Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott courtesy of a blown connection by Southwest. We clean out the TravelCommons mail bag, going through listener comments on disabling in-flight electronics, eating alone, and finding good non-chain food on the road. We talk about the sudden collapse of the CLEAR registered traveler program and if in-flight WiFi will really improve frequent traveler productivity. I also give a little personal history about how I came to travel so much. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #75:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott due to a missed connection courtesy of Southwest Airlines
• This is a pretty big miss by Southwest. It’ll be a while before they see me at Midway again
• Haven’t been doing quite as much travel as usual. Passenger traffic in May was down over 9% , and I personally contributed to that trend
• Bridge Music — Ice Hotel by Mario Grigorov

Following Up

• Thanks to everyone for the best wishes tweets, e-mails and website comments on last month’s 4th anniversary show
• Simon Mikkelsen provided a nice fact-based response to my rant about the mess of in-flight electronics regulations
• The CLEAR registered traveler program replaced its web site with a single white page announced its immediate shutdown. Guess I made the right decision not renewing my membership
• Bridge Music — Giving In by Brad Senne

Can’t I Fly Unplugged?

• Joint American Airlines/HP survey says most ” tech-savvy frequent flyers” think WiFi is more important than food.
• A not-so-surprising coincidence given AA’s recent announcement of their roll-out of the Gogo inflight Internet service.
• I rate airport food availability much higher than WiFi — especially if I’m getting on a flight heading to or from the West Coast.
• I think my productivity increases without inflight WiFi, but that’s because I use a full-featured laptop
• However, the emerging class of netbooks, with their corollary assumption of constant Internet connectivity – the model of a low-powered client leveraging the power and storage of the cloud — would need in-flight WiFi to be productive
• Bridge Music — Traveling Light by Adam Fielding

How I Got Here

• Simon Mikkelsen wrote “I’ve had a question for a long time. What is your job? We’ve heard a bit from time to time, but what requires so much travel?”
• Have tended not put too much of my personal background into TravelCommons. Kind of a corollary tag line – it’s more about the journey than the presenter. But after so many of you have stuck it out through 4 years and now 75 episodes, I thought I owed you a bit of background.
• I’m in consulting now, but traveled a lot even when I had real jobs
• When I joined Deloitte Consulting in Detroit, the real travel began. I made it to Northwest’s top tier in 9 months and had 750,000 miles in 4 years

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• Bridge music from Magnatune
• Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below
• Follow me on Twitter
• Direct link to the show