I’ve got a lot of love for designers right now, especially those who are improving the lives of travellers and tourists. Latest hero of this ilk is Emil Jacob, who designed the airline seat/bed layout you see above. I’m sure any airline that installs a layout like this will charge a premium for them, but it ever becomes a standard layout, it seems as though the tickets should only cost half again as much as a regular coach ticket to cover the cost of the lost seat.

slide show for some other seat designs. There are some interesting ideas in there that might cost a bit extra, but would certainly make log distance flying that much more comfortable.

Designer Dustin Curtis rightly points out that American Airline’s website sucks. The functionality you want is buried amongst all sorts of other content, and even then the search isn’t that great. And American Airlines isn’t the online airline with an annoying web page. In fact, I can’t find one I like, just ones that I don’t like, with Ryanair’s page topping the list of worst sites – it advertises flights from distant airports and the search doesn’t let you search all airports for a city.

Mr. Curtis proposes a redesign that reminds me a good deal of Kayak.com – my favourite site to search for flights. His looks like this:

The American Airline’s unofficial response to Mr. Curtis is simply depressing and reveals why airline pages sucks so hard. Quite simply: internal politics. Everyone has some vested interest in putting something on the website, and rather than focus on the other all user experience, everyone tosses something up there to make one big mess. I won’t hold my breath for a good airline site to come along, thankfully we don’t have to deal with them that much thanks to the joy of Kayak.

Not only are flights crazy cheap right now, but they are also getting better. Anecdotally, of my last few flights I’ve had a few empty seats around me, which is always pleasant. On my last flight to the U.S., I even had my own row of three seats on which to spread out. I’ve had fairly quick and easy check in lines with little wait, fewer people flying has just made for better flying.

Research bears this out. Bags aren’t being lost, more flights are on time, fewer people are getting bumped, and fewer people are complaining overall, according to a new study. While I’m sure the airline industry would prefer to be charging high fares for packed airplanes, I sure do appreciate that we customers are finally getting a good deal on the skies.

Apparently AirAsia is now taking reservations for a new London – Kuala Lumpur route. For 200 pounds round trip. I’m not kidding. Check it out.

Of course it’s for a select period of time and doesn’t include food during your 12 hour flight. But I’m willing to pack a couple meals. And looking at times when I would actually be able to fly to spend a bit of time in Malaysia I think I would end up paying something like 450-500 pounds. That’s still about half the cost of a normal flight.

Hat tip to my house mate for pointing this out. Apparently it’s only been available since yesterday.

After Jon the FlightBlogger’s defense of small national airlines, my mind started to turn over the idea of a round the world trip using these small airlines. If Suriname Airways flies to the Netherlands, then why not try to plot a diverse and exciting route dictated by available routes.

The first step was to identify my available airlines. I decided that I would only look at airlines from countries with an annual GDP of less than 20 billion – which would mean that a new 747 would be 1% of GDP. This isn’t a perfect measure for determining countries with a small national airline, since Jordan falls into my group to fly while Yemen does not. But it’s good enough for my purpose.

As it turns out, there are scores of ways to do this trip, so I’ll just go over a pretty straightforward one.

• Air Senegal flight from London to Dakar.
• Air Ethiopia for two legs, first from Dakar to Addis Ababa, and then Addis to Dubai.
• Nepal Airlines would take me from Dubai to Kathmandu, and then on to Singapore.
• Air Niugini (From Papua New Guinea) would take me from Singapore to Port Moresby and then from Port Moresby to Brisbane.
• Air Pacific, Fiji’s international airline, is the biggest bottleneck in this round the world tour, as it was the only airline that met my small country criteria with a flight across the Pacific. I would fly with then from Brisbane to Nadi and then on to Los Angeles.
• TACA, Nicaragua’s airline, gets me to Managua.
• Aerocaribbean would take me back north to Havana, and then on to Port au Prince.
• Insel Air then provides service that takes me to their base of operations in Curacao, and then on to Paramaribo.
• Surinam Airways, after providing the original inspiration for this trip, would take me back to Europe with their regular Amsterdam service.

This would be a pricey trip. The airline tickets could easily ad up to $10,000. But, it would be one hell of an adventure and it would take you to a load of destinations that are well off the beaten track.