Travel industry news offers useful features

A lot of innovations and announcements either appeared recently or just recently came to my attention. Although none is a game-changer, many provide useful features.

New rental car player. Germany- based Sixt ( sixt. com) has decided to move into the U. S. marketplace, featuring Mercedes brands but offering a full spectrum of models. Locations open to date are a handful in Florida, three in California, and several in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, plus Austin, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Seattle. Sixt has seven airport locations: Those in Atlanta, Miami, and Seattle are on-airport, where the airport operates combined rental car facilities shared with other renters; airport offices in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and West Palm Beach, Fla., and San Diego are off- airport, served by shuttle; other locations are downtown.

Sixt is a solid company: I’ve rented from it in Germany, and you may have, too, when you rented through a third-party rental car agency. But the U. S. program doesn’t seem to show any “unique selling proposition” that would make Sixt a go-to rental company.

Bus metasearch engine. Yes, I know that bus travel is not glamorous, but it’s enjoying a renaissance, with lots of new services. And the diversity of bus lines looked like an opportunity for a metasearch engine, which was grabbed by a new website, Wanderu.com. Unfortunately, when I tested it for some connections near my home in Oregon, I found that it didn’t even cover mainline Greyhound trips, let alone the handful of regional operators, My conclusion was that Wanderu isn’t fully ready for prime time.

Spirit Airlines: Annoying, yes, but a racketeer? In some ways, the most interesting recent tidbit of news in the airline business was an obscure decision Sept. 23 in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court ruled that a group of Spirit Airlines passengers could file a class action suit against the line for hiding passenger fees and misrepresenting its fares under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Specifically, the court held that the Airline Deregulation Act’s pre-emption of federal authority over airline pricing does not pre-empt other federal laws. This is significant because, since deregulation, airlines have been hiding behind the pre- emption principle to deflect consumer abuse offenses that the Department of Transportation has chosen not to enforce. As far as I know, Spirit has already stopped the practices cited in the case, but the ability of consumers to use RICO, if upheld, provides travelers a new avenue to pursue airline abuses. This could be big.

More Norwegian. Despite all the fuss about a possible corporate base in Ireland, the current Norway-based airline (Norwegian) announced plans for expanded U.S. service next spring and summer:

New routes, once weekly: Orlando- London/Gatwick April 4 and Orlando-Copenhagen March 30.

Added flights: New York-London/Gatwick, six times weekly starting in May; Los Angeles- Stockholm, twice weekly, in March; and Oakland- Stockholm, three times weekly, in March.

The potential for more flights — especially to London — depends on the outcome of negotiations with the United States over Norwegian’s plans to operate U.S. flights by a new company based in Ireland. Meanwhile, still in Ireland, Ryanair’s chief executive officer, Michael O’Leary, again promised low-fare service to the United States — as soon as he can buy long range wide body planes on the cheap.