Travelblather

A slightly offbeat post from the usual here on Travelblather - but heck, if you have a network... no harm in using it from time to time eh?

I'm looking for interviewees for a cool new project we’re doing for one of our clients at iCrossing.

I need to conduct short interviews with couples about romantic moments in London. Maybe you met in London in a really romantic way (the top of a double decker bus, bumped into each other at the British Museum)... or you got engaged in London (on the London Eye or in Kew Gardens) or you have a favourite place for romantic times together (walking along the Thames, that little restaurant tucked away down a side street somewhere).

I'd email you a series of short questions for you to answer. Reckon it would take no more than 20 minutes to complete. Feel free to stick a short summary in the comments below or suggest other places I might find interviewees.

I need to do these interviews this week or early next… Ideally couples need to be either empty nesters or young couples without kids yet…

I WILL BE HAPPY TO PAY FOR GOOD INTERVIEWS!

UPDATE - thanks for all the lovely people who have commented already - to make it easier for me could you include a couple of sentences about your romantic London moment. I'm particularly interested in experiences that link specifically to an activity or place in London itself. (like my examples above)

(Pic from: pedrosimoes7 on Flickr)

Welcome Tom Power for a guest blog post. Tom runs a rather nice boutique tour company called Pura Aventura which specialises in tours to Latin America and Spain. It's on a theme I've touched on before... but, coming from an operator rather than a journalist the perspective is different. Would anyone take him up on his offer? I know he'd love to know your thoughts and, of course, so would I...

What if, rather than asking travel journalists to take a trip with
us, commission a story and write about it, we simply offered free
holidays to travel bloggers?

I’m polling opinion here and would really appreciate your thoughts.
I can’t help thinking that there’s a potentially great idea here with
potentially great vulnerabilities. Where do you think it falls?

This is where I’ve got to:

1) Selective: we’d have to be picky about the blogs we select,
that’s hardly controversial. We would want to associate ourselves with
blogs that have decent reputations and rankings.

2) Prescriptive: we would want to define the number of posts and
links back to our site. Probably in the order of 4 posts pre-trip, 1
per day on the trip and another 4 on return. Presumably it is
reasonable that we expect an output in return for our investment.
Anyone see any issues with this?

3) Controlling: what are the acceptable limits of editorial control?
What if the blogger just hates the trip and is relentlessly nasty? (I
should say that I have full faith in what we do and I can’t think of a
time that it has happened to a customer so am not by nature worried.)
However, what if a blogger is the only one in a group to dislike the
trip? Do we retain editorial control? What would be the acceptable
limits and lines?

4) Profiling: our holidays are generally taken by people later in
life, median would be in the 50s I guess. If we were to send a blogger
on this walking holiday to Chile
for instance, would that work? Are there bloggers who would broadly
match the profile of our existing customers? Does it matter? Are travel
bloggers generally outdoors types or do they sit in still rooms lit
only by the glow of computer screens?

5) Boring: is this an offer which regularly drops into the laps of
travel bloggers? This isn’t my idea, I’ve nicked it from a Springwise
newsletter (cool business ideas from around the world), I think they
saw it being done in New Zealand. Is anyone else offering similar here?

6) Toe treading: and this is one for the TravelBlather and Travel Lists and many, many others I’m sure. Professional travel writers. How does this idea sit with you guys?

7) Fine print: the trip would usually not be 100% free as we don’t
tend to include international flights. If you had to buy a flight to,
say, South America, in order to claim/earn your trip, would it still
appeal?

I was one of 80 or so journalists, travel agents and tour operators on the Aer Lingus inaugural Gatwick to Faro flight on Sunday. The Irish carrier has big plans for Gatwick. It's using 4 leased A320s to cover 8 routes at the moment: Malaga, Nice, Munich, Vienna, Dublin, Knock and Zurich along with Faro. The investment is significant - somewhere around £100 million.

You have to admire their pluck - launching in the teeth of a huge recessionary downturn. Ryanair attempted to takeover of the company late last year... and was rebuffed by the Irish government on competition grounds, but not before it got quite heated. One of the Aer Lingus' crew in an unguarded bar-moment admitted to me that part of the reason (but clearly not a very big part) for launching these routes - on the low cost model - was to 'give O'Leary the finger'.

Check in is in Zone B - a new area off the back of the main concourse. For us it was quiet and efficient - a far cry from my check in with easyJet the weekend before bound for Prague - which was bedlam. (But that was half term weekend, so not a fair comparison.) That said - this area is uniquely for Aer Lingus - so there will be more control there and big queues at the check-in desks of other carriers won't spill over or get in the way.It's a clear signal of intent and a smart piece of manouevring.

On board the spanking new plane the seats were mock grey leather, with a fairly decent pitch. Perhaps an extra centimetre or so? There were seat back pockets for your books and mags, they reclined(!) and they even had wings on the headrests so there was something to lean your head against if you fancied nodding off. It's funny how the little things start to matter when you don't have them. Not having a seat back pocket with Ryanair drives me nuts! And I was a bit gutted to find that easyJet's seats don't recline either these days on their newer planes.

Crew were friendly and helpful - a tad less fun than easyJet's who are occasionally laugh-out loud funny - and they were much more pleasant than Ryanair. But that's not hard - they seem to loathe the sight of you most of the time.

As you'd expect with flights starting from £9.99 (including taxes during the launch period - clearly a significant loss-leader) you pay for your food and drink with similar fayre and prices to the other low costers. Service was rather slow, but with a 2 hour+ flight this didn't really matter. No exhortations to BUY LOTTO TICKETS on the PA system (like Ryanair)... and the toilets are free. (Seriously... can someone tell me is Ryanair really charging to use the toilets on its planes? One of the other journos assured me he had seen it with his own eyes on a recent Ryanair flight to Rimini. No joke. A pound in the slot...)

Anyway... the Aer Lingus gig - from a customer perspective - looks all good. More competition has to be a healthy thing - particularly when the product is better.

Returning from Faro yesterday evening I checked the monitors at the airport. Flights from Faro to Gatwick on the board:

• Easyjet: 20.05
• Aer Lingus: 20.45
• BA: 21.15
• Easyjet: 21.55

Yep. Four flights all within a couple of hours of each other all flying the same route. I can't believe this is sustainable. (And that doesn't include Monarch - which also flies this route - leaving earlier in the day.)

The steward on board told us the 174 capacity plane had just 44 seats filled on the outbound trip. Returning there were 97. So take out the 80 journos, agents etc and that leaves just 17 fare paying customers.

With £100million to burn there's time yet to market the services and see load factors increase, but those planes need to be seriously full to turn a profit. I wonder if they'll succeed? Right now I'd probably only put it at 50:50. Others have been forecasting the company's downfall against a backdrop of mounting losses.

But you know what they say about the luck of the Irish.