[The Practical Nomad Newsletter] The Amazing Race 15, Episode 5 (Dubai, best and worst airlines, and more)

[Edward Hasbrouck]

Scroll down for more on "The Amazing Race", Dubai, best and worst 
airlines, what the Feds need to do to protect airline consumers, and more. 

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New FTC rules on disclosure of sponsorships, freebies, and discounts:

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001756.html

My updated disclaimers & disclosures (let me know what you think!):

http://hasbrouck.org/disclosures.html

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The Washington Post reports on my priorities for airline passengers' 
rights (with a response from the Department of Transportation blog):

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001755.html


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Questions to tell your Senators to ask the TSA nominee:

http://www.papersplease.org/wp/2009/10/21/softball-questions-for-tsa-
nominee/

http://www.papersplease.org/wp/2009/08/12/rumors-of-a-new-administrator-
for-the-tsa/

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This column with links:

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001758.html

The Amazing Race 15, Episode 5
Dubai (United Arab Emirates)

This was one of the rare episodes of "The Amazing Race" spent entirely in 
a single city -- in this case Dubai -- without setting foot on a train or 
bus, much less an airplane.

Did the racers like Dubai? That's hard to tell. The one thing they clearly 
agreed was that it was hot. Very hot. Hotter, in mid-summer, than they had 
ever been in their lives.

Some of them got frustrated at the complexity of the water pipes they had 
to assemble (another geographic gaffe in nomenclature in the voiceover, 
which described them by the Hindi/Urdu name used in South Asia, "hookah", 
rather than by the Arabic or Turkish names more commonly used in West 
Asia, "nargila" or "shisha"), or at trying to weigh out an assigned value 
of gold as determined by a price adjusted every minute based on the latest 
commodity market transactions. For one million dollars, did you learn your 
long division and algebra when you were in school?

Mika's fear at the six-story water slide with the view of the shark tank 
(CBS included a credit for "promotional consideration" from the resort 
where it's located) led to her and Canaan's elimination. The takeaway for 
travellers: Your fears are equally real regardless of whether or not they 
are rational or well-founded. If you're too afraid of something or 
someplace to enjoy it, don't go there unless your goal is to overcome your 
fear and not to have fun. Neither you nor anyone else is likely to talk 
you into having a good time in spite of your fear, or in spite of knowing 
intellectually that your fear is irrational. You might discover that in 
the event, you don't feel as afraid as you had expected. But that's 
another story and not something you can count on. 

Why Dubai? Not everywhere interesting is fun, and there are good reasons 
to go to Dubai. Dubai is an important place to visit if you want to 
understand the range of possibilities open to human society: a place 
that's sui generis while exemplifying the most extreme instantiation in 
the real world of a complex of post-modern values, trends, and ideals. As 
Mike Davis asks in his essay on Dubai in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of 
Neoliberalism", "Is this a new Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K. Dick's 
unpublished sequel to Blade Runner , or Donald Trump on acid?"

My fantasyland isn't a place where the biggest tourist attraction is the 
annual Dubai Shopping Festival (which draws four million visitors a year, 
although "The Amazing Race" came through in the wrong season and missed 
it). But I wanted and still want to see Dubai to learn where our own and 
humanity's future are headed, why some people seek out as a utopia that 
which I recoil from as from a nightmare, whether that's the vision I want 
to pursue, and whether there are any signs of hope, resistance, or 
dissenting cultural discourse.

We had planned a stopover in Dubai last year on our trip around the world. 
In the end, though, we didn't get out of the airport. We were behind 
schedule, and wanted the time for other places further along our route. We 
had already spent time nearby, in Doha (Qatar) instead, in response to an 
invitation from a reader of my blog who offered to show us around and who 
gave us a fascinating introduction to a slice of Doha expatriate life. 
(Rule of thumb: if you have to choose between destinations, pick the one 
where you have a local contact or introduction, no matter how tenuous, 
over the one where you know nobody.)

The last straw in deciding us not to stop over in Dubai was the dismal 
performance of Emirates Airlines, unquestionably the worst experience I 
have ever had in my life with airline ticket office and ground service. We 
flew on Emirates, paying the full published fare, from Cairo to Hong Kong 
via Dubai and Bangkok. Because of changes in plans enforced by outside 
events (deadly post-election riots in Mombasa, Kenya; delays in getting 
visas for Eritrea) we had to deal with Emirates offices on four continents 
over a period of a couple of months. All of them treated us with a 
perfectly consistent level and style of gracious and fawning incompetence, 
suggestive of a staff that been selected for subservience rather than 
ability, then further disempowered by their training and left unwilling to 
take any initiative or responsibility for dealing with problems, lest they 
be blamed. It left me wondering whether, if an Emirates employee admits to 
a customer that the airline has made a mistake, the cost of making it 
right gets taken out of the employee's paycheck.

None of the people we dealt with at any Emirates office understood their 
own airline's tariff, and some of them didn't even seem to understand that 
as a common carrier they have published rules governing things like 
changes to tickets. For good measure, they tried to blame anyone but 
themselves: sending us away, referring us to Emirates' offices in other 
countries and on other continents (which didn't bother to answer queries, 
or only bounced the problem back), and falsely claiming that our travel 
agent had undercharged us a thousand dollars which we would have to pay 
before they could touch our tickets.

After hours of hassle, trips across town, and waiting, we got our freely-
changeable full-fare tickets re-routed for only a small fee (eventually 
refunded, in part, a year later). But the whole affair created a lousy 
first impression of anything associated with Dubai, which was only 
reinforced by the airport: a shopping mall designed to separate you from 
your money, not a comfortable place to arrive or change planes. We 
couldn't have been more eager to get on the next flight to anywhere else.

While I'm handing out prizes for ground service, I should note that the 
other extreme of operational competence and reliability I've experienced --
 anywhere, ever, including in comparison with airlines including not only 
Emirates but some of the others with the world's best reputations such as 
Virgin Atlantic, Thai, Malaysian, Air France, British Airways, Qantas, and 
so on -- was with Ethiopian Airlines , which we flew on from Zanzibar to 
Addis Ababa as well as on five flights within Ethiopia. (Disclosure: I 
paid full fare on the international flight, but Ethiopian gave me a travel 
agent discount on my domestic tickets, bringing the price down to about 
what it would have been if I had bought them in advance in conjunction 
with international tickets issued by Ethiopian.) Ethiopian doesn't go in 
for groveling, but they do go in for getting things done efficiently, 
without muss or fuss, even with severely limited infrastructure and 
resources. We had consistently excellent experiences with Ethiopian ticket 
offices and airport staff in Addis Ababa, in the provinces, and in other 
countries.

And while I've said it before I should also mention again that my "we try 
harder" award for best personal service by a smaller airline goes to 
Yemenia (Yemen Airways), who we were on (again, at full fare) from Addis 
Ababa to Sana'a and on to Cairo. Yemenia not only got us where we were 
going, on time, but their staff repeatedly went out their way to help us 
with things that were unquestionably not their fault or responsibility. 
Individual members of their staff, undoubtedly overworked and underpaid, 
repeatedly took personal initiative to make sure that we were taken care 
of the way they would want to be if our places were reversed.

For example, when we discovered that our applications for visas to our 
next intended destination, Eritrea, had been denied without our knowledge, 
Yemenia put us up at their expense for the next 24 hours -- comfortable 
hotel, all meals, transfers from and to the airport, and assistance with 
visas to stay longer in Yemen -- while we tried to figure out what to do. 
(We went to Egypt next instead. But we backtracked to Eritrea after that, 
when a combination of luck and Eritrean generosity and hospitality finally 
got us visas.) When my companion left a fleece jacket on a Yemenia plane, 
and asked a member of the ground staff if it had been found, they 
apologized and offered to buy her a replacement! (She declined.) When we 
needed to change our tickets, Yemenia took care of it without drama.

Surprised? Moral of the story: Most airline reputations -- especially with 
people who haven't flown on them -- have more to do with marketing than 
with performance.

Bon voyage!

Edward Hasbrouck


----------------
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/>

Disclosures & Disclaimers:
http://hasbrouck.org/disclosures.html