December 17, 2007

I went to Southampton England for the naming ceremony of Cunard’s new Queen Victoria. What made it interesting is that it was the first time a Cunard liner was ever named by someone who was not the queen. They actually brought in Camilla—that’s right—otherwise known as the Duchess of Cornwall, and Prince Charles accompanied her.

The English do two things very, very well: funerals and ship-naming ceremonies. You couldn’t have had more pomp and circumstance. You had the London Philharmonic, you had the marching buglers and drum core, and everything short of the changing of the guard. You’ve got to love this because it’s a little bit stiff, but it’s still fun to watch.

When Queen Elizabeth actually named the Queen Mary almost four years ago, it was the same thing: a lot of pomp and circumstance. She goes up to the microphone, everybody’s waiting in anticipation of her speech, and she goes, “I hereby name thee Queen Mary II.”

And that was it. She pushed the button, and out flew the champagne. It cracked across the bow and there you go.

So now we’re all waiting for the Duchess of Cornwall, otherwise known as Camilla, to do the same thing, and she walks up to the podium and goes, “I hereby name this ship Queen Victoria.”

And she hits the button, and the bottle of champagne flies—clunk. It doesn’t break. She hits the button again—clunk. And it doesn’t break.

And then if you look very carefully in the video—we saw it a little bit later—there was a crewman on the top of the bow of the Queen Victoria suspended by a cable who leans over with a hammer and whacks this bottle. And finally you hear the whistle and the ship is named.

Well, you know what the headlines were the next day: in some of the British papers it said, “Camilla’s Coming Out Party No Great Fizz,” and some people were calling it “Diana’s Revenge.”

Bottom line is, it was a fun thing to do. It is a luxury liner, but it’s actually not one of those huge mega-liners that you see today like the Queen Mary II or Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas (currently the world’s largest ship). It’s only 90,000 tons. Queen Elizabeth II—the ship that’s going to come out of service next year and be a permanent floating exhibit in Dubai (like the Queen Mary is in Long Beach)—weighed only 70,000 tons. And by comparison, the Queen Mary II weighs 151,000 tons.

That’s nothing compared to what’s being built right now: It’s called Project Genesis by Royal Caribbean. How big is big?

They’re building a ship right now of over 220,000 tons, almost 4,000 passengers, it’s going to be built as a floating convention center—people won’t even know they’re at sea. I mean, you know, they’ll have auto shows in there. It’s getting out of control. I like a ship that actually looks like a ship. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s what works for me.

Big Savings on Business-Class Fares

Some of the other items in the news we need to talk about: MAXjet, suspicions about their suspending service still floating around. They suspended trading on their stock, which dropped as low as $1.49 at the time they suspended the selling of the stock. Now, not everybody is in trouble.

MAXjet may be in trouble, but Eos is not, and Silver Jet, believe it or not, is having a sale hoping to gain some of those MAXjet customers. If you book by December 20, round-trip, all business-class fare from Newark to Luton, which is one of the subsidiary airports out of London, is about $1,839 round-trip. That’s comparing to a business-class fare on American and United of about $6,000-$7,000. So, if you want to know if there’s a savings there, you just heard it.

Lawsuits, Legislation and the Passenger Bill of Rights

One other item in the news—and don’t say I didn’t tell you this was going to happen, because it’s happening—on December 18, the major airlines, under their Airline Transportation Association, basically have gone and filed a lawsuit against the New York State Legislature and their Airline Passenger Bill of Rights.

You may remember that last August, by unanimous vote, the state legislature passed the bill of rights. It was signed into law by Governor Spitzer. It’s supposed to take effect in just two weeks, on January 1, but they’re filing a lawsuit because they’re going to claim, as I said they would, that state legislators have no jurisdiction in regulating airlines.

You know what? They might just get this thing thrown out, which is too bad because it was a pretty good law. It actually had some teeth in it, basically saying that if you’re stuck on a runway for more then three hours and they didn’t bathe you, feed you and hydrate you, they were subjected to a fine of $1,000 dollars per passenger.

The other federal laws that are out there are so weak—I mean you might as well just go out and frame them on the wall and call it artwork. But it’s going to be interesting to see what happens, especially in light of the fact that the Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, is supposed to go back to President Bush this coming weekend and give him ideas—there’s a concept—about what to do with the mess at the airports with delays, and whether or not they’re going to go to congestion pricing.

I don’t think this is going to work at all. They have to reschedule their planes before they can do congestion pricing. It stands to reason that, if your runways can only handle 30 take-offs an hour, even in good weather, why would you allow the airlines in your airport to schedule 48 of them? That’s in good weather. I mean, are we all delusional?

My feeling is that going to court on December 18 won’t get it thrown out; it’ll get the case heard. What’s going to get it thrown out is when the New York State government decides to enforce the law after January 1 on that first bad snow day when people are stuck in their regional jets, behind 60 other planes at Kennedy after the third hour, and the Port Authority police come and start arresting airlines. Now that’s going to be fun.

I think what’s going to happen first is that they are going to go to an auction in terms of who gets what slot at what hour. I guarantee you it will raise fares, which is another form of congestion pricing if you want to leave at eight o’clock. But if you want to have congestion pricing without the auction, you’ll still pay higher fares, and you’ll still sit on the runway because no one’s going to change the number of flights scheduled to leave at eight o’clock. It’s absurd.

I don’t think we’re going to see congestion pricing, but we are going to see the Department of Transportation do something that Congress can’t right now, and that is start to regulate, based on common sense, the number of airlines that can actually schedule flights and the number of aircraft that physically can leave the runway in any given hour. I mean, it’s just commonsensical. Wow, what a hope and a wish this Christmas season, for common sense at the airlines.

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