[The Practical Nomad Newsletter] The Amazing Race 14, Episode 6

[Edward Hasbrouck]

More crazy credit-card terms and conditions:
This time it's Capital One, and they're even worse

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001662.html

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This column with links:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001660.html

Novosibirsk (Russia) - Moscow (Russia) - Jaipur (India)

Last week's episode of "The Amazing Race 14" provided an example of some 
the issues that arise with rail travel in Russia, India, and China. 

If some of you were prompted to ask, "If it's so difficult to figure out 
railroad timetables and tickets, why don't they just fly?",this week's 
episode of the race, from Russia to India, may help give an answer.

In addition to having the world's three largest national railway systems, 
the BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- are the world's 
four largest countries in land area outside the First World, and four of 
the eight most populous countries outside the First World. Independent 
world travellers are likely to pass through one or more of these countries 
sooner or later, and will need to figure out how to cope with their 
logistical and other quirks. A case could be made that you haven't really 
seen the world unless you've gotten at least a glimpse of each of these 
countries. Travel conditions and infrastructure in each of these countries 
are different than what First Worlders are used to at home. And while 
there are some common attributes of travel in all of these countries, they 
are each so large as to be a world of their own, where most people take 
the domestic norms for granted as universals. (As, of course, do most 
people in the USA who have never traveled abroad, to an even greater 
degree.)

So what's it like to fly between and within each of the BRIC countries? 

Despite their size and proximity, Russia, India, and China are 
surprisingly isolated from each other. The extreme case is India and 
China, which because of border disputes unresolved since their 1962 war 
have no open land border crossings. Until very recently, the only direct 
flights between their capitals were those on a "neutral" third-country 
airline, Ethiopian Airlines, which had rights to carry local traffic on 
the Delhi-Beijing-Delhi legs of its twice-weekly through flights from 
Addis Ababa!

The few flights that do operate between Russia, India, and China, mostly 
connect only a few international gateway airports. To fly between even 
major "provincial" cities in these countries, you generally need to 
connect through either these gateways (unfortunately, transfers between 
domestic and international flights in Delhi or Mumbai/Bombay are soemtimes 
only marginally better than the nightmare transfers between airports that 
the racers had in Moscow) or a hub in a third country or in the Hong Kong 
Special Administrative Region (which still acts like a separate country 
from China).

Typically that means going through Seoul to get between provincial China 
and Russia; Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore between 
provincial China and India; and cities throughout the Gulf (Dubai, Doha, 
Kuwait, etc.) for connections between Russia and secondary cities in 
India.

For example, the teams in "The Amazing Race 14" all went from Novosibirsk, 
Siberia (Russia) to Jaipur, Rajasthan (India) by way of tedious changes of 
plane in both countries' capitals, Moscow and Delhi.

What's odd is that the TV producers actually required them to go through 
Moscow, even when this was one of the few cases when that was neither 
necessary nor optimal.

Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, back in the days when Aeroflot was 
still the world's largest airline, Tashkent (TAS) was the largest Soviet 
city in Asia (and third-largest anywhere in the country, after Moscow and 
Leningrad). Not surprisingly, it was also the largest air hub in Soviet 
Asia and the gateway for most Soviet flights to and from other Asian 
countries.

After 1992, when Uzbekistan became independent and the Tashkent division 
of Aeroflot became the new Uzbekistan Airways (IATA code "HY" for the 
Turkic acronym for "airline"), Novosibirsk (OVB) acquired new significance 
as Russia's third-largest city and largest in Asia. Since then, its 
airport has been upgraded, and it has gradually taken on much of the role 
that Tashkent once had as a regional domestic and international air hub.

With Aeroflot pared down to long-haul routes, and its domestic operations 
broken up and quasi-privatized, the Novosibirsk division of Aeroflot, now 
"Siberia Airlines" (IATA code "S7"), boasts of being the largest domestic 
airline in Russia. And it operates direct international flights to 
countries throughout Central Asia as well as to Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok 
and Dubai.

At the same time, there's been an enormous expansion of flights between 
secondary cities in various India provinces and the Gulf states. While the 
reason for these flights' existence is to carry Indian laborers to and 
from their jobs as "guest workers" in countries like the UAE and Saudi 
Arabia, they also provide a way for travelers to and from other countries 
to avoid having to clear customs and make domestic/international 
connections in Delhi (DEL), Mumbai/Bombay (BOM), Chennai/Madras (MAA), or 
Kolkata/Calcutta (CCU).

So the simplest way to get between Novosibirsk and Jaipur, with only one 
change of planes and avoiding larger cities in either country, would have 
been via Dubai. It wouldn't necessarily have been the fastest route, nor 
likely the cheapest. But given the low reliability and poor on-time 
performance of domestic flights in either Russia or India, it might have 
turned out to be the most efficient.

And the shortest if not fastest route -- less than half the distance the 
racers had to fly to travel via Moscow -- would still have been via 
Tashkent rather than Moscow.

Domestic airline services within Russia, India, and China are better than 
international services between these countries, but only marginally so. 
Airline capacity in each of these countries remains small relative to 
their size and to the growing (at least in India and China) elite among 
the local population who can now afford to fly. The cheapest airline 
tickets typically cost about as much as first-class rail tickets 
(sometimes a bit less in India, if you get lucky, and sometimes more in 
Russia). I prefer to take a train, when I have time, but flying is always 
much safer. There are, however, potential logistical issues:

In RUSSIA, the combination of the breakup of Aeroflot's monopoly into 
hundreds of airlines (many of them, unfortunately, still with local 
monopolies on their particular routes), and the pseudo-privatization of 
these "baby-flots", led to truly nightmarish difficulties in getting 
accurate information about schedules or ticket availability as well as 
substantial declines in reliability, safety, and service, at least at 
first. Things are improving, and there has been substantial consolidation, 
but there are still huge differences between some of the larger domestic 
airlines (S7 in Novosibirsk, for example) and smaller ones serving poorer 
parts of the country.

Only a few of the larger domestic Russian airlines participate in 
international reservation systems or financial clearinghouses for 
ticketing from outside Russia. Buying plane tickets in Russia is much like 
buying train tickets, as I discussed last week: It's often impossible to 
make reservations or buy tickets for Russian domestic flights in advance 
from outside the country, unless you pay a substantial fee to a Russian 
tour operator to buy them for you locally. Even within Russia, it can be 
difficult to get tickets in advance on small local airlines in other parts 
of the country. The help of someone who spekas Russian -- friend or 
someone from your hotel or guest-house -- can be vital.

In CHINA, a similarly disastrous fragmentation and privatization of the 
formerly unified government airline has been more successfully reversed, 
with what were briefly more than 100 airlines in the PRC merged into only 
about a dozen major regional and international ones today. The quality of 
service on Chinese airlines today, at least between major cities, is 
generally far superior to that of Russian or Indian airlines. As long as 
you have your origin and destination cities written down (either the names 
in Chinese, or the universally-recognized IATA standard three-letter 
codes), you don't need to speak any Chinese to make reservations and buy 
tickets from an airline office or travel agency within China.

The main problem is that airline capacity remains small relative to 
demand, while most Chinese airlines cling to a perverse system, perhaps 
emulating China Railways, in which they will confirm domestic reservations 
only within a few weeks of the date of the flight. Typically, that means 
first being told it's too soon to make reservations, and then that all 
seats are sold out as soon as they are offered for sale. Tourists can 
often "break the quota" of tickets for places on the better trains, for a 
small-price, but not usually for planes.

As in Russia, it can be difficult to make reservations or buy tickets for 
domestic flights in China from abroad. Your best chance of getting advance 
confirmation for domestic flights in China is to ask the international 
airline on which you are flying to China -- especially if it is a PRC-
based airline -- to request reservations for you and include tickets for 
these flights with your international tickets. It's often a bit cheaper 
this way, too, compared to buying separate domestic tickets.

In INDIA, the government has been caught between intense foreign pressure 
for "liberalization" and privatization on the one hand (read, "foreign 
ownership of Indian domestic airlines", a completely hypocritical demand 
given the categorical prohibition of foreign ownership of domestic 
airlines in the USA), and domestic political pressure for protectionism 
and continued state ownership of long-haul Air India and regional and 
domestic Indian Airlines on the other.

The result has been that airline capacity in India has grown even less 
than in China, while a series of foreign-owned and private airlines have 
come and gone, hamstrung by changing and often deliberately burdensome 
regulations. While the new private airlines have mostly gotten an 
excellent reputation for service, it has been risky to buy tickets on any 
of them far in advance, as their schedules, routes, and even existence 
have been a month-to-month affair dependent on which way the political 
winds of the central government are blowing.

Indian Airlines continues to have some of the lowest standards of customer 
service I've ever experienced, both on the ground and in the air, and 
their flights are prone to cancellations and delays. But as long as they 
remain owned by the government, they're not about to go out of business, 
and if they sell you a ticket, they'll probably eventually get you where 
you paid to go. And both Air India and Indian Airlines participate in all 
major international reservation and ticketing systems.

That leaves BRAZIL, the one BRIC country "The Amazing Race" isn't visiting 
this season (although it has several times before in seasons 2 , 9 , and 
13 ). Brazil has hardly any long-distance passenger rail service, so inter-
city surface travel in Brazil is almost all by bus.

Brazilian buses aren't quite up to Argentina's gold standard of long-
distance bus service, but they share the silver medal with Turkey, Chile, 
and Mexico (and probably Iran, but I haven't yet had a chance to confirm 
that for myself). Nonetheless, it's a big country, and roads in many areas 
are poor. The distances mean that even at reasonable per-mile or per-
kilometer tariffs, bus tickets can still add up to a substantial cost if 
you are trying to explore the entire country. 

Like Russia, Brazil has a substantial indigenous aircraft manufacturing 
industry. American Airlines, JetBlue, and many other airlines in the USA 
and around the world rely on modern turboprops and "regional jets" with up 
to 100 seats built by the Empresa Brasiliera de Aeronautica (Embraer). But 
the airline business has been even more cyclical in Brazils's repeated 
currency crises than in the USA, with a long succession of airline 
bankruptcies. 

The result is a fairly extreme paucity of service, with exceptionally high 
fares except for a few seats on Brazil-based "low-fare" airlines. The 
largest of these, GOL , bought the remnants of the bankrupt national flag 
carrier, Varig, in 2007. Not much was left but the name, as many of 
Varig's planes -- including a 747 seized while parked at JFK airport in 
New York -- had already been repossessed by creditors.

Unless you plan your itinerary and buy tickets far enough ahead to get the 
few cheap seats on discount airlines, you'll pay through the nose to get 
around Brazil any faster than by bus. GOL/Varig has an extensive route 
system within Brazil and between Brazil and neighboring countries, but a 
limited number of flights. Even on GOL and its smaller "low-fare" 
competitors, fares get high once flights start to fill up. And prices on 
the main Brazilian full-fare competitor, TAM, are almost always steep.

The good news is that Brazilian airlines' operations, reservations, and 
ticketing are mnore like those of First World airlines than those of 
airlines in the other BRIC countries. You can make reservations and buy e-
tickets on GOL or other airlines' Web sites months in advance, from 
outside the country, with reasonable confidence that flights will operate 
more or less as scheduled. (Subject to delays and cancellations for the 
same sorts of weather and mechanical causes as in the USA.)

Don't count on telephone customer service in English for pretty much 
anything in Brazil, though, even if the airline or other Web site has an 
English-language version. And be prepared for hassles paying for tickets 
with a credit card with a billing address outside Brazil. Foreigners have 
the same problems all the time, of course, with Web sites in the USA that 
can't handle foreign address formats or phone numbers, or are deliberately 
programmed to reject cards issued outside the USA. When I bought tickets 
on GOL in 2007, I had to go through all my credit cards, and try multiple 
address and phone formats, before I found a way to get one of them 
accepted.

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I'll be in Europe for the next two Sundays, in Geneva at a conference on 
aviation and global warming (yes, I am aware of the ironies of flying 
there, but I want to give the industry a full and fair hearing) and, 
taking my own advice for an Easter-week vacation in England. To my 
amazement, I was able to redeem frequent flyer miles for my trip, for a 
holiday week, at the lowest mileage level, just a few weeks ago.

I hope to have some interesting surprises for you while I'm gone, but 
otherwise I'll catch up with you, and "The Amazing Race 14" (I'm leaving 
MythTV running) after I get home on April 12th.

Bon voyage!

Edward


----------------
Edward Hasbrouck
<edward at hasbrouck.org>
<http://hasbrouck.org>
+1-415-824-0214

"The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World"
(4th edition 2007)
"The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace"
<http://www.practicalnomad.com>

Around-the-World and multi-stop international air tickets:
<http://hasbrouck.org/tickets/>