Regular readers of the blog know that I’m not a fan of all these “Best of” surveys. That’s why I haven’t written about JD Power’s boring surveys or anything else like that. But, when a survey has an interesting angle, it certainly catches my eye. This includes a recent British survey showing Palmair as one of the top four airlines in the world. Who?

This year’s Which? Awards (out of the UK) features “the best companies and individuals that seek to serve the interests of consumers.” In the airline category, it’s not surprising to see Air New Zealand, Jet Airways, and Singapore Airlines (the eventual winner) make the list of finalists. But that fourth finalist? Palmair. They ended up tying with Air New Zealand for third place.

I must admit that I’ve never heard of these guys, so I thought I’d dig in a little more. The airline seems like an unlikely hero. Based in Bournemouth, on the Southern coast of England, Palmair has a single 737-200 chartered from European Air Charter. The airplane started life with Sabena nearly 35 years ago, but it’s still going strong.

The airline exists to appear solely as a way to funnel pasty white Brits down to warm and sunny places to try to get a little color. You can’t book online, and it’s recommended that you use a travel agent or call them directly. You get a hot meal, but you won’t get your seat assignment until you arrive at the airport. You can only bring 20 kilos of baggage with you as well. So what is so great about these guys?

There aren’t any reviews on SkyTrax to help us out, but there have been plenty of articles popping up since the airline made it on the list. One from the Telegraph shows that flying with a focus on personal service has really set them apart. Just a sampling of what they do well.

• “Singapore Airlines has 100 planes including the A380 which is the largest plane in service, on-board massages and a choice of dvds. All we can offer is the choice of tea or coffee . . .”
• Until 2006, [founder Peter] Bath made sure he was in the departure lounge for each flight to greet the passengers. He then stood on the Tarmac at Bournemouth Airport in Dorset where the airline is based and waved off every single flight.”
• When Mr Bath passed away, long-standing airport representative Teresia Rossello took over the role. She also ensures each customer can have their choice of seat by drawing out a plan in her kitchen every night.
• Stewardesses place fresh flowers on the plane, including the toilets, every day and the company has removed a row of seats to give customers more room.

Sounds nice, right? I’m sure it is, but it’s easy to do with only one airplane. Good luck finding anyone who can replicate this on a large scale. It really makes you wonder how this tiny airline made it on to such a big list. Apparently, there were 70,000 votes by the general public to pick the winner. Sounds like there was a heck of a write-in campaign on behalf of this airline. It seems that every person who has heard of the airline must have felt compelled to go and vote.

So this doesn’t really change my view of surveys. I don’t find this particularly useful at all, since I highly doubt I’ll ever be in Bournemouth, and if I am, I’m unlikely to be flying to a sun spot. This may be an excellent airline, but if it doesn’t fly anywhere you need to be, is it really helpful? In fact, I’d imagine most people would find this news completely worthless, but I imagine all of us would enjoy flying on an airline like this, if it existed in our own backyard.

I thought about writing about more cuts that were announced by Frontier, Northwest, and Delta, but really, aren’t you getting tired of this? Click the links above if your answer is “no.” Otherwise, keep reading for a little bit of escapism to end the week.

It’s been a long time since I wrote a book report. I mean, throughout school it usually meant finding a way to write paper after paper on books that absolutely drove me insane. It’s safe to say that I haven’t fully recovered from “Ethan Frome.” Of course, this time around it’s a different story. I’m writing about a book about airplanes, well mostly about airplanes, so that’s a good start. This time, I’m writing about “Ruinar: How to be Treated Like Shite in 15 Different Countries . . . and Still Quite Like It.”

The title had me interested right away. That and the pretty airplane on the cover. So when the author offered to send me a copy, I was more than happy to dive in. It arrived and the first thing that caught my eye was the big red sticker on the front saying, “Only €0.01* – *price excludes fees and charges of €12.98 (full price €12.99)” I love it. The author clearly knows Ryanair well.

So what did I think? It was a fun read without question, but there were a couple of things that seemed to be thrown in just to fill up space and other parts that didn’t seem to fit at all. Overall, it’s a worthwhile read if you’re looking for something light (mostly) with a dry and witty humor.

The premise was simple enough. The author had a bad flight on Ryanair back in the day, and he paid €300 for the privilege. So, he decided to try to fly to every single country in the EU with a couple others thrown in (not counting recent Eastern Europe additions) for the same price and tell his story. You might think (and hope) that the book would focus more on his flying experience, but it seems to be more of a hybrid. While he talks about the flights, he spends an equal or greater amount of time talking about his experiences in the countries themselves. In those chapters that focus on his flying and traveling experiences, the book works quite well.

Possibly the only thing that really bothered me was the intentional misspelling of airline names (Ruinair, EZjet, etc) throughout the book. I’m not quite sure why he had to do it, maybe he was afraid of a lawsuit or maybe there are some funky EU laws that made him change them, but it seemed rather odd to me. He also seems to be a little dusty on his facts sometimes, especially regarding Southwest Airlines. He mentions that Southwest requires you to pay for food and drink (uh, no) and that Southwest doesn’t compete with other airlines, just train transportation. Sounds to me like he picked up a book about Southwest from 1985 and has missed the fairly significant changes since then.

But those are nits, because they are not central to the book. The author’s snarky and dry sense of humor worked well. (“In the recently upgraded Galleria lounge a glorious Bentley GT is parked centre stage. . . . ‘Would you like a car like this?’ he asks. Talk about asking a bleeding obvious question. It’s £200,000 plus. ‘Nah, I already have one.’”)

And yes, it even works when he’s taking his potshots at Americans. For example, “Only 20 per cent of Americans possess passports so we must be grateful for small mercies . . . .” Oh but don’t worry, he’s an equal opportunity insulter. “Greeks are dark, short, stocky, squat and hirsute. And that’s the ladies.”

A warning for those of you like me who are not very familiar with Irish pop culture: he has plenty of references that leave me running to Google to figure out what he’s saying. “Much like the duck at Fawlty Towers I suspect one can have tripe with orange sauce, tripe with cherry sauce, or tripe surprise.” Now, I’ve heard of Fawlty Towers, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes. Jokes like this are completely lost on me, but it’s easy to read beyond them.

As I said, when he’s writing the chapters on his country trips, it’s really a fun read. Yes, there are some helpful travel tips, “Never eat in a restaurant with a multilingual menu. Never eat in a restaurant with pictures of the food on the place mats. . . .” I couldn’t agree more. He also apparently shares my love of Mars bars (the European kind without nuts, not the second class US version), but there are a couple of times he strays into oddly serious territory. His chapter on the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the horrors of the holocaust seemed out of place with its humorless (obviously) and dark tone. It didn’t belong in this book.

Toward the end, it seemed like the author had a set number of pages to fill but ran out of content. There are a good 25 pages of material copied straight from the internet. Online reviews of the airline at Skytrax, a note from the PPrune board, and an excruciatingly-painful description of a video on YouTube left me skipping further to find more of what I couldn’t find for free online.

In the end, I enjoyed the read. The author certainly has a love-hate relationship with Ryanair, and it’s one that I think many people feel all over Europe. The airline will get you there cheaply and mostly on-time, but when things go wrong, it can be an ugly experience if you’re not prepared for it. It’s worth picking up a copy.

For some crazy reason, Josh Marks, SVP Planning & Development for MAXjet, was willing to sit down (at his computer) and talk (email) with me about the latest news at the airline. I’m hoping this is the first of many chats I can post here, so I’ve even decided to create a logo for my new “Across the Aisle” series.

For those who don’t know MAXjet, I’ll let Josh explain it in his own words. The interview is below, and I have a few comments at the bottom. Take it away, Josh.

Josh: When MAXjet started all Business Class service between New York and London Stansted in 2005, we had a clear value proposition. We offered the perks of international Business Class (fast check-in and security clearance, spacious departure lounges, deep-recline leather seats, 60” seat pitch, on-demand entertainment and gourmet meals) at a flexible Economy fare. After establishing service in New York, we added flights from London Stansted to Washington and Las Vegas.

Cranky: You recently seasonally canceled your Washington DC flights. What as the impetus behind that move? Were the flights not performing well or was it due to opportunities elsewhere?

Josh: Washington is a great summer market but turned out to be quite seasonal. So we changed Dulles to seasonal service and we will be back this May.

Cranky: There have been rumors about high front line employee turnover. Is that something you’re seeing? If so, what do you attribute it to? Are you concerned about it?

Josh: Our voluntary turnover has been very low. We pay our pilots and flight attendants an annual salary and we don’t have a seniority system. It’s a different kind of environment with a unique appeal. We’re now opening a crew base in London and we’re excited about having international crews on board.

Cranky: The annual salary for the front line is a really interesting concept. How does that work? Is there a baseline number of hours they fly and then if they go over they get paid overtime?

Josh: Annual salaries work for crews when paired with a line-allocation concept called fair assignment. Essentially lines are assigned by computer to employees in order to maximize equality. Employees have some ability to express preferences. So the number of hours a given crew will fly in a month can vary, but we guarantee them a salary number regardless. In our system there’s no concept of overtime or baseline hours. Similarly, there’s no seniority system (since there’s no bidding for lines).

Cranky: How are the Las Vegas flights performing? Do you see additional opportunities for growth there?

Josh: We’ve been surprised by the mix of business and leisure travelers. People assume we draw business traffic, and we do – many take our flight to Vegas and connect on Southwest to points like San Diego, Orange County, Burbank, San Jose and Sacramento. But we also draw a lot of leisure traffic – not surprising given how many families want Business Class but aren’t willing to pay exorbitant published fares.

Cranky: Are there any plans to begin flying to new cities in the US? Which ones?

Josh: We’ll be announcing new markets shortly as we’re already overhauling our next two aircraft. We like the B767-200ER because it offers a unique combination of trip cost, widebody spaciousness and usable range. Stansted has a long runway so the aircraft is really limited only by fuel. With our payloads (100 passengers on a plane built for 250) we can top the tanks and that means markets like London to Los Angeles or San Francisco are within our capabilities. We’re finding in Las Vegas that the longer the haul, the more our value proposition increases.

Cranky: Have you considered flying to other European destinations from the US or are you focusing solely on Stansted for now?

Josh: We’re just looking at Stansted for coming years. Open Skies dramatically increases the routes we can serve out of Stansted. That said, if the right opportunity comes along, we’ll consider it.

Cranky: You still haven’t submitted financial data to the DOT for the first half of 2006. Why has that been delayed and can we expect to see it soon?

Josh: We filed the DOT data; however it’s clearly not showing. We are investigating what happened.

Cranky: Do you have statistics about on time performance and canceled flights that you can pass along?

Josh: We had some rough periods last year due to both aircraft and weather events. By redesigning our schedule and designating a spare aircraft, we’ve become one of the best operations across the Atlantic. In the past 60 days we’ve had one flight cancellation (weather-related) and more than 90% of our flights were within 30 minutes of schedule.

So there you have it. Thank you Josh for taking the time here. And now for a couple comments.

There have been a lot of rumblings about MAXjet’s reliability in the last few months, and a look at Skytrax passenger opinions clearly shows problems. What you will notice, though, is that there haven’t been any really bad reviews over there in well over a month. (No, I don’t count the complaint that the flight attendants weren’t smiling as a really bad review.) With only one cancellation and a 90% arrival rate within 30 minutes of schedule over the last 60 days, it sounds like they may have their ship in order now, and that is crucial.

From the sound of it, we could see some more longer haul markets in the future from Stansted. I wouldn’t be surprised to see West Coast markets pop up soon. Will they go for the big airports or maybe try for a place like San Jose instead of San Francisco? For their product, I think they need to go straight for the big ones.  San Jose might work because of the business base there, but a place like Ontario instead of LA probably would not.

I like the idea of west coast flights. As Josh mentions, people find more value in the product when the flight is longer. So even if there are fewer people traveling from the West Coast to London than from New York, a higher percentage of people flying those routes may be willing to pay up for the product.

It seems to me that the MAXjet model of business class at an economy fare has a lot of growth potential. That being said, there will be plenty of competitors, and MAXjet needs to make sure they keep their operation running smoothly. The more people pay, the more they expect.