff writer for Time Asia,
arrived in Bangkok recently to research a story, he planned to set up
a temporary office at the Grand Hyatt Erawan and start work
immediately. Instead, he spent the first afternoon of his tightly
scheduled stay embroiled in a tech-support nightmare.

Roderick's woes began at the reception desk, where he learned the
hotel had rescinded its policy of lending Ethernet adapters to guests
for use with the hotel rooms' high-speed data ports. The solution? If
Roderick would pay approximately $150 for a new adapter, the Hyatt
would install the hardware on his behalf. Roderick reluctantly agreed
to foot the bill, and later that day, two technicians arrived with a
standard Ethernet adapter and tried in vain to make the device work
with Roderick's laptop.

Two frustrating hours later, the technicians were still struggling,
and as Roderick waited anxiously for a solution, his computer crashed
and refused to reboot. "Getting connected was the opposite of easy,"
Roderick said later, adding dryly that the Ethernet card he acquired
in the process "makes a lovely paperweight." Roderick learned the hard
way that connecting to a hotel's local area network is not always
smooth sailing. Yet the allure of broadband access has tempted growing
numbers of hotel companies and business travelers to brave the
potential pitfalls of in-room data ports. While estimates from Jupiter
Communications and PricewaterhouseCoopers place current in-room
broadband penetration at about 15 to 20 percent, a survey conducted
last year by Cahners In-Stat Group found that 82 percent of hotels
with more than 60 percent business clientele were considering
broadband services, and Jupiter Communications has predicted that half
of all hotel rooms in the United States will be wired for high-speed
access by 2002.

The trouble is, the fundamental technology behind most high-speed
hotel data ports - the 25-year-old networking protocol called Ethernet
- was originally developed for the comparatively static environment of
workplace LANs. Bring on a constant stream of travelers connecting
differently configured laptops and Ethernet adapters to the network,
and technical difficulties are sure to arise - not the least of which
is the problem of IP addressing. Many servers require specific IP
settings to accept a computer into the network, and many hotel guests
are understandably reluctant to muck around with the IP settings on
their laptops.

One solution is to remove the guest's computer from the loop entirely.
Hotel-centric service providers such as On Command and LodgeNet
Entertainment deliver high-speed Web access to thousands of properties
via the same in-room TV systems used for pay-per-view movies and
in-house messaging. Through large-scale service contracts with the
likes of Marriott, Starwood, Accor, Hilton and Hyatt, these two
companies collectively serve more than 1.5 million hotel rooms
worldwide.

But Net-connected TVs are not for everyone. In a recent paper on the
subject of Internet connectivity for the hospitality market, Todd
Landfried, president and CEO of LAN equipment supplier Viator
Networks, emphasizes that "most set-top units have limited screen
resolution and do not typically support technologies like Java, Flash,
Shockwave, or popular streaming video or audio formats." Moreover,
many business travelers prefer to tap into company networks using
their own laptops for e-mail and data access. Fortunately, with
millions of dollars in infrastructure investment and access fees at
stake, network engineers have made substantial progress in the quest
to deliver cost-effective and truly hassle-free Ethernet connectivity
for hotel guests.

Perhaps the most significant innovation is the development of network
management software that permits any "foreign" computer with a
standard Ethernet adapter to join a network without changing its IP
settings. "This means that 99 percent of the time, your guest will not
have to reconfigure their computer to connect," Landfried says. Cisco
Systems, Wayport and other companies (including interactive TV
suppliers such as LodgeNet and On Command) are pitching hotel data
networks that can run such software over existing copper telephone
wires, eliminating the need to retrofit rooms with expensive cabling.
Viator even offers a wall-mounted network adapter that allows hotel
guests to plug in without an Ethernet card.

As these are relatively new technologies, the plug-and-play claims
that these companies make in their marketing materials should probably
be taken with a grain of salt for now, but as more hotels jump on the
broadband bandwagon, it's a good bet that the technology will continue
to improve. As for Roderick, he eventually found a solution to his
problems, albeit a relatively low-tech one: After the Hyatt agreed to
lend him a desktop computer, he filed his story on time, and his
beleaguered laptop eventually returned from the dead.

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SITE REVIEWS
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Incheon International Airport

South Korea has lately become one of the most wired nations in Asia,
so it's no surprise that the new Incheon International Airport outside
Seoul had a sophisticated Web site (airport.or.kr/index2.htm) in place
when the airport began operations last Thursday. Unfortunately, the
site is cluttered with unnecessary content and frivolous technical
trickery that stand in the way of easy access to some truly useful
information. The main page, served in separate English (reviewed here)
and Korean language versions, loads an endlessly looping
Flash-animated logo, two animated GIF icons, a scrolling row of
indistinguishable thumbnail photos and a JavaScript marquee that
flashes silly slogans like "Incheon International Airport: Where
Dreams Come True." A prominent Help Desk link was inactive when we
visited the site last Friday, as was an intriguing link featuring a
cute cartoon mascot labeled "Huby Incheon Airport Character." Oddly, a
multi-engine search tool sits at the top of the main page, as if users
might want to use it as a Web portal. Much of the content addresses
the airport's business operations, with information about its design
and construction and a section devoted to investor relations, but a
stack of links on the left leads to handy flight schedules, terminal
maps, transit information and an interactive (but not printable) guide
to passenger services.

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

The creators of the Incheon site might want to take some tips from the
newly upgraded Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport site
(dfwairport.com) unveiled late last month. Except for an annoying text
scroll on the browser frame and a reasonably subtle Flash animation in
one corner, the site design is clean and fast, with a simple and
effective user interface highlighting passenger services and flight
information. Notable features include a useful travel guide
incorporating content from a variety of sources, audio updates on
airport parking availability and a free flight-tracking tool capable
of delivering flight status updates via e-mail, alphanumeric pager,
text-enabled wireless phone or wireless PDA. Just don't look for a
cute airport mascot - we did and were sadly disappointed.

STAFF
~~~~~
Written by Michael Shapiro and Morris Dye. Send e-mail to
techtrav@yahoo.com.
Editor: Michele Keller (mkeller@thestandard.com).

Copyright 2001 Standard Media International

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