Amazing Race 9, Episode 3 (2-part episode)

This column with links:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001030.html

===================================

Brotas (Brazil) - Sao Paulo (Brazil) - Moscow (Russia)
- Frankfurt (Germany) - Stuttgart (Germany)
- Bad Tolz (Germany) - Grunewald (Germany)
- Munich (Germany)

Transportation and navigation problems, culminating in
Desiree and Wanda's elimination after a succession of
wrong turns and difficulties reading a map and
obtaining and following directions from local people,
dominated "The Amazing Race" for the two weeks of this
double episode.

As is often the case in real life, the longest legs of
the reality- television travellers' journeys proved
less confusing to arrange than local transport.
There's really only one way to get from continent to
continent, if either time or money are factors in your
decision: Fly. Intercontinental cruises or passenger
travel on cargo ships are more expensive than flying,
even if you're not in hurry. Airline and airport
procedures are relatively standard worldwide (in many
airports, you can barely tell what continent you are
in unless you read the signs), so flights are
relatively straightforward to arrange, especially if
price is no object.

So all the teams in the race ended up on exactly the
same flights from Sao Paulo to Moscow. But once they
got to Moscow, some did better than others at getting
around. Notably, Danielle and Dani, from Staten Island
(New York City), took for granted that they knew how
to hail a taxi. Which, no doubt, they did -- in New
York City. So we saw them standing on a Moscow street,
futilely making grand New York taxi-hailing gestures
with upraised arms, and asking in puzzlement and
frustration, "Why aren't any of these taxis stopping?"

The answer is that gestures -- even ones that seem
"natural" and automatic to those who use them -- are
culturally specific. It's rarely a good idea to make
any gesture (other than pantomime) without first
taking note of whether that gesture is used by locals,
and has the same meaning as you are used to.

In some world cities you hail cabs (with various
gestures) on the street. In others places you get a
cab by standing in a line ("queue") at a taxi stand.
In other places (including most of the USA except for
a few of the largest cities) you phone for a taxi
rather than expecting one to happen by wherever you
are.

As I note in "The Practical Nomad: How to Travel
Around the World", you should watch what local people
do, or "ask local people how you should signal to
passing vehicles that you want a ride. In Russia, you
hold your arm out at a downward angle, palm down, with
your fingers extended and waving as though beckoning
passing traffic in toward you at the roadside.... In
many places in the world, [pointing or thrusting or
upraised] gestures have obscene, rude, or insulting
connotations. In a new place, it's safest not to point
at all and to beckon Asian style, with your fingers
together, palm down."

The racers had a variety of problems trying to get on
the last flights of the day from Moscow to Frankfurt.

Just when some of the teams got to the Aeroflot
counter to buy tickets, the computerized reservation
system went down, and didn't start working again until
after check-in had closed for the last flight of the
day.

In order to allow time for outbound customs,
immigration, and other processing, the cut-off time
for international flights can be two hours or more
before departure. That's why you should always plan to
be at the airport at least two hours before any
international flight. I once was denied permission to
check in, and had to watch my scheduled flight depart
without me, when a delay on the London Underground
(the "tube") kept me from getting to Heathrow Airport
until about 90 minutes before the departure time.
Fortunately, the airline had another flight later the
same day, and accommodated me on it at no extra
charge, although they weren't required to.

As a result of missing the last flight, some of the
racers ended up spending the night -- as do hundreds
of travellers from all over the world every night --
either on the floor of Terminal 2 at Sheremetyevo
Airport, or in the overpriced, iconically Stalinist,
Sheremetyevo 2 Hotel nearby.

There's also a post-Soviet Novotel nearby, but its
rates are set for expense-account business travellers.
The least costly Moscow accommodations are at hostels,
but they are nearer downtown, a US$45 cab ride (as we
saw earlier in this leg of the race) one-way from the
airport. And the best values in tourist accommodations
throughout Russia are probably in homestays with
families, but they have to be arranged well in
advance.

You and the racers might be tempted to blame ex-Soviet
computer technology for the Aeroflot computer outage.
If you did, you'd be wrong. A variety of older and
locally-developed reservation systems are used by
Aeroflot's successors and their competitors on
domestic routes within Russia. But even before the
breakup of Aeroflot, the division that became today's
Aeroflot Russian International Airlines used the
Gabriel reservation system, once of the international
standards, operated by the global airline cooperative
SITA (which also runs the .aero top-level Internet
domain for the aviation industry). In May 2005, well
before the filming of "The Amazing Race 9", Aeroflot
Russian International and its agents in Russia all
switched to the Sabre reservation system based in the
USA. What we saw was a Sabre (or, more likely, Sabre
connectivity) outage, not a failure of some obsolete
or inferior Russian system.

How often does a major reservation system go down? And
what can you do about it as a traveller?

The last time I heard about a prolonged outage of a
major reservation system was on 3 January 2006, when
the "Apollo" system (one of the brand names of Galileo
International, which was spun off from United Airlines
some years ago, and is currently a division of the
Cendant Corporation) used by United Airlines went
down for "approximately four hours".

According to United Airlines spokesperson Robin
Urbanski, none of the airline's worldwide staff,
either at airports or in telephone reservation
centers, were able to access any information in
reservations during that time. That included both
reservations (PNR's) and the electronic tickets stored
in PNR's.

Urbanski confirmed that some United flights did
depart, and some passenger were checked in, during the
Apollo outage.

Airlines like to point out that you, the traveller,
can't lose your e- ticket the way you can lose a paper
ticket. But the converse is equally true: An airline
can't lose your paper ticket the way they can, and
sometimes do, lose all record of your e-ticket. Or,
less seriously but still problematically, lose your
reservations. To some degree, a paper ticket and an
electronic reservation provide a degree of redundancy.
Since an e-ticket is stored in the PNR, an airline
that doesn't have a record of your reservation or
e-ticket probably doesn't have a record of either.

How, I asked, did United determine which passengers to
check in without having access to reservations or
e-tickets?

According to Urbanski, passengers who presented
"boarding passes" they had printed themselves, before
the reservation system went down and they came to the
airport, were allowed to check in, pass through
security screening, and board flights.

A homebrew "confirmation" and boarding pass was taken
by the airline as sufficient evidence of having paid
for a ticket!

It's trivially easy to save a Web page or e-mail
message confirming a reservation or e-ticket, edit
theHTML and/or image file, and print out a forged
confirmation in any name, for any flights. Since the
only authoritative record of whether there is a
reservation or e-ticket in that name on that flight is
contained in the passenger name record (PNR), such a
forgery is completely indetectable except by comparing
it with the PNR.

(I was skeptical when Bruce Schneier first pointed
this out in 2003. At that time, I believed the
airlines' claims that tickets would still be subject
to a significant number of random spot checks after
check-in and security screening. But that doesn't seem
to be happening any more, if it ever was.)

What about people with paper tickets, which are
printed on individually numbered, controlled stock
with many physical security features that enable them
to be verified independently of reservations?

If passengers with paper tickets had already gotten
boarding passes, they might have been allowed to fly.
Otherwise not, since regardless of whether they had
tickets, they couldn't get through security screening
without showing boarding passes. Security screeners
aren't supposed to check tickets: They are only
supposed to compare the name on each boarding pass
with the name on the ID presented by the passenger,
and compare the photo on the ID with the person's
appearance. And United couldn't print them "official"
boarding passes while Apollo was down.

What is wrong with this picture?

1. The people who had physically verifiable paper
tickets to prove they had paid for flights were left
behind, while anyone with a do-it-yourself boarding
pass, which proves nothing beyond minimal competence
with an HTML or image editor, was transported.
(Transported for free, if their boarding pass was
forged.)

2. By accepting homebrew boarding passes as sufficient
evidence of tickets, United completely compromised any
actual security provided by "verification" of boarding
passes or ID against either paper tickets (with their
physical security) or PNR's (with their electronic
security), both of which airlines have a financial
interest in protecting against unauthorized entries
and alterations.

3. Security screeners were willing to accept "boarding
passes" printed at home (for passengers claiming to
have e-tickets), but were unable to accept any sort of
hand-written boarding pass issued by airline staff at
the airport for passengers with paper tickets. (At
least that's what Urbanski told me, although this
strains credibility.)

It's hard to give any definitive advice on the basis
of this incident. In other countries, without the
bizarre and ineffectual "security screening"
procedures in the USA, the reverse usually happens
when airline reservation systems are down: Passengers
with unverifiable e-tickets are left behind, while
passengers with paper tickets are manually checked in
and transported.

The bottom line on this nonsense, I think, is that
both e-tickets and print-them-yourself boarding passes
were developed to save airlines money, not to make
life easier for travellers. Both fundamentally
compromise purportedly essential "security" systems.
And neither the airlines nor the government cares:
Both airlines and the USA government are more
interested in securing airlines' profits than in
airline passengers' convenience or security.

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

http://hasbrouck.org

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