I give them credit for offering free wifi in the first place, more airports should, but it’s kind of purposeless if it’s too slow to do anything with it. I just clocked the time it took just to get through the “policy acceptance” stuff at 20 minutes! They’re about to load my plane now, so all I really have time to do is rant about how slow it is.

In the log-on phase, I counted about 10 different screens, including a page for the usage policy, a 30 second ad that couldn’t actually load because the connection is too slow, and the rest were a bunch of “next you’ll be doing this” pages. Seriously, how about you just do it instead of telling me and making me download another page.

Now that I am online, they’ve embedded a frame at the top of the browser window with a bunch of ads. I understand that they’re trying to make some money off it, but these ads are probably taking up half the bandwidth of the entire network.

I’ve got a picture to upload, but I’m not even gonna try from here.

—-

Back home now. Got to sit next to a lady that was super sick and hacking up a lung. Passed up my normal ginger ale for some orange juice. Good times.

If you don’t know, you can tell a page is secure by the “https” instead of just “http” in the web address. If a page isn’t secure, your information is being sent through the web as clear text, so somebody watching the signals in the tubes can steal your info.

Here’s a pic of the offending site that does not have the “https” yet is requesting CC info. Technically if this page submitted to a secure page it would be okay, but it doesn’t. I didn’t feel like buying more parking to show the really bad page.

So after seeing this I looked for some contact info where I could let somebody know of the security hole. I found a “contact us” link at bottom, and it didn’t work! In fact none of the links in the footer worked. I’m not sure why I was surprised. The links pointed to “#”, which is kind of a place holder address where you’ll put something later.

So dumb…

I received this email the very next day:

Mr. Heffernan,

This has been fixed. Thank you for your feedback and because of our
feedback on this issue we have asked our Marketing Department to fix the
problem and today, they did announce that is now secure with https.
Thank you for remaining a loyal customer!

Thank You, 

Alexis Torrence 

Park N Fly Headquarters
Frequent Parker Program
 

So yeah, pretty quick response time. I’m impressed. I didn’t think that would actually work. I checked and the security issue has been fixed. The footer links are still broken, but that’s a minor issue in comparison. Not bad Park ‘N Fly. For that I’ll give you an SEO link: Airport Parking

Priceline says they get the best deals within two weeks of the flight. That made me assume that airlines start to get desperate and drop their prices behind the scenes. What I didn’t think about was that when flights get closer, airlines start hiking up the price. In this case pretty drastically. Over two days I saw the general price of my trip double on Kayak.com (A site that pulls in listings from other travel sites).

Luckily, I was still able to get a good deal from Priceline. My flight was $200, while the same flight listed on other sites was $485. Almost a $300 savings. However, I could have bought the ticket a week earlier for around the same price from sites that let you choose the time you fly. I also might have gotten an even better deal from Priceline.

So you can learn from my dumbness, and not wait until the last minute. Another site that is similar to Priceline is Hotwire. I know my friend Brandon uses them a lot, especially for great hotel deals.

Aside from the waiting strategy that didn’t work, a strategy that has worked well for me is to first check prices on Kayak, then check Southwest. My flying dates are usually pretty flexible, so I use those two sites find the cheapest days to fly. Then I jump onto Priceline and bid about 50% of the price Kayak lists for those dates. Even if Priceline doesn’t accept your offer, they’ll give you other options. Then I just compare Kayak, Southwest, and Priceline, and figure out what’s best for me. This usually results in a reasonable if not great rate.

I’ve heard there’s some medicinal/health benefit of ginger ale, but that’s gotta be BS, or at least something of the past before they stripped out all the nutrients to add more corn syrup. But if that’s still the perception, it could be that people are trying to help their immune systems a little while they’re sharing recycled air in a crowded cabin. But then why not drink orange juice?

…it’s a mystery.