Month: February 2013

The new American is arriving

I love the new commercial announcing the US Airways/American Air merger. It’s stirring, and poignant, and on-message. Who would have thought that a corporate merger could make your heart swell with pride? They did it with an emotional tug at the appeal of new beginnings… an empty airport becomes filled with promise and we remember that flying used to be romantic and exciting. Here’s the script, as narrated by John Hamm:

It’s time to make a change.
It’s time to become better versions of ourselves.
To be greater than you expected.
And more than you had hoped for.
So starting now, we begin a new chapter.
One written in passion, and skill, ambition, and sweat.
One where two companies take the best of themselves to create something better.
And when all is said and done, we will not only have become a bigger airline
But also something so much greater.
So let’s introduce ourselves to the world…
Not again, but for the very first time.
The new American is arriving.

What’s even better is that the spot was completed on February 12 (per the slate at the beginning), the day before the merger was announced, so it would seem to have been produced in record time. How did they do it? Perhaps it was in the can in anticipation of the event (which had been publicly discussed for several weeks), but I like to think they (McCann Worldwide) quickly threw it together using footage from the recent “Change is in the Air” campaign which debuted last month.

That campaign, by the way, fails for me in the same way this new spot succeeds. All the people stopping what they’re doing to look into the skies seems manipulative and unlikely, and also brings unfortunate echoes of 9/11, especially the peek at the tail of the plane disappearing over the top of the building. The evolution from that campaign to this one is to be applauded. I also like the fact I’ll finally be able to use my AAdvantage miles, since US Airways but not American flies to my local airport. Well done.

Priceline cancellation process… smart, or sneakily stupid?

Priceline Change reservation Page
Can you find the cancellation link on this page?

[This post is preserved for historical reasons only. See UPDATE below.]

I booked a hotel through Priceline’s Booking.com subsidiary where you don’t have to pay up front but do have to give them a credit card with advance notice required if you cancel. Then I did need to cancel and found it surprisingly difficult.

The email confirmation made no mention of a cancellation procedure. I went back to the confirmation page on Priceline and there was nothing there about cancellation either. I poked around with searches for “cancel” on the Priceline website without success. I emailed the hotel at the address in my confirmation email and got no response. Finally, I called the hotel and they had no record of the reservation. They said since it was made through booking.com I’d have to go back through them.

So I did go on the booking.com website and entered the reservation number and PIN I’d been given and it took me to the page shown here. Notice there’s no cancellation option, just the choice to “change” my booking. I chose that and was then able to cancel without further difficulty.

I’m wondering if Priceline has run the numbers on the effects of this process, which is definitely more sneaky than what I’ve encountered on hotel sites and also on other aggregators like Expedia. On the one hand, there are probably people who, faced with the difficulty to cancel, just say screw it, I’ll stay there after all. But how often does that happen? Don’t you generally have a good specific reason when you cancel a reservation?

And the net effect on me is that, similar to CarRentals.com with its deceptive pricing policy, I’m much less likely to use booking.com in the future. How is that a good thing for them?

UPDATE as of June 2015. I used booking.com for a recent stay, and had to cancel. Happy to say that the cancellation procedure is completely transparent. There’s now a prominent link on your confirmation email that says “manage your booking” and when you click to that page there’s a prominent (red) “Cancel” button. Very pleased with this change in policy, which I assume was made by Priceline not out of the goodness of their heart but because it makes sound business sense to be up front with your customers.