WHAT has Barack Obama done for business travellers? A few good things, according to Joe Brancatelli on Portfolio.com. On the grounds that it is only in the run-up to elections that business travellers' needs are heeded, Mr Brancatelli has decided to take the opportunity granted by the imminent mid-terms and grade the president's administration in six different areas.

Mr Obama gets an "A" for selecting Ray LaHood to run the department of transport, but an "F" for his drawn-out effort to appoint a new head of the TSA. His efforts to rebuild transport infrastructure only merit a "D". In Mr Brancatelli's words:

As president, he claimed the controversial 2009 economic stimulus bill would concentrate on "shovel ready" projects like transportation infrastructure. Unfortunately, there were very few construction projects in "the stim," and Obama allowed his opponents to paint those that were as folly.

The report goes on to cover security, consumer protection and airline alliances—it's worth a read.

AIRLINES routinely charge passengers for checked bags, pillows, “food” and a whole lot of other amenities that used to be free. And now it seems there's a new fee in town: a charge for seats in the first two or three rows of economy, including the bulkhead seats. In August American Airlines announced it would start demanding $19-$39 for these Express Seats, which allow passengers on domestic services to get on the plane in the first “general boarding” call and disembark a few seconds before those unlucky travellers right behind them. American's Elite frequent flyers can get the seats at no extra charge, but everyone else has to buy them at airport kiosks, 24 hours to 50 minutes before the flight.

American might be in need of some extra cash. In late August the Federal Aviation Authority levied a record $24.2m civil penalty against the airline for operating planes in 2008 that allegedly did not meet federal regulations. American is to challenge the fine. “These events happened more than two years ago, and we believe this action is unwarranted,” the company said in a statement. “We plan to follow the FAA’s process and will challenge any proposed civil penalty. We are confident we have a strong case and the facts will bear this out.”

When the FAA notified American of some maintenance irregularities, the airline temporarily grounded its MD-80 fleet to conduct new inspections and redo maintenance work as required. This resulted in more than 3,000 flight cancellations and cost American tens of millions of dollars, according to Gerard Arpey, the CEO. The airline says that passenger safety was never at risk. But Gulliver wonders how much longer it will be before people have to pay extra to sit near an emergency exit.

UPROAR in the Sun newspaper today at the news that two rail passengers were fined a total of £114 ($176) for apparently “getting off [a] train two stops early”. Emma Clark and Davyd Winter-Bates had purchased discounted rail tickets for a return journey between Southampton and London. Heading home, though, they decided to leave the train at Eastleigh, two stops before Southampton. And that's where the fun started:

…when they handed over their tickets they were told they had breached railway rules and should have stayed on the train until their destination.

They were then fined TWICE the standard fare of £28.50 each - a whopping £57 each.

Now, the original draft of this blog post was a defence of Stagecoach, the company which runs South West Trains and which also owns the megatrain.com website through which the travellers booked their journey. I was ready to say that Miss Clark and Mr Winter-Bates should have read the terms and conditions of their purchase a bit more clearly. Stagecoach is not a charity, after all, and if it can make some money when travellers break pre-agreed rules, then that's fair enough.

Indeed a company statement offers just such a two-handed defence of the penalty:

It is made very clear in the terms and conditions of travel that leaving the train at an intermediate station is not permitted on these discounted tickets. As with any service offered by any company, it is important passengers comply with the terms and conditions.

It is also important to understand that the cost of a rail ticket is not solely based on distance travelled. It is based on the level of flexibility purchased by the customer and factors such as the popularity of the route, the time of travel during the day and when the ticket was booked in relation to the date of travel.

But having just re-enacted the Southampton-London booking, my sympathies have swung strongly across to the impoverished travellers. Yes you're told to tick your agreement to the company's terms and conditions, but these include more than 2,000 words of technical verbiage before you reach this line:

Bookings are only valid on the journey(s) and places stated.

And that's the only relevant reference I can. From this, it seems, travellers are meant to infer the perils of failing to travel through to their official journey's end. This is anything but a clear warning, and given the severity of the fine, I can only think that travellers should be told much more clearly, and much more obviously, what happens if they get off the train too soon.

NOT all airport security adventures end in people getting frustrated and crawling through the X-ray machine. Sometimes, security staff can be quite pleasant. Of course, it helps if you're an international tennis star and you're in a chocolate ad, as opposed to real life. Still, I challenge you to watch this and not laugh:

Hilarious stuff. Any readers have stories of actually positive or happy moments in airport security? Let us know in the comments.

(h/t James Fallows)

TWO quick cheers for TripAdvisor. One for enabling Gulliver to select four different honeymoon lodgings that all charmed Mrs Gulliver without gutting the bank account. And another for continuing to find the right tone when interacting with its contributors.

The site may allow hotels a right of reply to related reviews, and (for a fee) the chance to post their contact details. But it still conveys the impression of being firmly on the side of the traveller, and revelling in appraisals at the extreme ends of the spectrum. The monthly e-mail sent out to members highlights particularly gruesome reviews, as well as the more effusive (and therefore less fun) ones. This month, alas, it's the turn of the Grand Hotel Hermitage in Rome to be singled out for an underwhelming performance. You can sympathise with the recent guests who arrived at 10pm and spent over three hours checking in.

We would exhort readers to add their own voices to the site's reviews. The more the merrier—and the more accurate.

TRAVELLERS to Toronto may enjoy the latest audio guide recorded by one of our local correspondents. This safe, friendly city is not, admittedly, one whose visitors need too much advice. Just avoid comparing Canadians to Americans, don't forget some sturdy overshoes if arriving in winter, and think of something nice to say about the Maple Leafs, the city's ice-hockey team.

LAST WEEK brought us a story for the creative smuggling Hall of Fame. Last Sunday, airport security officials in Thailand found a real tiger sedated in a bag full of fake, toy tigers. The 2-month-old cub was in the luggage of a 31-year-old Thai who was headed for Iran. TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, first reported the news:

The 31-year old Thai national was scheduled to board a Mahan Air flight destined for Iran when she had trouble checking in her oversized bag.

Airports of Thailand (AOT) staff suspected something amiss when they scanned the bag and x-ray images showed an item resembling a real cat.

Officers from the Livestock Development Department and the National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department were then called in to open the bag for inspection and discovered the tranquilized cub.

Investigations are underway to determine if the cub was wild caught or captive-bred, where it came from and the suspect’s intended final destination.

Tigers are, of course, endangered, and buying and selling them is generally prohibited. But some people like to keep wild animals as pets, and others believe certain animal parts have medicinal properties, so a black market thrives in spite of international treaties. The good news is that this particular tiger cub is being well cared for at the Rescue Center of Thailand's Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation while authorities attempt to track down where it came from. The bad news, however, is that a smuggler felt safe enough to even try such a ridiculous stunt. "If people are trying to smuggle live Tigers in their check-in luggage, they obviously think wildlife smuggling is something easy to get away with and do not fear reprimand," Chris R. Shepherd, TRAFFIC's regional director in Southeast Asia, said last week. He's right.

AIRPORT security drives most people up the wall. But it affects some of us more than others. Take this guy, for example:

This video might be a hoax, but it's hard to know for sure. It's certainly odd that someone just happened to be taping this incident (and no one stopped the man from jumping into the X-ray machine), but it's not impossible. People tape all sorts of things these days, and this wouldn't be the first time poorly trained airport security personnel made an embarrassing mistake. Medyaspor.com, which watermarked the video, is a Turkish-language website that covers sport. Can any readers identify what's being said? Or the airport in question? 

I'd also love to know more about the health risks associated with going through an airport X-ray machine. My sense is that it's not much more dangerous than a medical X-ray. Does anyone have other information? I'll update this post with good answers to any of these questions. Extra credit if you cite sources. 

(h/t The Consumerist)

UPDATE, September 4: We're starting to get some good answers in the comments, but nothing definitive yet. Check out the thread and let us know what you think.

WHY does the world think that Mexico is a violent, lawless place, but not have the same image of Brazil? This somewhat indignant query from our correspondent, TW, based in Mexico City, landed in my inbox shortly after the horrible discovery of a mass grave in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state: 72 migrants slaughtered by a drug gang, as far as could be told. He had dug up figures on Mexico’s murder rates, and at 15 a year per 100,000 they were substantially better than Brazil’s, at 25. Just four states had very high homicide rates; much of Mexico seems pretty peaceful. And yet around the world the country is thought of as if it consisted only of the badlands.

The short answer, I suppose, is that the world does think of Brazil as violent, at least in its biggest cities, Sao Paulo and especially Rio de Janeiro. Just a few days before TW’s complaint, the occupation of a tourist hotel in Rio de Janeiro by a drug gang from one of the favelas was beamed around the world (I decided against telling my mother I was off to Rio for a conference the following week). Most countries issue advice to business travelers and tourists to avoid walking at night in Brazil’s cities, to leave valuables in a hotel safe and avoid wearing anything flashy—and for goodness’ sake, not to go poking around the favelas in search of authentic Brazilian life.

But TW is right: violence in Mexico certainly has a higher profile globally. Think Mexico and you think drugs and killings first and only then move on to beaches and ancient ruins; think Brazil and football and fiesta will probably spring immediately to mind. As far as editors are concerned, booming Brazil—one of the BRICs, after all—is a "Good News Story". Mexico is not.

One reason is that Mexico’s killings, some on a huge scale, others appallingly sadistic (I will never be able to get the image of a flayed face sewn to a football out of my mind; now you won’t either) are undisputably news. Brazil’s nightly drip-drip of poor young men killing other poor young men in seedy parts of town is not (it is, after all, “news”, not “olds”). Another is that US citizens are interested in Mexico and for entirely negative reasons—drugs and illegal immigrants—and what interests Americans gets broadcast around the world. A third is that Brazil is less-traversed than Mexico, through which are funneled Latin America’s would-be migrants to the United States, and its borders seem less porous to news too. Covering half of South America, and with a different language to boot, Brazil is more inward looking.

Two more reasons come to mind. If Mexico has many more killing grounds like the one only discovered this week because an intended victim escaped, perhaps Mexico’s murder rate isn’t that much lower than Brazil’s after all. (One long-time observer of the continent dismisses the whole question by saying he simply doesn’t believe Mexican crime statistics.) And perhaps the single most important reason: Mexico is the world leader in the type of homicide that gets a disproportionate number of column inches—that of journalists. (Sorry, TW.)

OK, so the headline is a bit of a fib. But a report on Mexico’s security situation has painted a more detailed picture than the one we hear about in the news most of the time. When I told friends I was moving to Mexico City, some asked if I would be provided with a bodyguard (no). Business travellers are thinking twice about coming, according to chambers of commerce here. But a detailed breakdown of violence released this week shows that, if you pick your state, you’re as safe—or safer—than in any other North American country.

Mexico’s overall homicide rate is 14 per 100,000 inhabitants: fearsomely high (and possibly an underestimate, given the drugs cartels' habit of hiding bodies in old mines), but quite a lot lower than its great Latin rival Brazil, whose rate is more like 25. As the chart below shows, Mexico’s death rate is bumped up by extraordinarily high levels of violence in four states: Chihuahua (home of Ciudad Juárez, widely labelled the world’s most murderous city), Durango, Sinaloa and Guerrero (see p.29 of this document). Of the rest, some are blissfully serene: Yucatán, where tourists flock to swim with whale sharks and clamber over Chichen Itzá, has a murder rate of 1.7—slightly lower than Canada’s average of 2.1.

Before I am buried an avalanche of polite Canadian emails, I should acknowledge that comparing an entire country with one quiet state is hardly fair: there are no doubt parts of Canada where no-one has been so much as kicked in the shin for decades. But Mexico’s predicament is worth highlighting, because the extreme violence around its border with the United States colours people’s view of the rest of the country, though much of it is pretty quiet. A third of Mexico’s states hover around 5 murders per 100,000, about the same rate as the United States. Another third are around 8 per 100,000, similar to Thailand, for instance. A handful of states have rates in the teens—like Russia, say—and a couple are in the low twenties, a little lower than Brazil’s average. Then you have the chaos of the four very violent states, which sends the average soaring.

The carnage in Mexico’s badlands is not to be underestimated, and nor does it seem to be getting any better. Business travellers should certainly watch out in places such as Juárez and, these days, even in cities such as Monterrey. But people doing business south of the Rio Grande should remember that, even on average, Mexico is a less murderous country than places such as Brazil, and that once you avoid the hotspots, it’s downright safe.

CASH-STRAPPED American states are balking at the prospect of having to pay some of the costs of new high-speed rail development. The Obama administration's stimulus bill included billions for such projects. But new rules attached to this year's round of funding require that states pay 20% of the bill for federally-funded HSR construction. That's a problem for the states, which already face massive deficits (and are generally constitutionally required to balance their budgets). The Wall Street Journal's Josh Mitchell offers some examples:

Pennsylvania has put off plans for various rail projects, including construction of a line that would provide 100-mph service between Scranton and Hoboken, N.J., because the state is facing an immediate shortfall of $472 million in its transportation budget.

Virginia, which proposed high-speed service between Washington and the Richmond area, is for now largely limiting its efforts to improving a bridge and doing preliminary environmental studies.

"We've got some good things that are going, but if the commitment in America is to get to these higher-speed rail programs, then there's going to have to be more help," says Thelma Drake, Virginia's director of rail and public transportation. "We don't have $375 million to put into our match."

Oregon has delayed rebuilding a train line between Eugene and Portland after failing to find the $3.3 million in needed matching funds just to do preliminary studies. It's now going to upgrade a train station in Portland.

This latest story is yet another example of how hard it is for America to invest in infrastructure right now. States don't have the money, and it's not politically possible for Congress to pass more stimulus. Meanwhile, Republican gubernatorial candidates in Wisconsin, California, and Ohio have slammed high-speed rail projects as money-wasting boondoggles. Turning infrastructure into a campaign issue isn't going to make it any easier for America to upgrade its ageing transportation system. But Americans are angry, and it's easy to attack projects that haven't been built yet—no one depends on non-existent railroads to get to work. We'll probably see a lot more anti-HSR attacks before this campaign season is over.

WHEN is the best time to buy airline tickets? An economist, Makoto Watanabe, thinks he has an answer. Here's the Guardian:

[Mr Watanabe] has calculated that the optimum time to buy an airline ticket is eight weeks in advance of flying.

His yet-to-be-published findings also suggests that airline tickets are cheaper when purchased in the afternoons, rather than the mornings, prompting him to speculate that airlines are assuming business travellers will book their tickets at work in the morning on the company account, whereas leisure travellers are more likely to book from home in the afternoon.

The eight-week result stems from work published in the latest edition of the Economic Journal in which Watanabe and his colleague, Marc Möller, offer intimidating equations such as ∏A = gUG + min(k - g, (1 - g)(1 - r)) as part of the complex formula, where ∏ equals profit, that determines advance ticket purchases.

I can't vouch for the math, but Mr Watanabe's result seems intuitively right. It definitely jives with much of the anecdotal ticket-purchasing wisdom passed from business traveller to business traveller. But just because something is generally true doesn't mean it's always true (or will continue to be true in the future). Airline sale alerts and ticket price monitors are still useful tools.

If you don't want to spend the time setting up those kinds of alerts, and just want to have a decent shot at the cheapest ticket, Mr Watanabe's rule might be a good place to start. (Anyone have a different hard-and-fast rule for buying airline tickets? Let us know in the comments.) Please be careful about placing too much faith in these sorts of guidelines, however. No hard-and-fast rule about "the best time to buy" something can hold true for very long if it becomes widely used. If ticket buyers start sticking to the eight-week rule, it will presumably change demand for tickets at the eight-week mark. That will affect prices, and the rule won't be as useful.  

Anyway, read the Guardian's whole report. It includes a comparison to Broadway show tickets and is well worth the click-through.