Hotel Occupancy- and Rates!- Rising

A new projection from PricewaterhouseCoopers Hospitality and Leisure Practice predicts that the average daily hotel rate in the United States for the full-year of 2011 will increase by 3.6% as compared to 2010 rates. An additional 5.1% rate increase in 2012 is expected to follow.

Despite this, demand for hotel rooms has been abnormally high in 2011, especially in July, when, according to Smith Travel Research, 105 million room nights were booked- the highest number of room nights ever sold in one month, even with a 3.9% average daily rate increase for that particular month. The only other single month (in any year) that more than 100 million rooms were sold in the U.S. was in July 2010.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on whether the predicted price increases for the average daily hotel rate will have a substantial adverse effect on the increasing occupancy rates, or if travelers will continue to book more hotel rooms regardless of price increases. It would be unfortunate if hotels detracted potential customers with a continuation of inflated rates; however, considering the data above, this scenario does not seem to coincide with the findings of the conducted studies.

East Coast Travel -and Stranded Travelers- Recovering from Hurricane Irene

With Hurricane Irene's departure from the Eastern United States, travel operators have been forced to attempt to restore regularity to the travel schedule with as much rapidity as possible. Immense numbers of flights, public transportation systems, business and leisure travelers, and local residents were affected by the damage inflicted by the Category 1 hurricane. Despite the tragedies and damages done by the storm, it is fortunate that the storm did not escalate as expected. MSNBC reports on the recovery process for East Coast travel.

Article from MSNBC.com follows:

The nation's planes, trains and buses had their first full day of near-normal service since Thursday, as most passengers stranded by Hurricane Irene slowly made their way home.

Airlines said overall Tuesday that despite some scattered issues, including a handful of delays and cancellations, most flights were running smoothly because of the overtime put in by crews put in the day before. Most ran extra flights Monday to clear the glut of travelers waiting to fly.

Flight tracking service FlightAware reported only 159 flights were scratched compared with more than 1,700 on Monday. Nearly 14,000 flights were scrapped in the hours before, during and after the storm. That's the most in any four-day period in more than a year, surpassing cancellations during either of the massive snowstorms this winter.

United Continental, Delta and US Airways expect to finish shuttling the majority of stranded travelers to their final destinations Tuesday. American Airlines spokesman Ed Martelle said it cleared its backlog of passengers in New York waiting to take off. And JetBlue spokesman Mateo Lleras said every passenger affected by the storm should be brought to their destinations by the end of the week.

Most airlines reported few problems getting planes back in the air and getting travelers where they needed to go. But some officials said that the decision to shut down major airports — especially the closure of New York's five main airports by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — caused a scramble.

David Holtz, the managing director for operations at Delta, had just about finished its cancellation plan around 6 p.m. on Friday and could have kept flying at New York's Kennedy airport through Saturday evening when airport officials said they would close at noon Saturday.

That "threw a huge monkey wrench into our planning," he said. Delta canceled additional flights to adjust to the earlier closing.

Airport officials thought the 18-hour notice was generous. But with flights of 12 hours or longer scheduled from as far away as Tokyo, the decision forced the airline to act quickly to notify passengers before they left for the airport, he said.

Susan Baer, the Port Authority's aviation director, said the shutdown of New York's public transit system — which most employees use to get to work — affected its decision to close the airports.

Despite the sooner-than-expected shutdown, some airlines praised the efficiency of the airports' reopening.

"The coordination was really extraordinary," JetBlue CEO Dave Barger told CNBC on Monday. "I really don't think we could have had a more effective startup."

Reopening airports means much more than just switching on the lights. In New York, for example, it involved doing everything from clearing cots used by stranded travelers to making sure airport staff could show up to work. With the city's public transportation system limping back into service, Baer said security agents were picked up by their managers in vans to ensure that they'd make it to work on time.

Amtrak resumed service between New York and Boston on Tuesday. Trains are still canceled between Philadelphia and New York because of flooding. Amtrak also canceled trains from the Northeast to cities like Miami and New Orleans.

Travelers who couldn't fly or take the train turned to the bus. BoltBus was fully booked Monday and Tuesday, according to Timothy Stokes, a spokesman for its parent company Greyhound. The only cancellation for Greyhound was its route between Albany and Syracuse.

Megabus also saw an increase in passengers who had tried to get around by other means, according to Dale Moser, president and COO of Megabus parent company Coach USA.

All buses were running again, but some kept their speeds down on roads other than interstate highways as a precaution.

Article originally appeared in Travel News on MSNBC.com
By SAMANTHA BOMKAMP and SCOTT MAYEROWITZ
AP Airlines Writer Joshua Freed in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44325892/ns/travel-news/

Image uploaded from: http://www.ctpost.com/news/slideshow/Hurricane-Irene-30520.php#photo-83

TSA Pilots Traveler Behavior Screenings In Boston

I have only one historical observation; "Papers please! Your papers are not in order! Come with me."
The domestic version of the Global Entry program can not come fast enough for me!


From BTN

The Transportation Security Administration will expand its Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques program by requiring every airline passenger traveling through Boston Logan International Airport to engage in a "brief conversation" with a TSA officer, who will perform a behavior analysis. A 60-day pilot begins August 15.

Confirming several media reports about the new pilot, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said passengers will be asked three or four questions, possibly related to their recent whereabouts, their destination and whether they have a business card.

"All passengers are being screened normally, but during the screening, it's [their] interaction with the behavior officer, not so much your answer," Davis said. "These officers are trained to observe passengers who are [displaying] physical and physiological signs that they fear discovery or that they are being deceptive."

Though the SPOT program first took effect in 2003 and currently is used in 160 airports, "what's different is that we are positioning this right at the checkpoint along with the document checker," Davis said. Up to this point, she explained, TSA officers "have walked around and observed passengers, and they have engaged passengers in conversation, and they have referred passengers for additional screenings." Now in Boston, if a TSA officer is suspicious of a passenger following the behavioral assessment at the checkpoint, that passenger will "undergo a pat-down and have your carry-on physically searched."

TSA will use the pilot in Boston to "inform any next steps," Davis said. "We will look at the data that we collect during the 60 days and we will look at how the program impacts passengers and screening operations, and how it impacts wait times."

TSA acknowledged the program could make some travelers uneasy, but accepts that "normal behavior in an airport involves some level of nervousness and anxiety," Davis said. She also claimed the program "is an antidote to racial profiling because race and ethnicity is not something we look at all. If you just focus on someone's race or ethnicity you are going to miss a terrorist."