The High Price of Add-on Online Fees

New rules will go into effect in a month for US airline advertising that take the emphasis off the asterisk and adds transparency to their add-on ticketing fees. Ironically, some of the low-fare airlines such as Spirit are fighting the changes, claiming freedom of speech infringement by the government. I guess the right to deceive their customers should be part of the Constitution, or at least left to free enterprise to sort this all out. The rules were supposed to go in effect earlier this fall, but were extended to January 24th to give the airlines time to legally outmaneuver them. I mean, to comply.

It used to be that one went online to avoid add-on fees by travel agents, but as the airlines have made visits to bankruptcy courts more frequent (American is the most recent), they have come up with a variety of ways to squeeze more money out of the public without being so, well, obvious and clear. There are baggage fees, fees for using particular forms of payment, and fees for sitting in those extra-spacious exit row seats. Buying a ticket online is now akin to buying a computer from Dell: there are so many screens to click on to avoid various up-sells (rental cars? hotels? a new printer cartridge, maybe?), that the process is a user experience nightmare.

But the fee asterisk and its associated add-ons are onerous. Spirit, for example, charges all sorts of fees depending on the ticket. They claim the online booking fees are “optional” since you can avoid them by going to the airport and buying your tickets there. Right. As if we don’t spend enough time waiting in airport lines. You can read their fine print here and it will take you a while. Here is a screenshot showing you that a $164 round-trip ticket would cost you an additional $62 in fees.

Granted, they aren’t alone in charging high fees for online purchases. Many of these are local and other taxes that the hospitality industry has to bear. But the objection is how the consumer is informed of them during the online purchase process. Spirit doesn’t divulge all the fees until you have selected your flights and are getting ready to pay them, which is understandable given the many nuances of its complex fee structure. But that is still reprehensible, from an airline that advertises $9 fares that turn into something quite a bit more.

As another example, two tickets for Book of the Mormon, the popular Broadway show, can have almost as much in add-ons as Spirit does. The site Broadway.com is at least a bit more upfront about what they charge you, as you can see here at right.

Easyjet, the European low-fare airline, has different ticketing prices depending on the way you pay. “All bookings will incur a £8.00 booking fee except for bookings made by Visa electron (a debit card that isn’t available in the US and Canada) which is free.” Then you are presented at checkout with this somewhat confusing screen at left.

So the biggest number on the page is the fee that you would pay with a regular credit card, that includes the surcharge. Got it? This is a user experience nightmare.

Concert tickets for years have had high add-on fees, but at least the online concert ticket booking sites are more up-front about them. Still, two tickets for an upcoming show of George Strait for example that started out costing $80 a piece add $13 for various fees at Ticketmaster, more if you want them mailed quickly to you.

That is still less of a proportion than what the airlines add on.

Some thoughts for the future to improve the experience:

• Limit the upsells. I shouldn’t have to click through more screens to decline offers at checkout than it took to buy the original item.
• Disclose the fees at the beginningrather than at the end of the purchase process.
• Simplify, as Thoreau once said. If you need to explain your fees with an asterisk, it is time to get rid of both.
• Keep them below 10% of the total price.Otherwise it isn’t really a fee, it is just generating more revenue.
• Make it easy to find the fees. At least Spirit posts them on their site in plain sight.

Hedy Lamarr, The First Geek Movie Star

The story sounds almost like a Hollywood plot, except it is true: A young starlet doing nude scenes as a teenager, goes on to invent a critical wartime technology that is ignored by the US Navy but ultimately forms the basis of WiFi and cell phones that we use today. Of course, I am talking about the life and times of Hedy Lamarr, the subject of a new biography from Richard Rhodes.

I heard Rhodes a few weeks ago on the radio promoting his book, and there is a review in this weekend’s NY Times. She is a fascinating study in how someone with both beauty and brains can not necessarily make the best of both worlds.

Lamarr’s invention, which she developed with her music composer neighbor George Antheil, came about through an odd inquiry. Lamarr was interested in a boob job and Antheil had written about early efforts in that area, again presaging another important intersection of Hollywood and technology. The duo went on to get a patent in 1941 for a new technique for frequency-hopping radio communications. While not taken seriously at the time, it ultimately was deployed by the military in the 1960s during the cold war. While the technique involved piano rolls, the basis of frequency hopping continues to be used as part of spread-spectrum radio communications that are in common use today. Along the way, Lamarr made many movies (although none quite as provocative as Ecstasy, the one cited earlier) and married and divorced six husbands, one of who was a Nazi arms merchant that got her interested in developing new technology for the war effort once she fled to America. She lived to be honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few years before she died in 2000. Rhodes’ book is the first detailed recounting of her various inventions with Antheil.

It is hard for many of us to grok a movie star with her trips to the patent office, but she was the real deal. Rhodes is the author of many intriguing history of science works, including the story of the Manhattan Project, and his new book is worth reading.

Lamarr once said that “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was anything but.

Whitepaper: Orchestrating your Disaster Recovery with QuorumLabs onQ

This is my review of QuorumLabs’ onQ recovery appliance that accompanied my video screencast. I go into a bit more depth here about its various features.

Webinar: Integrating Cloud Services Management Into Your IT Operations

Getting into the cloud is a lot easier than understanding how to make it a part of your overall IT operations. In this webinar, I look at ways that you can better govern your cloud deployments and make use of the best practices of IT that you use for your own servers. I will show you more than a dozen different services that can help you understand your cloud computing costs, figure our better ways to make your cloud infrastructure secure, and better manage your cloud deployments.

The webinar is held this Thursday at 12:30 pm ET.

You can register for the webinar here, download the white paper Dec Cloud Integration here, and view the slides that I will use for the event here.

MS Office is like your PC’s Kudzu

Is it time to retire Microsoft Office, as my colleague Eric Lundquist says in his latest Information Week column? Much as I would like to, I can’t. Part of the problem is addiction, part comfort, and part because it just works well enough that there isn’t any reason to get rid of it. Office is the kudzu of the computer world: you can’t easily get rid of it, it has grown like topsy to take over other apps, and it holds you in its grip something fierce.

Why addiction? Let’s face it, we have enough keystroke and command syntax memory that switching to something else isn’t useful. And yes, there are all these fancy tools that didn’t exist a decade ago, or even last month. Okay, I’ll admit it: my name is David and I have been a Microsoft user for 20 years. I would guess Eric is too. But retire Office? No chance.

Comfort should count for a lot when you boot up your PC and open your apps. At least, if you use a PC. My officemate, who does a lot of accounting, certainly is a master of QuickBooks for his clients. But for some of his record keeping, he writes in ink in a paper spreadsheet ledger. It is what he is most comfortable with, and obviates the need for him to carry a laptop around. Makes sense to me.

Certainly, many of us have had abusive relationships with Office over the years. Using Excel as our go-to database app to build tables, for example. And the oft-cited death-by-Powerpoint slideware. I have sat through far too many presentations, and more to come I am sure. But I, like many other professional speakers rely on Powerpoint to produce beautiful presentations that have few if any words on each slide. And while there are online substitutes like Prezi and Zurb, Powerpoint still has a lot of utility. Same with Excel: I learned how to do pivot tables back in grad school, and while I couldn’t do one today it is amazing that this is just another spreadsheet function.

Speaking of function count, the original Word had less than 50 functions, and probably most of us still use less than these same 50 functions in our daily work. Do I need 457 different type fonts and being able to adjust my line spacing and right-justify my text? Not really, since much of what I write ends up on the Web and it is more important for me to know HTML format codes than where to find something in Word’s ever-more-obscure menu trees. Does Office need any new features? Probably not. What is clear is that many companies have stoppped upgrading Office, and are staying one or two versions back. Why bother? The new features aren’t all that compelling, to be sure. And once a few people start using the newer versions, you have document format incompatibilities. That is probably what Eric refers to by saying we need to retire Office. Maybe we just need to stop upgrading and paying the Microsoft tax.

Speaking of which, sure there are plenty of alternatives. Like WordPad. It comes free with Windows. But they are all less than satisfying; even those that are nearly free like Google Docs. Google Docs can’t always deliver what you want. I use PiratePad.net for real time collaboration that just needs text and to capture comments (this came from the same people who were acquired by Google). Sometimes, all you need is one or two functions, as I said earlier.

A few years ago I tried an experiment, and loaded all my content to my Google Docs account and saw how long I could last without using Word or any other Office program. I think I lasted maybe a week, probably less. Then I thought: what was the point? Office was fine for my needs. I mean, I am not going back to pen and paper. Or a paper ledger book.

Of course, we have progressed. Now I see people at meetings composing on smartphone keyboards. Good for them. Or typing on glass, on tablets. Or even sillier: using a keyboard with their tablets. I have tried these and they aren’t for me. But that is just me.

But seriously Eric, you really want people to retire Office and move to using a combination of Box and Yammer? Much as I love Box and Yammer, I don’t see this as a viable option.

As I am writing this article (in Word, of course), I recall the many word processors that I have used over my career:

In the late 1970s when I was in grad school, I used DEC VAX and LaTEX and the predecessors to vi and other text editors that are still used today in the command-line world. This was on time sharing character-mode terminals. In my first jobs, we used dedicated word processing machines, such as the Xerox, Wang and NBI. They had screens and impact line printers and cost a bundle. But they were a real boon for those of us who learned how to compose on the keyboard. Now you say those words and people look at you funny: how else are you going to write something? Oh, you mean with a pen and a piece of paper? How retro!

Then came the PC and the first DOS based tools in the early 1980s. Wordstar was one of the first. Then I worked in an insurance company where we gave everyone Multimate, which was popular because it mimicked the Wang word processing command structure. When I started at PC Week, everyone there used Xywrite and for many years in publishing I used that one. It was popular because again it mimicked the command structure of another minicomputer text processing system called Atex. Then came Word, and the rest of Office, and that was that. End of the need to try something else. The rest of the world adopted Office, and we are done evaluating anything else.

Do we see a trend here? Word processors have been user interface train wrecks, caused by the comfort and keyboard memories of forgotten office equipment. But we use them, and use them hard daily.

But retire Office? I don’t think so. Actually, Office has a lot of stuff in it. Many people couldn’t even name three other programs that are included in Office besides the big three. (Click on the Wikipedia link if you are curious.) Have you ever tried using Groove? Exactly my point.

So sorry, Office is for better or worse, here to stay on our hard drives. But let’s try to make those 100-slide verbose decks extinct, please.

QuorumLabs’ onQ: a new way to recover Windows servers (video review)

More businesses are depending that their computer systems are staying up and continuously running. To protect them, they have piles of tape backups made. However, these tapes are never ever touched or tested. Another choice for disaster recovery is to build a replicated remote data center. But this can get pricey.

Enter QuorumLabs and their onQ Recovery appliance. I spent some time last week working with them and produced this video screencast that explains its features. For about $20 large, you can set up a pair of these appliances and fully protect all of your Windows servers. It uses some cool virtualization technology to make copies of your running servers, so when one goes south you don’t have to run around trying to recover it quickly.