The Amazing Race 5, Episode 1

Tuesday, 6 July 2004

The Amazing Race 5, Episode 1

Santa Monica, CA (USA) - Montevideo (Uruguay) - Punta
del Este (Uruguay) - Punta Ballena (Uruguay)

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000268.html

Before the teams in The Amazing Race 5 even get off
the Santa Monica Pier, Jim is knocked down by another
racer at the starting line, tears open his leg on a
nail, and needs 25 stitches before he can get on the
first flight.

We worry about flying, but the greatest dangers are on
the ground, and closer to home -- in this case,
literally underfoot before the would-be travellers
have gone anywhere at all. We worry about whether the
natives are friendly, but the people we need to watch
out for most may be our fellow travellers.

After that, at the end of the pier, the racers open
the box of clue cards, and learn that they have to fly
to Montevideo, Uruguay, on either United Airlines or
American Airlines.

Both these airlines have virtually identical
schedules, departing and arriving within an hour of
each other. Both go via Miami and Buenos Aires, but
the Buenos Aires stop isn't mentioned or shown on the
route map, perhaps to make the flights look more
direct than they are. This is the second time the race
has stopped in Argentina -- The Amazing Race 2 even
spent a night on the Argentine side of the river at
Iguassu Falls -- without the country even being
mentioned. (More on that next week.)

This isn't the first time we've seen such blatant paid
airline product placements in "The Amazing Race",
especially on the opening leg. But what got my goat
was that immediately after the racers are shown making
their choice between Air Tweedledum and Air
Tweedledee, viewers are treated to an announcement
that "The Amazing Race 5" is sponsored by Expedia.com.

As has often been the case, there would have been
better ways to get there, if the racers were allowed
to take them. As is also often the case, especially
between distant points without same-plane service (the
USA Department of Transportation allows airlines to
label connecting flights as "direct", but that's
another story), the fastest and most direct flights
would not have been on an airline based in the USA,
and not even on an airline of the destination country,
but on the airline of a third, intermediate country.
And in most cases they would have involved a
combination of flights on more than one airline.

The American Airlines and United Airlines flights got
to Montevideo between noon and 1 p.m. (12:00-13:00).
Using LAN Chile -- one of only 2 airlines, neither
based in the USA, with nonstop service from Los
Angeles to South America -- via Lima and either
Santiago or Buenos Aires, they could have left at
about the same time, and arrived between 9:00 and
10:00 in the morning, 3 hours earlier than the flights
they took.

The racers' plight in being forced to take less direct
(and in real life often more expensive, although CBS
doesn't care in the race) flights on USA-based
airlines is not, unfortunately, unique or even
particularly unusual. In support of its commitment to
free trade, and its principled opposition to
protectionism, the USA government requires all travel
that it funds, even in part (such as academic research
trips on projects that have received even the smallest
government grants) to be entirely on USA-based
airlines, whenever possible, almost entirely without
regard for how much less direct or more costly they
are.

Choices of long-haul flights have typically been
decisive factors in "The Amazing Race", making
differences of hours compared to mere minutes saved by
bribing or imploring taxistas to drive more
recklessly, or by completing tasks more quickly. But
even if the racers were free to choose their flights,
would the show's sponsors at Expedia.com find the best
ones? No.

It's not just Expedia.com. I also checked Orbitz.com
and Travelocity.com, using a sample date of 13 January
2005. (You can't check flights for past dates on any
of these Web sites, but the schedules are essentially
unchanged except that United has shifted its gateway
for the Buenos Aires/Montevideo flight from Miami to
Washington Dulles Airport.)

None of these three largest Internet travel agencies
lists the fastest and most direct flights at all. Even
if I ask for the earliest possible arrival and for all
possible alternatives, and specify that I'm willing to
use a combination of multiple airlines, none of them
list any flights on this date arriving earlier than
noon (Varig, via Sao Paulo). On some other dates, they
find the Santiago connections arriving at 9:50 a.m.,
but none find the interline connections via Lima and
Buenos Aires to LAN Peru and Aerolineas Argentinas
that leave at 12:35 p.m. and arrive at 9:05 a.m.

So how did I find these flights? I looked in the Sabre
computerized reservation system, one of the four such
CRS's used by travel agents.

Savvy travellers are probably saying, "But doesn't the
same company (Sabre Holdings) own both the Sabre CRS
and Travelocity.com?" Yes, it does. But they provide
different information to consumers on their
Travelocity.com Web site than they do to travel
agencies.

Why? Government regulation, or the lack thereof.

The CRS's were all originally developed and owned by
individual airlines. After airline routes and fares
were deregulated in the USA in 1978, there were
repeated consumer and travel agent complaints that the
airlines that owned the CRS's were using their
oligopoly power to bias CRS displays against competing
airlines, in restraint of trade. As a result, CRS
regulations were adopted in the USA, Canada, and the
European Union requiring the CRS's to provide travel
agents with unbiased displays and rankings of flights
on the basis of trip duration, price, arrival or
departure time, or whatever other criteria a travel
agent specifies in their query.

None of the big four global CRS's are owned by
airlines any more, but they remain an oligopoly, and
these regulations remain in force -- for the time
being -- to ensure consumers access to competitive
information. CRS's can't sell positioning or ranking
in responses to travel agent queries.

When the CRS regulations were adopted, the World Wide
Web didn't exist yet, and there was no way for CRS's
to provide information directly to travellers. In the
absence of regulations, retail travel agencies and Web
sites -- including those like Travelocity.com that are
owned by the CRS's -- are free to filter, rearrange,
or sell positioning on their displays. And they do.

So Sabre is required to show the flight that arrives
first, if a travel agent knows how to ask, but is free
to show visitors to Travelocity.com a different
flight, in response to the same request, if they think
it more profitable to do so.

That's not in consumers' or travellers' interests, and
the evidence of cases like this makes clear that the
CRS regulations should be extended to cover the
information CRS's provide directly to consumers,
especially on their own Web sites.

Instead, ignoring the obvious reality of a continuing
CRS oligopoly and its anti-consumer, anti-competitive
implications, the USA Department of Transportation
published a decision in January 2004 that will
entirely repeal the CRS regulations in the USA,
effective 31 July 2004, unless further action is taken
by the DOT or Congress.

If this happens, CRS's will be free to give travel
agents -- who pay them for access to a neutral
information source -- the same biased and filtered
information displays they now give retail consumers.
Some travel agents will still want to serve as
advocates for travellers against the interests of
airlines, but they will no longer have the tools to be
able to do so: the CRS's will be free to reinvent
themselves as advertising, marketing, and
"distribution" channels for airlines, rather than
unbiased information utilities.

The bottom line is that in what government regulations
in the USA require, for many travellers -- use of
USA-based airlines, or those on which they have
fraudulently put their flight numbers -- and what they
no longer will require -- unbiased information
provided to travel agents by the CRS oligopoly --
those rules are depriving consumers and travellers of
the best choices and information, in order to advance
the interests of USA-based airlines.

The impending "sunset" of the CRS regulations is a
disaster for consumers. It's the inevitable result of
a regulatory process in which the primary participants
were lobbyists for the economic interests of different
segments of the travel industry, and the politicians
who should have been watching out for the interests of
the travelling public abdicated that responsibility.

See you next week in Uruguay. Maybe we'll have time
for dinner in Montevideo, instead of just running
through, or taking a bus out of town directly from the
airport. One of the best meals in my life was at just
this time last year, at the restaurant "El Palenque",
in the Mercado del Puerto, while waiting for the
high-speed ferry to Buenos Aires to depart from the
terminal across the road. At Uruguayan prices, it was
a lavish feast that the teams in "The Amazing Race"
could easily afford on what's left of the US$97.23 per
couple they were given at the starting line. And
there's plenty more to see and do there. But I've got
to go now -- I've got an instant message from
Argentina.

(If you missed it, the first episode of "The Amazing
Race 5" will be re-broadcast in the USA on CBS this
Saturday night from 8-9:30 p.m. EDT/PDT, 7-8:30
CDT/MDT.)


----------------
Edward Hasbrouck

http://hasbrouck.org

"The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World"
(3rd edition, February 2004)
"The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace"
http://www.practicalnomad.com

It still is funny when a person is pressed for time and wants to get
from A-B, to take the first flight out. "I need the first flight out of
'A' and I need to go to 'B'".
"Usually" on TAR, if you need to get somewhere and have a task to
perform, do the hard one. The easy ones are longer and for a
million$$$$$ time is precious. JDR

For more details on Episode 1 and to get a blog report, go to
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000268.html


"Jim" wrote in message
...
It still is funny when a person is pressed for time and wants to get
from A-B, to take the first flight out. "I need the first flight out of
'A' and I need to go to 'B'".
"Usually" on TAR, if you need to get somewhere and have a task to
perform, do the hard one. The easy ones are longer and for a
million$$$$$ time is precious. JDR