Stuck in the Middle with You

The first part of this week I was out in Los Angeles for the inaugural Magento Imagine eCommerce conference (more about that to come). En route, I ended up trying (via standby) to get on an early flight for one leg (ATL to LAX), and just got squeezed onto the flight as the last passenger.

This meant five hours plus in a middle seat in coach. Nothing to write home about — this certainly falls in the first-world-problems camp — just the average run-of-the-mill experience that makes traveling tiring.

The next day, I got this in my email:

Excellent, proactive customer service. Never got one of these before – maybe it only comes with a certain level of Medallion Status?

Not that 500 sky miles is going to make any significant difference (and never mind that of course on every full plane there are lots of folks in middle seats) but I thought it was quite clever to notice and simply acknowledge that the much heralded benefits of being a frequent flier didn’t apply in this case.

Good work Delta, and thanks for the aisle seat on the way home.

Dopplr import fail

I use Dopplr and TripIt, to keep track of traveling colleagues, update people on my own travel, and just generally simplify life. (I’ve blogged about each many times as well: see posts containing dopplr or TripIt).

I’m getting tired of Dopplr’s consistent FAIL on a common (for me) use case- a one day trip to NY on Delta.

Whenever I forward such a confirmation here’s what Dopplr does:

Thanks for sending us a message by email.

We automatically created a trip to Atlanta, GA, United States (from Newburyport, MA, United States) between February 10th and February 13th

We won’t share coincidences from this newly-created trip with your fellow travellers until February 18th. This is to give you a chance to check and correct any problems in interpretation.

If you’d like to check, go to [link removed]

Yours sincerely,
The Dopplr Team.

The problem is, I’m not going to or from Atlanta – that’s where Delta airlines headquarters is, sure, but it’s a long detour on the Boston->New York route.

I’m also not travelling Feb 10 to Feb 13, I’m leaving and returning on the 13th, and the trip was booked on the 10th.

I can (and do) go in and manually fix the trip in Dopplr, but in this type of case TripIt’s import feature just works.