G’day,
We’re travelling through Southeast Asia for a month so we’ve launched a new blog at http://www.allyadam.info! Many of the articles currently on here will be slowly transitioned over along with new stuff; check out our tips, photos, reviews from our trip! Hope to see you there soon!
Posted in news
With sky-high fuel bills QANTAS has decided to do some route pruning. QANTAS will exit the Gold Coast-Sydney and Ayers Rock-Melbourne routes and reducing services on Ayers Rock-Sydney from August. From July Jetstar will cut Sydney-Whitsunday Coast, Adelaide-Sunshine Coast, and Brisbane-Hobart. The service reductions will reduce capacity by five percent ‘the equivalent of grounding six aircraft’.
According to the SMH
Qantas plans to “ground” two Boeing 767s, retire one ageing 737 and speed up the retirement of its fuel-guzzling fleet of four 747-300s.
But in a worrying sign, Qantas said its low-cost subisidiary Jetstar would cancel the delivery of one A321 and ground another of its relatively new A320s. This counters moves by other airlines to focus on the retirement of older and less fuel efficient jets. Jetstar said the grounded A320 would be used as a “spare”.
ABC Radio National’s PM: QANTAS reacts to petrol prices by cutting routes
Posted in news
Tagged adelaide, airlines, australia, ayers rock, domestic, gold coast, jetstar, melbourne, new south wales, qantas, queensland, south australia, sunshine coast, sydney, travel, victoria, whitsunday
Portugal’s parliament last week approved a measure to standardise the Portugese language, standarising the Brazilian spelling of numerous words. The benefits? Apparently, making the language 
more uniform globally, internet searches and legal documents easier to understand and removing silent consonants in order for words to be spelt more phonetically. Oh, and ‘Portuguese officials hope the measure would advance an old ambition of getting Portuguese adopted as an official language at the UN’.
All sounds peachy, but Portuguese nationalists are furious at the prospect of this slight to national pride, with The Independent quoting distinguished poet Vasco Graça Moura as saying “There is no need for us to take a back seat to Brazil.”
[Image by psychiccrow]
Posted in news
Tagged brazil, brazilian, europe, language, news, portugal, portuguese, south america, travel
According to TravelWeekly AirAsia’s next Australian destination will be Perth, with weekly flights commencing November 2 and daily flights from March 2009. Intial fares from $99.
Qantas’ dispute with its engineers appears to have taken a turn for the worse. The union is demanding a five percent per year wage rise, while the airline is offering two percent. The four hour strike tomorrow between 2pm and 6pm which will result in the cancellation of at least 12 domestic flights may be just the beginning as Qantas is threatening to break the dispute with non-union labour, targeting retired engineers and expat staff.
We can only hope this is all resolved before it gets really nasty for passengers.
Update: Walkoff off.
Given the recent turbulence amongst low cost carriers Tiger Airways released some reassuring financials yesterday, although no trading figures were announced. The most promising sign is that they are reportedly giving Airbus the ol’ hurry up for fifty new planes on order, thirty of which are scheduled to operate in Australia.
V Blue, an airline founded by an eccentric Brit, has offended patriotic sensitivities by awarding Singapore Airlines the tender to service its fleet of 777’s just because they, you know, have the tools and experience to service these aircraft. A talking head from the Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineers Association decried the move claiming the ‘Virgin group should have considered the need to develop a skill base in Australia’, in between choruses of Waltzing Matilda and screaming Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie!!!
China is reportedly imposing more ever more stringent visa requirements.
Tourists taking a day trip from Siem Reap to the floating village of Chong Kneas are being mobbed by beggars taking to the water in plastic buckets.
Posted in news
Tagged airbus, airlines, cambodia, china, chong kneas, siem reap, singapore airlines, tiger airways, travel, v australia, virgin, virgin blue, visas
An intrepid traveller will soon be able to leave London for Brussels, Cologne, Vienna, Bucharest, Istanbul, Tehran, Quetta, Lahore, Amritsar, Delhi and Calcutta before reaching the end of the line in Dhaka according to a report from The Times.
Rail enthusiasts with a sense of adventure and 23 days to spare will be able to travel by train from London to Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, when a new link opens later this year.
The 7,000-mile Trans-Asia railway will follow one of the old Silk Roads through Istanbul, Tehran, Lahore and Delhi.
It is already being described by train buffs as “the world’s greatest railway journey” and will be longer than the Trans-Siberian railway, which spans 5,772 miles.
Under a United Nations-sponsored scheme, Pakistan and Iran will link up their lines in the coming months to join the sub-continent’s track to that of Europe for the first time.
The UN said the link would open up new trade routes within Asia and give the former Soviet republics of central Asia rail access to Iran’s strategic sea port at Bandar Abbas on the Gulf.
…
Last week, senior Indian officials met their Iranian counterparts in Tehran to discuss progress. India has already earmarked £90m to extend its vast rail network towards its border with Burma. From there just 218 miles of missing track stands in the way of an overland rail journey from London to Singapore.
[Photos Eileen Dehil via Flickr]
Flight Centre founder Graham Turner has called out airlines on the ridiculous fuel ‘surcharges’, calling on airlines integrate such operating costs in ticket prices: “Fuel, like maintenance, taxes and labour costs, is obviously an integral component of air travel expense, so it is difficult to see why it should be treated as a separate surcharge.”
According to the News.com.au article, however, it may well be some easy populist rhetoric when the writing is already on the wall
“Federal Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs Chris Bowen has included airline fuel surcharges in new legislation that is cracking down on hidden costs.
Amendments to the Trade Practices Act will ban so-called component pricing, where the full cost is not disclosed in advertising.”
It’s about damn time.
In any case, it’s good to see Flight Centre putting its expertise in misleading and deceptive conduct to good use.
Pacific Airlines, Vietnam’s second-largest carrier will be renamed Jetstar Pacific as part of a joint venture with the QANTAS subsidiary that will also lead to a fleet of 30 leased Airbus A320 aircraft being based in the country by 2014.
A woman has died in Brisbane this morning after falling from a stationary plane at Brisbane International Airport.
‘It feels as if someone has taken a huge sack of invaluable works of art and dumped them into the building, letting them fall as they may’. Can anybody match the Italians for their cheerful indifference to gorgeous ancient works of art? If in Rome check out ‘a treasure trove of breathtaking paintings, frescos, mosaics and sculptures from the heyday of Roman Empire — most borrowed from museums in Naples and Pompeii” currently being exhibited within spitting distance of Termini.
Jet Airways has delayed the planned launch of a Bombay – Shanghai – San Francisco service until June ‘to finalize the regulatory process’. Meanwhile AirAsia XXX is wearing a look of studied indifference to the collapse of Oasis – declaring it remains confident it will start flights to London – just not this year.
The chatter leaking out from under the Australian Government’s cone of silence insist that the “security incident” which delayed a plane in Melbourne for half an hour on Saturday night was a ‘misunderstanding‘ which is NOT bureaucrat speak for ‘stuff up’. But we’ve already said too much.
Does anything say ‘peaceful’, ‘tranquil’ and no longer the source of extreme tension between two quarrelling nuclear armed nations like golf courses? Kashmir can’t think of anything so it’s going with parks for ‘flog and chase’.
Scandal is engulfing Lonely Planet after the revelations by an employee, Thomas Kohnstamm, that slabs of the South America guidebooks contributed to were anything but well researched. In a new book entitled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? Kohnstamm admits to having plagerised and invented information. He claims he didn’t even visit Colombia to write the LP guide ‘because they didn’t pay me enough’; instead, ‘I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian consulate’.
Khonstamm accepted free travel and his recommendations seem to have been anything but fearlessly independent. Here is one of Kohnstamm’s anecdotes from a restaurant in Brazil he recommended:
“The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight,” he writes. “We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner.
” That performance earned a guidebook entry describing the restaurant as “a pleasant surprise” where “the table service is friendly”.
According to reports another LP author, Jeanne Oliver, wrote to management regarding this scandal ‘Why did you (management) not understand that when you hire a constant stream of new, unvetted people, pay them poorly and set them loose, that someone, somehow was going to screw you?’.
Apparently Mr Kohnstamm’s books are being ‘urgently reviewed’.
The Telegraph & News.com.au (The Sunday Telegraph)
UPDATE
An interesting article from the New Zealand Herald published a week ago with some more quotes from Kohnstamm:
“They [Lonely Planet] know the book is coming out,” he says. “I’ve been contacted by a number of other Lonely Planet writers and everyone who has bothered to be in contact said, ‘Good on you, it’s a story that needed to be told.’
“But the book is fundamentally about my personal experience and not intended as an expose on Lonely Planet. Nor do I attempt to shoot it down. Obviously, when the book was written, it was given a full legal review.”
Kohnstamm notes in the interview that ‘Lonely Planet pays on average less than the minimum hourly wage, often does not support its writers in the field and makes demands almost impossible to meet’.
Posted in Lonely Planet/Kohnstamm Affair, news
Tagged brazil, colombia, kohnstamm, lonely planet, scandal, south america, thomas kohnstamm, travel
Oz Traveller 