Adios Aloha and ATA

Well, my dreams of going to Hawaii on a lark with Erik next year have been dashed. With the demise of Aloha and ATA airlines this week, airfare to Hawaii is expected to rise. And I highly doubt we'll be able to do what a couple friends did a few weeks ago and fly roundtrip for 3 nights with hotel for $450. I used to watch the super low fares every spring and dream of hopping off the mainland for a few days. It's a 5 hour flight from here. I'm sure we'll still make it to Kauai sometime but probably not as soon or as inexpensively as I'd planned. Oh well. I am very glad right now that we did go over Thanksgiving for our 10-year anniversary, even if we did take the family. I was able to fly all of us including Sky, for just under $2,000. I guess that won't be happening again so I'm very glad we did it when we did.

Now onto my soapbox. I watched the TV news coverage of the event last night and I was reminded why I despise TV news. I wasted 3.5 minutes of my life on the segment where all they covered were the disappointed ATA would-be passengers that showed up for flights yesterday morning and found out they held tickets for nothing. They talked about which airlines would theoretically honor the tickets (Why should they? They still need to make money so they don't go out of business. And I say theoretically because of course there aren't any seats left). I feel bad for these stranded people, but the effects are much more far-reaching. They did say those who purchased tickets more than 60 days ago are SOL. Those who used their credit cards within the past 60 days can probably get a refund. But what about all the employees? I haven't heard anything about them. Will this have an effect on our local economy? What about general prices for Hawaiian fares? Today's newspaper picked up on this story and said they would be going up, but none of this was covered in last night's newscast. You get my point. When I worked for the newspaper, I had access to AP and other news wires and I would see the differences between the stories the newspapers chose to run and what was covered on the TV news. I found it disgusting that the TV news would only give good coverage to those items they could get interesting footage of. If there wasn't video or at least a picture attached, it got relegated to a brief clip. Newspapers do this a little, giving prominent play to items with photos attached, but not as badly. But what I dislike the most is that anytime I actually know something about a subject that is covered on a TV newscast, I find they are full of crap. Just like how in last night's broadcast they mentioned each of the airline's ticket honoring policies and had worked up a graphic for it when in reality, every airline that is running flights to Hawaii is now overbooked and the other airlines don't matter to the affected passengers, so the information was essentially irrelevant. And yet someone watches this stuff or they wouldn't keep spewing it out, but I can hardly stand to watch it anymore. Sometimes I feel like a traitor to my journalism degree that I rarely read newspapers either, but I get my news from online and I occasionally watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I'm sure I'll watch it more in the near future because their election coverage is highly entertaining. So that's it. There's my 10 cents. You can take it for what it's worth.