• DO NOT throw things at a flight attendant but DO write a complaint letter. Sure, you might feel like it when that 150 year old flight attendant gives you a scowl, but it will generally just get you into trouble if you throw something at her. If you have a beef, get the flight attendant’s info and write in to the airline afterward to complain.
• DO ask for help with heavy bags, but DO NOT expect help. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Most flight attendants won’t help you lift a heavy bag. It’s either an airline concern about paying workers comp or it’s not in the contract. Some flight attendants will still try to help, so it can’t hurt to ask, but don’t expect much.
• DO ring the call button when you need something, but DO NOT ring it every five minutes. Some flight attendants will try to tell you that the call button is there for emergencies. That’s a load of crap. It’s there if you need something from the flight attendant. Now, if you happen to need something every five minutes, you’re likely to get some dirty looks and a scolding. Nobody needs something every five minutes.
• DO NOT get up when the seat belt sign is on. I know, I know. You’ve been bouncing around for ages and you just need to pee, but you should try to hold it as long as you can. The pilots will generally only keep the sign on when there’s a threat of turbulence (though not always). You remember hearing about those flights where people break their neck when a plane hits turbulence? That is almost always someone who didn’t have a seatbelt buckled when it should have been. Don’t be that person. Flight attendants don’t want to have to scrape you off the ceiling.
• DO say “please” and “thank you.” You’d be amazed at what a little common courtesy can do. Flight attendants are out slinging drinks and throwing peanuts all day long, and a lot of people aren’t very friendly about it. Just a simple “please” and “thank you” along with a smile can do wonders.
• DO not yell at the flight attendant for all the problems you have with the airline. You’re finally winging your way to Omaha after a 3 hour delay and a missed connection in Chicago. This airlines sucks, right? Well, don’t yell at the flight attendant for it. Do you think he had anything to do with the delay or missed connection? Nope. I know he’s an easy target since you’re in a metal tube and he has nowhere to hide, but there’s nothing he can do from up there anyway.

If you’re flying for your wedding or your honeymoon, the last thing you want is to be tied up with flex cuffs and humiliated in front of your groom. Just be nice, have some common courtesy, and enjoy the ride.

If you’re getting married, you have about 400 million things to remember to do, so the last thing you want is to have to remember your frequent flier information when you’re booking your wedding travel. Oh sure, you want to earn those miles, and maybe you even want to use them, but what was that number again . . . ?

You know that you’ve dug into a drawer in some dark corner of your home, hoping to find that card that was sent to you in 1987. Let’s face it. It’s a real pain in the butt. So why not just use a site that keeps everything in one place?

There are a handful of sites out there that do this. TripIt has a Pro version that costs money, as does Mileage Manager. And GoMiles, which is in private beta, is working on relating your miles to what you can get for them. But for my purposes of just monitoring all the accounts, AwardWallet does the job. As long as you don’t have concerns about storing your numbers and passwords elsewhere, this site works really well.

You set it up program by program, entering your frequent flier number or web login along with your password. Then it goes in and pulls out your balances and expiration dates so you can monitor them all from one place.

When you log in, you see your frequent flier number and website logins so it makes for an easy reference point. It can even log you in directly to the websites for those programs and take you there if you so choose.

It’s also not limited to airlines or even travel even general. Yes, I can follow my Starwood, National car rental, and Amtrak balances on there, but I could also look at credit card rewards, and more.

What don’t I love? The pricing plan is really goofy. You get a lot of functionality for free, but the premium version, which includes some bells and whistles, costs, uh, whatever you want. Seriously. You decide what you think it’s worth and pay it. Strange, I know.

But forgetting about that quirk, this site is great. I never remember my frequent flier numbers, so this is an easy way to bring them up. It’s also helpful when you’re trying to log in to the different programs and can’t remember your information. This stores your login info even if it isn’t your frequent flier number. So you really can’t lose this stuff anymore.

Kudos to AwardWallet for putting together a really helpful tool.

I started Cranky Concierge last year to effectively provide airline dork knowledge for any traveler who needs the help. We’ve helped hundreds of people so far, and there have been some pretty spectacular results. With the Spirit Air strike stranding all kinds of people heading to tropical Caribbean destinations, the Antibride herself thought this would be a worthwhile topic. Here are some fun-filled stories with happy endings.

Overnight in Boston? Nay
We had one client who was on his way back from Madrid. He had to connect in Boston and then get on a flight to Columbus where he would pick up his daughter from his parents’ and then fly home the next day. Unfortunately, this happened just after Christmas, right when the underwear-bomber-inspired rule ridiculousness was put into place.

As was the case for most flights facing TSA-imposed insanity, this flight was late getting out of Madrid and got in to Boston just in time for him to wave goodbye to his connection. Oh yeah, that was the last flight of the night.

We, of course, saw this coming a mile away and looked for options while he was in the air. There weren’t any through the usual connecting points, but I remembered that there was the possibility of flying through LaGuardia. Normally that’s not a good idea, but the weather was good and things were running on time.

Sure enough, there was a late flight through LaGuardia, and I had the information ready for him when he landed. He made it to Columbus that night even though the airline had told him when he arrived that they had nothing until the next day.

Into the Belly of the Volcano
Ah the Icelandic volcano. Was there any natural disaster that was more annoying? (Ok, maybe hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil pouring into the Gulf, but that isn’t impacting air travel.)

Our very first volcano client called before it was known to be a big issue. Airspace had closed, but it was looking like a day to day thing. He was scheduled to fly from Halifax to JFK and then back home to London, but he figured his flight wouldn’t go. It was still scheduled as he boarded his flight to JFK, but we were already looking for alternates.

Ultimately, his flight to London canceled, of course, and most other airlines had canceled their flights to northern Europe as well. It didn’t look like he would be getting out anytime soon, so he had resigned himself to staying in New York as long as necessary. (And we know that New York hotels aren’t cheap.)

We came up with another option. It sounds strange, but Icelandair had room on its flights. The volcano may have been in Iceland, but it blew away from Reykjavik, so that airport was open. At the time, Glasgow was open as well, so I snagged the last business class seat that would get him there. Then he could hop a train.

As it turns out, while he was in the air, Glasgow closed. You might think being stuck in Iceland would be awful, but it was far from it. Icelandair actually provided customers with the first hotel night free. They put our client up in a hotel with fast internet connectivity, and he was thrilled.

He spent a few days in Iceland, and then as soon as a small corner of the UK opened, they snuck some airplanes into Edinburgh and he was on one. He got home long before he would have been able to get out of New York.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Sometimes, our suggestions are slightly insane, but they do the job if you really need to be somewhere. Here’s another volcano story for you. We had a client in London who was supposed to come home from London to Atlanta but was canceled. He was only to be home for two days and then he had to be in Toronto for a meeting. Now, the goal became to just get him there in two days. Not easy.

After looking at several options, we came up with a doozy of a trip. He could take the Eurostar train from London to Paris. Then he would take the TGV train down to the Spanish frontier. Next, he would take an overnight train down to Lisbon. From there, he would board a flight on SATA, the airline of the Azores. After a brief stop in the Azores, his flight would get him to Toronto in time for the meeting.

In the end, he opted not to do it. Why? Well, though he wanted to be at the meeting, he was in the eighties and just didn’t think it was worth the hassle. I can’t say I blame him for that, but man, it would have been fun and yes, it would have gotten him there.

It’s a timely topic, right? I mean, let’s say you were scheduled to get married this weekend and a volcano just happened to erupt, spewing ash all over a continent and messing up air travel. Then what? Lots of people are facing that prospect right now, and the moral of the story is . . . don’t get married in Europe. No, wait, that’s not right. I think the moral is to just have patience.

There’s not much you can do when something like this happens, unless you want to get really creative, so just chalk it up to being a great story you can tell the grandkids one day. But how do you make the best of a bad situation? Stay on top of things and you might get out sooner than others. We’ve sent Cranky Concierge clients through places like Israel and Iceland with much luck so far. Here are some tips.

First off, follow your airline and airport on Twitter. These guys have been pumping out information via Twitter like rock stars, keeping people up to date. For example, I just received a tweet that Icelandair was adding a few flights tonight to Scotland. If you catch it before others, you might be able to grab yourself a seat.

Another tip: go standby. Though flights are jammed full for the foreseeable future, that doesn’t mean all seats will be filled. Many people will opt not to travel and others will get stuck on connections. If you see that flights are starting to leave, it might be worth it to go standby and see if you can get on an earlier flight.

Lastly, just be creative. If you’re willing, there are ways to get to Europe. It may involve flying to Africa or the Middle East and backtracking. It may involve trains, buses, and cars. It may take a long time, but you’ll get there.

No matter what, having patience is the best suggestion. It will make things much better for you while you’re waiting this out. Your “perfect” wedding may not work out as planned, but man, it’ll make for a much better story.

The thought certainly crossed my mind more than once. My now-wife and I went to Vegas a couple of times while we were engaged, and I only half-jokingly suggested that we elope while we were there. It would have saved a lot of money, and that’s money that can be spent on other things like season tickets to the Diamondbacks or, uh, something a little more female-friendly. Sounds great.

So if you decide you want to elope, chances are it’s more of a spur-of-the-moment thing. Before you change your mind, you decide to hop a flight to Vegas or Hawai’i and get it over with, right? Well, if you’re going to do that, then you’ll want some tips on how to keep the cost down.

You could always drive, of course, but that doesn’t exactly create the fun, cool memories that last a lifetime. You want to fly, but last minute airfare can be pretty expensive, and that sucks. Yes, it’ll still cost you less than all those flowers you were going to buy for your traditional wedding, but still, there’s no reason to waste any money.

The first thing you should do is look for last minute deals. American, for example, has NetSAAver fares that come out midweek for last minute weekend trips. Other airlines, like Delta, do this as well. It’s a great way for the airlines to sell off some of their excess inventory at the last minute. Then again, it might be tougher to get a flight to Vegas than, say, Reno.

But unless you’re going in and coming right back, you also need a place to stay. There are some great deals around right now, but how do you find them? Well, there certainly are a million places to look, but one that you might want to bookmark is Dealbase. Dealbase shows deals from a variety of sources and tries to display them in terms so that they can be compared to each other easily.

Find your deals this way and then you’ll have plenty of cash leftover to blow on the deluxe package at the chapel.

One of the reasons that weddings are great for this purpose is because they offer the luxury of time. You’ve probably planned your wedding 30 years in advance. (Yes, we know what you girls were doing with those Barbie Dolls when we were pretending to be the A-Team.) And chances are that your date has been picked more than a year in advance, unless you were drunk and just married some schlub in Vegas. But that’s a whole different issue.

Most airlines open up their schedules 330 days in advance, so if you have your date ready, be there to grab any available seats exactly 330 days before you walk down the aisle. This is particularly important if you’re getting married in Hawai’i during the high season or maybe Europe in the summer. If you’re heading to Erie, Pennsylvania in January, well, don’t bother hurrying to check availability. (On the other hand, you might want to consider hurrying to your nearest shrink.)

Sometimes, miles will never be available on a flight. Going to Hawai’i over New Years? Yeah, good luck. That’s a tough one. But if you don’t find availability at other times, that doesn’t mean that it won’t pop up later. Airlines may expect a flight to be full, but if it doesn’t book up as predicted, they will open up seats later. You can check this every day or you can use a service to do it for you, depending upon the airline.

ExpertFlyer.com will notify you when award seats become available on some airlines if you have a subscription. (Cranky Concierge clients get a 15% discount.) Or you can sign up with Cranky Concierge and we’ll monitor it for you. Don’t want to spend money? Just check periodically. You can start with a monthly check when you’re very far out, but start checking more frequently the closer you get. Granted, if you get too close, you risk not being able to buy a ticket.

And when it comes to your honeymoon, that’s even better. You can usually build that schedule around when flights are available. If you’ve been saving up miles, what better way to burn them than with a First Class trip to the Maldives?

So if you’ve got miles, this is a great time to burn them, unless, of course, your parents are paying . . . .

Work sucks. So when it comes time for your wedding, you’ve probably been saving up vacation days like a squirrel saves up acorns. Your natural inclination will probably be to dart out of work as soon as you can and make a beeline for the airport for an evening flight out of town. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Stick with morning flights and you’ll be happier.

I realize that waking up at 0-dark-thirty and dragging yourself to the airport before the sun comes up is not your idea of fun, but you’ll thank me in the end. Morning flights tend to go on time more often than afternoon or evening flights. It’s worth waking up early if it means things go smoothly.

Think about how airplanes spend their days. The goal for an airline is to keep planes in the air as often as possible. When they’re in the air, they make money. When they’re on the ground, they don’t. Airlines would fly their planes 24 hours a day except for two problems.

1. Nobody is willing to pay for a 3am flight to Jackson, Mississippi.
2. They have to maintain those planes sometime, so the airlines do most of their maintenance at night when demand is lowest.

Simply put, most planes start the day fresh each morning. Then they fly like crazy until late at night when they go back to sleep for a few hours.

But what happens when there’s bad weather? Or there are 25 sets of new parents with strollers to be checked on that flight from Omaha? Planes get bogged down during the day as traffic increases and things conspire to really mess up schedules. By the end of the day, you’re paying for all the problems that happened earlier. But each night, the planes get to where they’re supposed to be going, sometimes very late, and the airline is able to reset for the next day.

Sometimes flights get canceled, planes break, etc and things don’t work out as planned. So when you’re running to the airport after work on a bad day, that plane is falling behind and your flight may end up being canceled. That’s not a big deal if there’s another flight five minutes later with an empty seat on it, but in an era of very high load factors, that’s a rarity. Sometimes, you can be out of luck for several days and your trip may be ruined.

So spend that last night in eager anticipation of what lies ahead and then wake up early and enjoy that on time departure. Oh, and on the way home? Who cares. You don’t want to go back to work anyway.

The first thing is to know the policy of the airline you’re flying. At Southwest, for example, the policy is that you should buy as many seats as you need in order to fit comfortably between the two lowered armrests. If the flight isn’t full, they’ll refund you after the fact for that seat. So you’ll only have to pay for it on a full flight. The policies are similar at many other airlines, but they will often not make you buy a second seat unless the flight is full – just a small tweak.

How do you know if you fit? Well, you can use SeatGuru or SeatExpert to find out the width of the seat. You’ll be surprised to know that it can vary. For example, Airbus narrowbody airplanes (A319, A320, A321) tend to have about an inch more width per seat than a 737. A United A320, for example, has an 18 inch wide seat while a Southwest 737 seat is 17 inches wide.

Also, make sure you know your body. If you are at all concerned, then you should probably just buy the extra seat and save yourself the embarrassment. Or you could try to play that game and find flights that aren’t likely to be full so that you can stretch out. Remember, it’s all about width here, so if you’re pregnant, that big ole’ belly doesn’t really matter.

Some say this policy is discriminatory, but as someone who has sat next to a passenger spilling over into my seat, I’m very happy to see it in place. Still, I can’t help feeling very sorry for those people who get flagged at the gate or on the plane, like Kevin Smith. Don’t be that person. Figure things out in advance.

And remember, you can avoid all these problems by just going First Class . . .

Cranky Concierge

Last week, a big winter storm rolled through the Midwest, and that meant flights were guaranteed to be disrupted. It’s tough to keep those runways clear when snow is coming down fast. I had a client, who we’ll call Tarzan, who was heading from Chicago to Dallas for his wedding to, uh, Jane. His plane was supposed to arrive at 747p that night, and he had plans to meet everyone at 9p for a late dinner to kick off the wedding weekend.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. He’s an idiot for scheduling a flight to arrive only an hour before he needed to be there, but remember, I’m making up the background on this story. (It was actually a business trip.)

Tarzan was scheduled to fly on Delta from Chicago/Midway via Minneapolis to get to Dallas. Both Chicago and Minneapolis were seeing heavy snows, so Tarzan was getting nervous. He was supposed to leave Chicago at 245p, but when we looked, an earlier flight has already been canceled and the next one was delayed. He decided to head to the airport early to see if he could get out of town.

While he was on his way, we did a search here at Cranky Concierge to see what other flight options he might have. Sure enough, while Atlanta had weather problems the day before, it was clear now. There was an airplane on its way to Midway that was going to leave on time at 1225p. We figured if we could get him out of the snow on time, the rest would be easy.

He went up to the counter and they gladly put him on that flight, as they’ll often do when the weather goes south. They also put him on a connection that would arrive Dallas at 718p, still a half an hour before he was supposed to arrive. There was an earlier connection they didn’t put him on, but we figured we could fix that once he got to Atlanta.

Tarzan flies a fair bit and is actually an elite member in Delta’s frequent flier program. He was pleasantly surprised to see his airplane not only leave on time (3 minutes early, actually), but they even had a nice cushy First Class seat for him. Even though they needed to deice the plane, he still arrived just a couple minutes late.

Once he landed, I had an email in his inbox telling him where that earlier connecting flight was leaving from. I told Tarzan to swing his way over there to see if they’d let him onboard. Sure enough, they did, and once again, a First Class seat had his name on it. Our hero ended up arriving Dallas at 621p, and he was able to surprise Jane with a few quiet moments before the wedding insanity began.

Oh, and Tarzan’s original flight? It was canceled. My guess is that they would have put him on the 2+ hour delayed earlier flight if there were available seats. That would have had him arrive in Minneapolis just after the scheduled departure his connection, but that was delayed as well. He would have clocked in just shy of 9p in Dallas, and he would have been very late to dinner. Jane no happy.

Of course, much of this was possible because it was a relatively light day to travel. There were seats available on all these flights, and that won’t always be the case. You should always leave some extra buffer time when you fly to your wedding, and if you’re traveling during a busy season, you should leave even more.

For more info on Cranky Concierge, go to crankyconcierge.com, send us a note at info@crankyconcierge.com, or call us at (707) 797-7474.

My wife and I live in sunny Southern California, a beautiful place for an October wedding. But of course, we decided to go elsewhere. Our decision to get married in the Napa Valley meant there were countless planning trips to find the venue and nail down the details. It was fantastic, but it ended up being a fair bit of work.

Then we had to find hotels for our guests (not a cheap thing in wine country during the crush, I might add) and help them fly in from places as far away as London. It took a look of work, but of course, it was worth it. Coordinating travel must be brutal for those of you who don’t live it and love it. (I’ll just guess most of you don’t consider yourselves to be an airline dork like I do.)

Planning becomes even more difficult if you’re putting together a wedding off the beaten path. Maybe a surfing wedding in Chile? How about a volunteering wedding in the jungles of Africa? They all have one thing in common. You have to get there.

So I’ll be writing here every couple of weeks to try and demystify the entire travel planning experience around weddings. I’ll post tips and tricks, deals, and more. Of course, not all travel planning is painful. There’s always the best part of the wedding to plan as far as I’m concerned . . . the honeymoon.

I’ll cover all these things and more over the next few months. If you have questions or suggested topics for me, you can always email me at cf@crankyflier.com or come visit me on my site, The Cranky Flier.