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E L L I O T T' S TRAVEL NOTES
Travel news, opinion and analysis

June 14, 2004

Europe Open Skies Deal Rejected
European Union transport ministers rejected a proposed "open skies" agreement with the United States on Friday, ordering their negotiators to seek a better deal from Washington. The proposal is "unbalanced" because it doesn't give anything on the key EU demand that European carriers should have the right to fly U.S. domestic routes, said EU Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio. "We need to look for a new formula on U.S. access" for EU carriers, she told reporters as she left a closed-door session with ministers in Luxembourg. AP | Posted 6:30 a.m.
-- Bloomberg: 'Not making a deal' without UK
-- Reuters: More open skies concessions needed

• I've always said that our antiquated laws need to be changed in order allow foreign airlines to serve domestic travelers. But protectionists groups don't see it that way - and now threaten to stop "open skies" from becoming a reality. Send us your comments.

Low-Fare Carriers Force 'Panic Pricing'
JetBlue. Frontier. Southwest. For many travelers, such names are synonymous with savings. It's reasonable to expect low-cost carriers such as these to offer the lowest fares. Reasonable but wrong. You need to shop around. "Low cost" no longer always means "low fare," experts say. Major airlines, sometimes dubbed "legacy carriers" because they existed before industry deregulation in 1978, are shaving fares to meet or undercut the discounters whose networks threaten their territory and bottom line. "The low-cost carriers are driving the legacy carriers into panic pricing," said Mike Boyd, an industry analyst and president of the Boyd Group/Aviation Systems Research Corp. in Evergreen, Colo. Los Angeles TImes | Posted 6:45 a.m.

Space Tourism Gets a Boost
One week from today, from a runway in a barren reach of the Mojave Desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Burt Rutan will try sending a pilot higher than anyone has ever flown in a private plane. A longtime designer of innovative aircraft, he plans to shoot his creation, a rocket called SpaceShipOne, 62 miles above the earth. If the flight is successful, Mr. Rutan and his sponsor, Paul G. Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, say it will usher in an age of privately financed space travel and even spacefaring laboratories and manufacturing plants, at down-to-earth prices. Advertisement The flight would also be a milestone on the way to winning the Ansari X Prize, a competition begun by a group of entrepreneurs and space enthusiasts in 1996 in hopes of spurring a private space race. The New York Times | Posted 7 a.m.

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• And finally ... there's a new columnist on Travelcomment, and he's already making waves. John Frenaye's debut column about travel agents (and whether you should use one) is nothing if not controversial. Especially considering he's a travel agent. Posted 7:10 a.m. | Send us your comments.

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