Standing Room Seats? Uh, Not True
May 4th, 2006 | By Jared BlankI will give full credit here to long-time reader IAHPHX for excuse me here, calling bullshit on last week’s story about standing room only seats in the NY Times. The Times issued a correction (last one on the page) saying that Airbus had looked into the seats in 2003, but dismissed the idea. It also said that, had it known that, it would never have published the story on page 1. (Meanwhile, I had written that I thought the story was "odd though not implausible," which is essentially true: Airbus considered the idea and dismissed it). Shame on the Times for doing essentially zero research into this before stuffing it on page 1.
At the end of the day, a good journalist needs good judgment. Running this seemingly far-fetched story without proper confirmation was simply not good judgment.
Elliott has had other recent problems with judgment, too. Last month, he also pissed off the Flyertalk folks by calling them “unethical” for trying to book the dirt cheap “mistake” fares that are occasionally loaded on the computer rez systems.
http://ellipses.elliott.org/archives/2006/04/decimal.php
I would say there’s a very good argument that travel companies need not honor such reservations (if they quickly notify the rez holders that the price is a mistake), but is booking such a fare actually “unethical”?
That strikes me as being as silly as standing-room-only on jets!