pointing out the obvious

My upgrade certificates say I need to book latitude in order to upgrade. So I book latitude, call air canada, tell them I have a coupon to upgrade and carry on with my life.

When I get to the check-in counter, I surrender my ticket and air canada aeroplan upgrade certificate (silver) to be used with my latitude fare. The employee checks my reservation and indicates that I cannot actually use this upgrade certificate because my fare booking class doesn’t match, so I must use my last blue upgrade certificate (saved for cheap flights) to be upgraded.

I fold and use the last blue upgrade certificate but cannot believe how silly this scenario is. I book latitude, so I can use my latitude upgrade certificate, but am told at the gate that I can’t use it because the little letters (that make sense only to employees) don’t match what exist on the certificate.. although the ‘pretty names’ match -> latitude = latitude.

This is terrible customer service. I’ve ranted about airlines before, but this one really gets me.

While in Vancouver, I had the chance to witness one of the many interesting side effects of a bottle deposit system for all types of bottles (not just beer bottles as exists in Ontario).

While in line at a local grocery store, I saw a someone bring in about 25 bottles for a deposit refund. He got about $1.50 in refunds after delivering his cache of plastic and glass bottles. These bottles were pretty worn out, but he got his refund and was on his way.

What I find interesting about this is that Vancouver is a pretty damn clean city. I don’t see tumbleweeds of cans and bottles roaming the streets. So this bottle deposit system has this interesting side effect - someone will pickup a bottle on the street to get the refund.

This happens in Toronto, but the people leafing through my trash at 6am are only looking for beer bottles. Why not extend that program to include plastic and other bottles? This might reduce the volume of recycling set out weekly by residents of Toronto, but something tells me most people don’t recycle because they are lazy and don’t understand the impact of their actions. So this might not work unless people are aware of what happens to that bottle.

Maybe they can implement a bottle deposit system, and continue to run the recycling program. The bottles with deposit that make it into the recycling system can be sorted out at the plant - thus the recycling truck can actually be making money instead of losing it. This leaves the recycling left out overnight available for scavenging, but that’s okay - if you are too lazy to return the bottles yourself, someone else can reap the benefits of it.

I understand this is much easiser said than done, but Vancouver seems to have it in place. Why can’t Toronto? The LCBO bottle depost system is long overdue, but at least it’s on the horizon.

I decided to make the move from netfirms.com to superwebhost.ca.  The main reason for the change is that they are local, and I’d rather support a local company.  The other reason is that mod_rewrites work as advertised - Netfirms.com seems not to be able to support wordpress permalinks.  Permalinks now work without the index.php in the url, so life is good.

Of course it’s sad, but it shouldn’t suprise anyone that Steve Irwin (aka the Crocodile Hunter) died as a result of being too close to a wild animal.  You can read the Animal Planet statement here.

What always bothered me was why he was an icon for children.  I’m not saying he was a bad guy, he was a great happy, bubbly, energetic guy, that likely got along great with kids.  What I’m questioning is the way he “led by example” when it came to dealing with wildlife.  He was very experienced around animals and approached them with much more caution than he led us to believe.  The message he sent home was “animals are not scary”, through things like bringing a baby into a crocodile feeding pit.  I guess Michael Jackson has done similar, but no one wants to be compared to that.

Air Canada has finally started upgrading the interior of their aircraft. I flew in a recently upgraded A320 the other day, which included personal tv for each passenger and plugs for 2 of 3 seats. It looks nice inside, and makes travelling much nicer for those of us who would rather not watch RV for the 3rd time, but…

They still have work to do in their washrooms. These things are gross.

Speaking of terrible customer experience, checkout sutori.com. It’s aim is to collect and share those experiences with everyone, to be a customer experience database of sorts. Definitely an interesting idea.