Greedy Airlines Found A Partner In Crime-- The Trump Regime Wants To Encourage More Rip-offs Of Passengers

A week or so ago, we took a quick look at how Trump's policies are hurting the American travel industry-- and how pissed off the travel industry is at him and his regime. It looks like it will be getting worse too. Thursday the EU Parliament passed a non-binding resolution calling for the reintroduction of visa requirements for American citizens, a little tit-for-tat over Washington refusing to give visa-free travel access to 5 EU nations (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania).

In the vote on Thursday, the Parliament gave the European Commission two months to take legal measures to impose visas for American travelers to the European Union unless the Americans offered reciprocity to all citizens from the bloc.

European officials in Brussels have balked at making travel to Europe more difficult for Americans, saying doing so would have an economic cost and would most likely not even resolve the hurdles facing citizens of the five affected countries.

The Parliament’s measure was approved in a show of hands and was not expected to worsen the standoff with the United States. But in the event that the court in Luxembourg were to rule in favor of Parliament, the commission might be forced to impose visa requirements on Americans.

The Trump administration, finding itself in a tit-for-tat battle over access, would then almost certainly do the same for travelers from the European Union.

(It would probably be prudent for Trump to add Cyprus-- a shady Russian Mafia den of iniquity-- to his travel ban altogether. But that's not going to happen while the Trump kakistocracy is in power.)

Anyway-- back to the travel industry-- it looks like one segment of that industry-- the airlines-- are happy with Trump again. Elaine Chao (Mitch McConnell's beard wife) is the Secretary of Transportation and she's already starting to roll back regulations that protected the public from the runaway avarice and greed of the U.S. airlines. Travel Weekly posted about it Thursday. The Trumpists came down firmly on the side of the airlines when it comes to ripping off passengers with hidden fees for baggage, etc.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) on Thursday indefinitely suspended public comment on two proposed consumer-protection measures that the Obama administration put forward during its last months in office.

The DOT took the steps to "allow the president's appointees to review and consider this action," it said in Federal Register filings.

Last October, the DOT issued a request for information from consumer groups, airlines and other industry stakeholders to determine whether it should regulate the common airline practice of displaying only some content offerings through indirect channels, such as OTAs and GDSs, while displaying their full offerings on their own websites. In late December, the DOT extended that comment period to March 31 from its initial end date of Dec. 31. That comment period has now been suspended while the DOT reviews its merits.

The DOT has also suspended the final airline-related rulemaking process that was begun during the Obama administration. On Jan. 19, just three days before Obama left office, the DOT proposed a requirement that airlines and ticket agents (including travel agents) disclose fees for carry-on and checked bags from the beginning of a fare inquiry.

If enacted, the rule would mean that carriers couldn't show a ticket price on a web interface, then only later in the sales process show fees for baggage.

Public comment on that proposal had been scheduled to close on March 20.

...The trade group Travel Tech, which represents OTAs, travel search sites and GDSs, said Thursday that it is disappointed with both suspensions.

"Consumers deserve transparency in fare and schedule information and ancillary fees," Travel Tech president Steve Shur said in prepared remarks. "DOT must live up to its mandate on consumer protection and ensure consumers have access to all the information they need to make a purchasing decision."

President Trump has said reducing regulations will be a key policy goal of his administration.

Needless to say, the airline lobbyists were giddy with joy. Airlines for America President and CEO Nicholas E. Calio: "We applaud Secretary Chao’s leadership today and look forward to an era of smarter regulation that protects consumers from unfair practices, but does not step in when action is not warranted. Today’s action is a common sense measure reinforcing that the airline industry is capable of making the decisions that best serve our customers, our employees and the communities we serve."

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Visiting Azerbaijan-- Some Basics

See the dancing cave drawing over my head?

Two of my favorite congressmen advised me on my trip to Azerbaijan-- and one did even more than that, which I'll explain in a moment. The other congressman urged me to visit a statue in Baku of the current president's father, the former president (dictator), Heydar Aliyev. Statues of human beings are rare in Muslim-majority countries to begin with; it's something the religion proscribes, but Azerbaijan is a very secular country and there are statues of admired people all over. This particular one of Papa Aliyev depicts him sitting with one leg crossed and the sole of his shoe partially showing. Showing the sole of a shoe is generally perceived as an insult because the feet are often seen as unclean and shoes are always removed before entering a mosque or a home. My congressional friend told me he had asked his guide at the time if the statue was somewhat offensive to the Muslim population? The guide said yes, that was the point, to show that Azerbaijan's government is secular even though over 90% of the population is Muslim. Blunt-- but dictatorial oligarchs can be that way-- and often are.

Heydar Aliyev shows the soles of his shoe

The other congressman urged me to go see Gobustan (prehistoric caves, a nearby museum and, in the same region, Azerbaijan's famous mud volcanoes), the ancient Zoroastrian Atashgah Fire Temple in Surakhani, and Yanar Dag (the burning mountainside). We went to all of them and it was a much better use of time than just hanging around Baku (or Moscow).

Gobustan is about 40 miles southwest of Baku and we hired a taxi to take us there. The whole area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, primarily because of its easily-accessible caves with their rock art engravings showing life in prehistoric times, some dating back 40,000 years.

Azerbaijan has hundreds of mud volcanoes and I have a feeling the few dozen we saw might not have been the most impressive ones. They were hard to get to-- no paved roads-- and not really erupting, more like bubbling and burping out mud. Every twenty years or so one of them really explodes shooting fire and mud hundreds of feet into the air. So far, this wasn't one of those years. But we did get to climb around the hillocks and Roland dipped his hands into the bubbling mud.



The Atashgah Fire Temple is very close to Baku, a site dated as far back as 730 AD but destroyed and rebuilt several times since. What we saw was a pentagonal complex from the 17th century, which has a courtyard surrounded by cells for pilgrims and monks and a fire alter structure in the middle. It's the principal Zoroastrian site of pre-Islamic Azerbaijan and the guide I hired made sure to tell me that famous Zoroastrians included Indira Gandhi, Freddie Mercury, Zubin Mehta and Meher Baba.

Yanar Dag was kind of a dud. It's a not especially impressive natural gas fire that burns eternally on the side of a hill and I was mixing it up in my mind with a similar but bigger phenomenum in Derweze, Turkmenistan, on the other side of the Caspian Sea, east of Azerbaijan, called the Gates of Hell.

Not many American tourists go to Azerbaijan. We nearly didn't ourselves. But our trip to Russia looked like we had planned on too many days in Moscow-- even with a trip to the Golden Ring towns of Vladimir and Suzdal-- so we decided on a side trip to Baku. It's not very far by plane and Azerbaijan has a good airline with new, well-maintained planes and it's relatively inexpensive-- both the plane flights and everything in the city itself. But it isn't easy to get to because of the visa situation. You have to have a visa and Azerbaijan inadvertantly-- I think inadvertently-- makes it difficult by channeling would-be tourists to Travisa, a private company/middleman that "helps" travelers get visas. Except they don't. They just charge a inordinate amount of money and get in the way, making it more difficult to get the visas. I had a nightmare experience with them once before-- when I was forced to use them for an Indian visa-- and I would never voluntarily use them.

When you want a Russian visa, you have no choice any longer except to go through one of these "helpful" contractors, Invisa Logistics Service (ILS), although scammers like Travisa are happy to charge you for sending your application on to ILS. When you apply for an Azerbaijani visa, there is a strong implication that there is a similar mandate and that you must go through Travisa, an implication that Travisa doesn't discourage. When I tried getting my Azerbaijani visa through Travisa, nothing worked and lots of time was wasted. They also kept trying to get me to give them money with the warning that if I couldn't get the visa for any reason-- which looked likely judging by their jaw-dropping incompetence-- they still kept the money. Excuses ranged from their online application doesn't work with Apple computers to I can't use their in-office computer-- after they asked me to drive to their office to do just that-- because they couldn't give me the pass code for their WiFi network because of "security." I decided to give up and go to Georgia or Armenia instead when someone who overheard my conversation with the unhelpful staffer who was guaranteeing I couldn't go to Azerbaijan, told me to just go to the Azerbaijan consulate in L.A. and that it would be faster and cheaper. And it was. And easy as pie. That's your free tip of the day. Get your visa directly from the Azerbaijan consulate and skip the Travisa horror show.

Roland, meanwhile, had his passport tied up in the regular Travisa hell-- weeks and weeks of complete nonsense and wasted time. Like, two weeks wasted on "you have to change the name of your hotel from the Leningrad Hotel to the St. Petersburg Hotel." But the name of the hotel is the Leningrad Hotel. It doesn't matter. You can't get a visa if you write you're going to a hotel named for Lenin. His application and passport went back and forth across the country three times before we realized there was no way he could get the Russian visa done in time to also get the Azerbaijani visa. That's where it's helpful to have a good congressman. For a civilian it's impossible-- in takes a minimum of 10days-- but for a congressman asking for a constituent... it takes a few hours. Roland got his visa just hours before he departed and off we went... to a country with the good sense to not patronize a glitzy, gaudy new Trump Tower that was forced to close down in less than a week due to lack of business.

There's a mosque between my hotel and the funicular

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Travisa Outsourcing-- Why I Would Have Canceled My Trip To India And Gone Somewhere Else

Imagine what kind of intestinal fortitude it took, historically, to go on an international voyage... like before airplanes. There were so many considerations conspiring to keep all but the most dauntless travelers at home-- probability of violence, disease, inability to communicate, bizarre lifestyles, time constraints, being just a few. Even when I first started visiting Asia and Africa in the late 1960s, one had to pause for some semi-serious contemplation before plunging forward to overcome the inevitable roadblocks.

In 1969, for example, I drove a brand new VW van I purchased in Wiesbaden, Germany across Asia. Although I was more than excited to visit Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, my real destination was India. Problem-- aside from how far it was and all the shots you had to take and the bandits and bad roads, was that importing cars was heavily discouraged. In fact, it was so discouraged that you had to post a bond at the border for the full value of the car.

I had sold a lot of hash in New York to buy that van on a special students-only plan in Germany ($2,500 if you picked it up at the factory) and I didn't have any more money. I mean none. I would pick up hitch-hikers to get money for gas. Arrested in Afghanistan for trying to smuggle a couple hundred pounds of hash out of the country-- through the Soviet Union-- I was lucky enough to meet an American consular official who explained that he could give me a carnet de passage which would allow me to drive the van (without the hash) into India and without leaving a deposit at the border. Problem solved.

These days, it's much easier to travel almost anywhere, and certainly to India. In fact, I've been back to India at least half a dozen times since that first trip, sometimes on business, sometimes for pleasure. This time we planned the trip out and bought our non-refundable tickets and paid our special non-refundable rates for a hotel in Delhi and a house in Kerala. And then something horrifying happened. We learned that India no longer grants visas from their consulates and embassies. The only way to get in is to get a visa from an outfit called Travisa Outsourcing.

Travisa, which as an absolute monopoly on Indian visas, has a horrendous reputation. But you have no choice. The reality of dealing with Travisa is far worse than the reputation implies. I stopped counting the endless hours on hold after it reached 24 hours-- one full day of my life wasted to listening to their cheery, sensible, pointless on-hold messages. It will probably be hard for you to believe all this. I mean, 24 hours on hold is impossible, right? So try it. Their number is 415-644-0149.

You dial. It rings and rings and rings. An automated system grabs you and asks automated questions. You punch them in. You're on hold. Hold on this first round sometimes was just half an hour... but that was rare. Usually it was an hour or more. Eventually someone answers from a headquarters in Chicago I think. No matter how many times you call or for how many weeks, each time is starting from scratch. No one knows anything. This is the most clueless and incompetent organization I have ever run into in any country and in my entire life. They can't help you, of course, but they eventually route you back through the original number you called, in my case, San Francisco. This is where the real wait time comes into it. The shortest wait I had was an hour, but that was practically a godsend compared to some of the waits. The worst, of course-- and this happened three times-- you're waiting a couple of hours on hold (after you already waited to get through to the Chicago branch) and someone picks up and disconnects the phone. Imagine what Kafka could do with his!

Once you get them on the phone, they're relatively polite, but entirely useless. No one knows anything. Early in the saga, a guy picked up and swore he was holding my money order ($176) in his hand but that the policy is they can't open it for 30 hours so I would have to wait. It was never seen again. Several times I had a sympathetic voice tell me they would update my information online by 4pm that day "for sure," which never happened, or "I promise I'll call you back before the end of the day," which also never happened. It went on for almost two excruciating weeks.

There is no doubt that I would have canceled our trip to India this year and gone to Indonesia instead-- where I wanted to go all along and which grants visas-on-arrival at the airport-- had I not already paid for the air flights and hotels. So I was stuck. I bet hundreds of people give up and just don't go to India because of Travisa. I'm a member of the Century Club. That means I've been to at least 100 countries. I've gotten a lot of visas-- including a lot for India-- but this was the first time it's ever been a real problem. Well, the second time-- the first time was to go to Brazil, but that was national policy, slowing down American visas to match the way the U.S. under Bush was treating Brazilian visa applicants who wanted to travel to the U.S.

Eventually, I just made a deal with the Travisa agent to pay for everything again-- another $176 by credit card. Fine. I got the visa. They stole my money. How can I be sure? Well, I had the money order receipt and, more important, I had the paperwork for FedEx when they delivered the money order. I sent that to Western Union and reported that someone at Travisa was stealing the money orders. There were several complaints I heard from others that that had happened to as well. Western Union refunded the $176 (minus $15 as a fee).

Travisa specializes in "facilitating" visa applications for Americans who want to travel to China, Brazil, Russia, India, Australia, Vietnam, Kenya, and Tanzania. I believe India is the only country that makes it mandatory to use them. Travisa Outsourcing handles all the India visa requests from inside the United States as a private contractor to the Indian Embassy and Consulates. "We have revolutionized the way people get their visas," said Jan Dvorak, President of Travisa Outsourcing." Yes, they have.

They claim their "online process along with the Indian Visa Application ensures a streamlined experience with fewer mistakes. In addition, real time passport tracking provides confidence that your passport is handled safely and efficiently. If applying by mail, we will keep you notified by email as your visa is processed." That's unrelated to reality. Nothing works the way it was designed to work. Every single step of the way is fraught with breakdowns and problems.

Once while I was on hold for a few hours, I tweeted I was on hold for Travisa and going insane. Immediately I started getting random tweets from people who had had the same experiences as I had had. There's even a Yelp page devoted to how horrible the service is. I don't know that there's a moral to this story. There's no way around Travisa. And India is pretty amazing. But this will certainly be my last trip there.

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