Those Special Deals Just Keep On Comin'

There are times when I wish I were traveling more. Since cutting back on announcing airshows [see an earlier blog entry] to Spring and Autumn, I am seeing MANY special travel deals I just can't use. JET BLUE has a special flash-sale Fall fare of $29 and up (each way) via Travelzoo. I read about Jet Blue and Airtrans specials, but from Phoenix, most are red-eyes and are not real appealing to me.

In Las Vegas the 4-Diamond hotel, Monte Carlo Resort and Casino is currently running a special at $40 - $49 per night. Not bad.

Another special from Travelzoo is $137 for a Paris 4-Star hotel with breakfast and Seine Boat Tour. The Hotel Concorde La Fayette. Yes, the "Paris" in France, not Las Vegas.

I just this moment received an outstanding offer from the Harrah's Hotels. This has to be one of the best offers I have found if you want to get away from everything this summer and return in the cooler weather for more riotous fun. Book a quickie vacation NOW and get a free night or two from November through January. The hotels include Bally's and Rio from $49 a night, Harrah's from $39 a night, the Flamingo from $45 a night, Caesar's from $110 a night, Imperial Palace from $25 a night, and Paris [Las Vegas] from $69 a night. The deal is book two nights summer, get one free winter; book three nights summer, get two free winter. If you deserve a few days off, you can't beat this deal with a large stick!

Flash Sales on Cotton

It's the time of the season when cotton growers and cotton clothing manufacturers want to move a bunch of product out, quickly.

In the past two weeks, we have received short notice of three day sales from seven different T-shirt and fleece manufacturers. WHITE T-shirt blanks (unimprinted) are selling for as little as $2.25 for the 5.3 ounce promotional weight and two dollars more for the 6.1 ounce heavyweight, in white. Gildan, Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom. It's hard to think about fleece in mid-July but special offers are coming through for shorts, pants, long and short sleeve jackets, pullovers, hoods, caps and BLANKETS. Most of these are available in a variety of colors; last year in the colder climes, high schools and colleges were buying these things for football games and other outdoor activities.

We got this one special offer for large quantity Ts, 5.4 ounce (promotional weight), sizes Large and Extra-Large, WITH 4-color imprints. $2.78 each, a one-time setup of $185, and a minimum of 2,000 pieces. And this is FULL COLOR! This is ideal for a mob! One of our suppliers is offering free freight on orders over $200; that's like seven dozen T-shirts.

If your group, school, college, fraternity, sorority, civic organization or club is planning anything in the cooler weather, now would be a good time to consider fleece. As for T-shirts, they can be stored until next spring, if you don't have an immediate need for them. But like airfares, these flash sales happen with little notice and are gone in the blink of an eye.

School Starts WHEN!?

When did school begin fall classes in August? EARLY August? It used to start the day after Labor Day and run until about 5th of June. Beginning about Memorial Day weekend, kids would start to pound the pavement to look for summer jobs. Growing up in Philadelphia, most kids would head "down the shore" anywhere from Cape May to Long Beach Island, NJ. New York area kids would hit everything from Tom's River and Seaside Heights, northward. You just knew if you landed a job (and most did) that you would have a good ten weeks of paychecks to get you into the following school year.

I was big for my age, so I could pass for older. I had a job working the kitchen and pulling the dumbwaiters in a summer residential hotel, I cooked and beat fudge (starting at 4:30 AM each day), I crewed as a first or second mate on a charter fishing boat, and my last three summers before Penn State, I worked as a line boy at the Ocean City, New Jersey, municipal airport. In each case, I knew I could work from mid-June until Labor Day. In some cases I was asked back for several weekends, as my family commuted between Ocean City and Philadelphia on the weekends, not wanting to give up the great south Jersey weather.

Point is, now kids barely have 5 weeks off, if that. Who is going to hire summer help for five weeks? They are barely trained in a job, and they have to leave to go back to school. It's like military pilots who do their contract time, then leave the service to look for airline work. [Not so much TODAY, but the airline jobs will come back. Really they will.]

I bring this all up because we (Showline Promotional Products) are being swamped with back-to-school promotional specials. Every time one arrives, I shake my head. For a kid, summer vacation was part of growing up. Now there is very little summer vacation. In my opinion kids are being robbed, at least short-changed, of part of their youth. At Penn State, I elected to go through summer terms to get my BA in June of 1965. I had spent ten months on the road performing with a hot band, and I wanted to get my degree on time. In college, you grow up pretty quickly. But come on, NOT in school.

What was it I said yesterday?

You KNOW merchants are in trouble when they are running WINTER sales in the midst of summer.

Toys 'R Us is running a "Christmas in July" Sale beginning this weekend (July 19) and running for a week. This is not unlike hotels offering deep discounts (with a deposit) now for bookings in winter. The hotels are REALLY different in that many of them are offering SUMMER prices for Fall and WINTER stays when their prices are higher.

Last evening (July 15), well after my last post, Southwest Airlines announced a flash sale. Purchase travel by July 30th for travel August 16th through November 18th, '09. Travel on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Southwest has to put bodies in the seats, and according to good ol' Yield Marketing (which is something you learn about when you study for an MBA), if you have a product and it doesn't sell at the MSRP, let us say n dollars, then see how it sells if the price is adjusted to n dollars minus r dollars. If demand increases, the price may be increased to just below the point of diminishing returns, let's say r dollars plus ten.

Basically if you have a plane with 136 seats and 50 of them are empty, it costs almost as much to fly with the empty seats as with them full. So FILL THEM UP. And if you are looking for deals, watch very carefully for other airlines to follow suit on the same dates with the same restrictions.

Good hunting.

Where there ARE airline travel deals

You just have to BE there when they happen!

With my reduced summertime travel schedule I have been simply watching the travel industry from the sidelines. The "flashdeals" come and go everywhere, especially in Las Vegas. Some hotels in Reno, NV, namely the Grand Sierra (which used to be the Reno Hilton) have some outstanding deals... really hard to believe. I am most familiar with the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino; that's where many of us stay during the Reno Championship Air Races in September.

It's the "Getting There" part which is usually what hurts. Most of the major airlines have had "flashdeals" of their own, beginning with one airline and spreading to most major lines within less that a day. There was a spectacular deal the week of July 6th which lasted just THREE DAYS for travel through most of the autumn months. Fares most people could afford out of pocket... that cheap.

The airlines have their own bills to pay. LARGE bills for fuel, maintenance, all those people, loans for the airplanes, rent for airport facilities, taxes, etc. Revenue, money coming in, is really really important.

The WALL STREET JOURNAL always has an interesting spin on travel. Earlier this week, there was a piece about the U.S. airlines flying into a credit squeeze. They all need cash. (duh.) the WSJ simplifies it this way:

• The country is in a terrible economic slowdown.
• Businesses are cutting back trips and the number of people taking trips.
• Airlines count on business travelers for the big bucks, like, buy a ticket this morning to travel this afternoon.
• Business travelers just aren't there.
• When this happens, the airlines try to attract vacation travelers.
• If people are not making money, they certainly don't have a load of jack to spend on airline tickets to fly the family to Six Flags.
• Therefore, marketing departments will try lowering fares on select routes. If other airlines follow and lower fares on other routes, pretty soon you have a "flashsale", and you HAVE to be right there when one starts.

If you were going to have to go to a meeting in Las Vegas in December, and you have known about it since last January, doubtless you kept an eye on airfares and hotel rates and jumped on the best you could find, probably last March. But now, you just want to get out of town. ell, your good pals, the airlines, want to help. Be watching the websites of your favorite two or three carriers, and when it seems that something up, and suddenly there are some great fares, do NOT sit around thinking about it.

Think "Money I don't have to spend." That will get you motivated.

I am NOT abandoning Airshows!

There has been loose talk floating around that Ol' Frank has left the business of announcing airshows. But having announced shows since 1977, there comes a time when a line has to be drawn. Linda and I have a thriving Promotional Products business, and I still lease my voice to various businesses for commercial voice-over work and narrations. There are only so many hours in a week.

Summer in the southwest is always a challenge, especially when the electric bills come. Here in the Scottsdale-Phoenix metro area, Arizona Public Service changes electric rates in late May for six months; the daytime rate (9 AM to 9 PM Monday through Friday) increases by about 45%. This happens just as the need for air conditioning becomes painfully obvious. When is it hottest here? In the daylight hours! Running the A/C in the house and in the separate office building is a necessity and becomes painful when the bill from APS arrives.

After having announced airshows since 1977, standing out there on the announcing stand or on the ramp for what has become six hours or so each show day, I decided a couple of years ago that I just didn't want to stand there in the heat through the months of June, July and August. So with very few exceptions, I decided to announce only in the spring and the autumn. The exceptions? I will go to New England at any time of year to announce a show, having lived there for 23 years and missing it terribly. The other exception is a show which really is a product demonstration as in a trade show. I am under cover with fans, or inside a glass-walled air-conditioned studio with all the cold water I could ever want.

Of course I continue to function as lead race announcer at the Reno Championship Air Races. Although the races are in mid-September, I have so much help in the form of spotters, timers, the local "99s" putting my spotting boards together, my "Pit Bull Pit Boss", and representatives for each class of racing plus Steve Stavrakakis to help with the unlimiteds and Danny Clisham to announce the civilian aerobatics, I don't mind it still being summer, technically. I say "technically" because we have worked the races in perfect beach weather, in dreadful heat, in wind so bad that dust obscured the course, and four years ago, we flew the final race of the week, the Breitling Unlimited Gold Race, in fairly heavy snow. So that week is always a challenge.

Yes, I am still announcing airshows in spring and fall. Just do not think that I have turned my back on the business of airshows. Too much fun, too many friends, too many memories.

Happy Independence Day

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