Tuckers Downunder

Who knew winking was this hard? For some reason this cracks Diana up every time, and boy does Scarlett know it!

Diana didn’t want me to post this, but hey, it’s what’s going on… She had a minor bump on the road some time back, for which the other driver wanted $100 in cash for the damage, luckily our insurance company is picking up the $5,000 tab for the indelible mark left on our car by the brief meeting of metal! Expect to have our people-mover back shiny and new some time next week.

Ivy has followed Scarlett into swimming lessons at 8 months, she’s loving being in the pool each Friday – I suspect she just likes the extra attention!

We just Exchanged on a holiday home on the Whitsundays, (Investment rather than vacation spot) and it feels like we took one step closer to having a leisurely life, although, given we’ll rent it out, truth is other people will be one step closer to a leisurely life!

Great island home, fully furnished with all the things you’d need for a great family holiday, it even has its own electric Golf Buggy to get around the Island.

Bet you $5 bucks we don’t spend any time there until at least 2010!

Getting back from Atlanta required a great deal of patience and restraint; twenty three hours in the air plus another few in hanging out in airports with almost half of the journey time split amongst three American airports and one American airline – and there’s the challenge right there, the airlines are having it pretty hard right now, and it shows.

The cascading pressures of fuel costs (87% up Year on Year), security overheads and exchange rate woes are creating an unbearable downward pressure on all airlines, with the most visible, accessible staff coming under the greatest pressure of all. Not only do these frontline staff have to live in the shadow of job cuts, but they have fewer and fewer resources at hand to deal with ever increasing passenger numbers. As the cost to serve each passenger increases (30% increase Year on Year between mid 2006 and 2007) the greater the margin pressure on the airlines, who, in this highly competitive environment cannot increase fares outside of industry agreed fuel surcharges, so must instead cut sectors to improve yield by increasing % of occupied seat hours in tourist class. For crews, they are working on routes with more and more full planes and for ground crew they are checking in the same number of passengers but against fewer flights, making for longer queues and angrier customers.

I figure that it’s different at the front of the plane since a) business class occupancy has been high for a number of years and the business has long been scaled to cope, and b) the cost of declining satisfaction is too great in the upper class cabins to leave it unaddressed, meaning there is a direct correlation between occupancy, crew size and satisfaction, versus in economy where the relationship between satisfaction and occupancy is less obvious

Airport security is an area that passengers and airlines suffer together and the US is the worst of all, where the procedures have now become a running joke, just not a very funny one – long lines, sullen Government officials, shoes, watches and belts off, odd rules and regulations set against even odder parameters and inconvenient limitations and controls on the transportation of any sort of organic matter, firstly for security reasons, i.e. explosives suspended in liquid (hence the 100ml rule) as well as limitations on the transportation of foods for reasons of disease control – the entire process is just horrendous, and will only get worse.

Since January 2002 every passenger clearing security at a US domestic airport has had to remove their shoes, numbering 441million passengers at Atlanta Airport alone, and all because of the thankfully-failed actions of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. As a useful example of why air travel for the masses will continue to get worse, consider this: Does Al-Qaeda think Richard Reid failed? There’s a pretty good chance they don’t.

Reality is that had he charged the flight deck and downed the plane, he would have killed all on board, but the long term impact of his actions would have been significantly less in global terms than they actually were. We know that terrorists use calculated disruption as a key weapon against their enemy, (especially financial markets, energy and currency) and against that measure, Richard Reid was in fact very successful. Same is true for the ban on liquids onboard, intelligence forces in the US seemingly uncovered a plot to suspend explosives in liquids, and an almost immediate world wide ban was imposed on liquid containers over 100mls as a result, even though no one has yet been able to create a device based on liquid-suspended explosives! Imagine if the same intelligence discovers a plot to disable crews and air marshals with razor sharp credit cards or trouser belts to whip crews to the same end, what new security steps will be imposed then, and why are they never mitigated by other means? The terrorist induced carnage isn’t in the air, it hasn’t been since September 2001, it’s on the ground, impacting the lives and economy of billions of people every single day, but especially those at the back.

As the world economy slides into recession, and airlines’ operations costs increase, the combined impact of greater passenger numbers and compounding security measures is making for an increasingly bi-polar travel industry; where the tourists are exposed to the raw end of the change, bearing the brunt of the increased occupancy and decreased service levels, and the Business and First Class passengers are further insulated from the hardship as a competitive selling point, with greater staff numbers, improved loyalty schemes and access to Fast-Track security with pre-screening set against your airline loyalty card. All this I can see resulting in a world where Business travellers have an entirely separate travel experience to the Tourists, travelling through dedicated Airport terminals to fly on business and first class only Boeing 787’s while the masses are shoe-horned onto 800+ seat Airbus 380’s.

Although as long as I continue to spend most of the travel hours at the pointy-end, I say bring it on!

Partially I assume because I have been flitting only between the conference centre and the hotel, and partly because Atlanta is a nondescript City in America’s South, I have found the recent downtown tornado damage to be the most interesting thing here…

Back in March a category “scary” tornado plundered the downtown area, and the damage is pretty obvious. I always though America’s mid-west was the most perilous place to get in the way of Mother Nature, but the prospect of a 200 mile an hour wind loaded with 1,000 sheets of shattered glass feels like a greater threat than the possibility of a mid-west twister dumping a cow on your head.

In LA yesterday and today and off to Atlanta tonight… Missing the girls of course, but liking the sun here in LA.

Actually, it’s a somewhat pointless LA visit given that my flight was delayed by 9 hours yesterday and I missed every meeting as a result, bugger…

So today, far from living the Entourage life, me and a few colleagues are working next to the pool in The Standard, where we’ll be for the rest of the morning, nice. Building up the psychological strength required to endure the next few days in Atlanta with 12,000 of our closest Microsoft friends

Finally have some architect drawings for the house, can’t wait to get moving on the renovation, at least now we can see light at the end of this single story tunnel.

Between now and getting some builders in we need to organise a DA with the notorious Local Council, which may take some time if our previous experience is a guide, so there’s a good chance we won’t get moving until early 2009, frustrating but fine.

Doing what we can to make the place habitable within the constraints of the future plan means tidying around the house and pulling down most of the sub-standard crap erected by the previous owner… A real lesson I think, our house seems to be the product of a long term owner, we actually bought it from the people who had built the place back in the 50’s, and ever since then they have tinkered and toyed with it, never spending more than the cost of a cappuccino on the project in hand; Christ it shows…

A gentle tug at the pergola at the rear of the place (ok, gentle tug with a big hammer) resulted in the entire structure cascading over me, the table and the BBQ… Who knew that would happen? Previous owner I think, hence why he sold the place!

Trip to bi-centennial park today (Sunday) with the girls for a bit of a cycle and breakfast with friends… Scarlett shared her chariot with her friend Amelia while I cycled with my buddy Peter – the girls read books and yapped the whole time, it was pretty funny watching them. Somewhere across the park Diana & Simone chatted and had coffee while babies Ivy and Lucy slept, turns out I was the only one dragging 30kgs behind me, great fun though…