Travel advisors are appreciated, and so is air safety
Arnie Weissmann
This is Travel Advisor Appreciation Month, and suppliers have been showing their support with deals and expressions of gratitude.
To which I will add my own words of thanks, as a client rather than a supplier: Here's to you, Maria Carmen of Corporate Travel Management. Thank you for knowing my fussy preferences by heart, enabling me to go around the world and always having my back.
There's no shortage of reasons to appreciate travel advisors, but one area that does not get as much attention as it deserves is their dedication to community service.
I spent last Saturday morning at Internova headquarters in Manhattan for the I Am Cultured Annual Youth Travel and Career Summit. I Am Cultured is a wonderful nonprofit that prepares under-resourced students in Brooklyn to navigate life. Among its programs is the opportunity to travel abroad.
I learned about it from a former co-worker, Reggie Hudson, who introduced me to its founder, Karmia Berry. I subsequently spoke with Internova CEO J.D. O'Hara about the organization, and we discussed ways to support its mission.
Internova really stepped up, and not only to offer space in their headquarters for a job fair. It also reached out to preferred suppliers to meet with the kids to talk about careers in travel. Over the past three years that Internova has been involved, it facilitated support for career day from Accor, AmaWaterways, Delta, Disney, the Globus family of brands, Hyatt, MSC Cruises, Omni, Royal Caribbean, Singapore Airlines and The Travel Corporation. Delta, American and Hyatt were represented by speakers this year, as well.
I know several agencies and agency groups that have foundations or affiliated nonprofits or programs to support their own communities or the communities where they send clients. It's an area of advisor service that I sometimes feel goes unnoticed by many but is never underappreciated by the people who have been helped.
Real ID is now for real
As I write this, airports are preparing for the implementation of Real ID requirements to fly.
I have been thinking all week about Norm MacDonald's joke that the "I" in "ID" stands for "I" and the "D" for "dentification." I don't know whether the TSA will be staffed to handle those who do not have Real IDs and may need further verification, but I do worry that no one standing in a TSA line on May 7 will have much to laugh about.
Still, those whose travel advisor told them to bring their passport if they don't have a Real ID will do better than most, and it got me wondering what percentage of U.S. citizens currently hold passports.
Approximately 47% of our compatriots do. This is a huge jump from 17% in 2000 (and may help explain why the term "overtourism" wasn't coined until 2008).
But those holding passports are not evenly distributed across the states. Those lacking Real IDs but with passports and departing from airports in New Jersey, California and Massachusetts will have the fewest problems; those are the three states with the highest passport ownership in the country (79.9%, 71.8% and 71.2%, respectively).
The states with the fewest households holding passports are West Virginia (20.7%), Mississippi (22.1%) and Alabama (27.7%). As Real ID issues may persist for some period, if you find yourself flying out of one of these Southern states, you may want to get to the airport early, and with some good reading material.
Stress on air traffic controllers
It's great that New Jersey flyers lead the country in holding passports, but those flying from the Garden State have other issues to contend with. The strain of an antiquated air traffic control system that is 3,500 air traffic controllers short of targeted staffing (yes, you read that right) took a noticeable toll this past week when air traffic controllers in Philadelphia lost contact for 90 seconds with the airplanes they were guiding into and out of Newark.
May I humbly ask that the 300 fired people who maintain our air traffic control system be rehired?
This was too much for some of the staff in what is one of the most stressful jobs in America: Four of the controllers responsible for Newark air safety took trauma leave, which could last for up to 45 days.
DOGE fired fewer than 400 out of 45,000 workers at the FAA. Although the FAA and DOT won't say which positions were cut, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union said that 300 of those were maintenance mechanics, aeronautical information specialists, aviation safety assistants and management and program assistants -- the people who help maintain the outdated air traffic control system. This was done despite being 800 technicians short of its hiring target. May I speak on behalf of flyers everywhere and humbly ask that they be rehired?
Travel Weekly has been writing about "next-gen" air traffic control since 2007. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is asking for billions of dollars to update the system, but even if approved, it will be years before a new system is fully implemented. The time is long, long overdue for bipartisan support for this funding.
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