Spirit Airlines alleges conspiracy because it can’t pretend airfares are $9

 Blog
Jan 262012
 
Alec Baldwin as American Airlines pilot on Saturday Night Live

Airfares were in disguise before today, but we can spot bad behavior

It’s a welcome development. As of today, travel vendors are required by the Department of Transportation to include taxes and fuel surcharges right up front when the price of the ticket is quoted. No more will shoppers experience that painful price jump when they click through the final purchase screen. All unavoidable expenses are incorporated from the start.

This change finally makes base price the same as cost. It also makes purchasing travel sensible, like purchasing stuff in Europe: The amount on the price tag is what you pay.

It has always been one of the cornerstones of American hucksterism. Businesses love separating the price from the true cost because it makes a sale more appealing. Never mind the fact it’s a lie. Everyone pays the full cost, not only the base price.

So of course some of the big vendors have been responding to the change to “teaser fares” with some weasel-like email messages. Don’t they know that travelers are thrilled? Why apologize?

Air-hotel packager Go-Today.com explains it this way: “Consumers should be aware that fares have not increased; they simply reflect a difference in how pricing is displayed.” That’s the bottom line, and it’s true. But other companies are editorializing, and that’s where they step in it.

Sleazy Spirit Airlines has made a business out of making the cost of airfare seem lower than it truly is. It has had its wrist slapped by the DOT already for deceptive advertising. (I hope the DOT scrubbed thoroughly afterward.) Unsurprisingly, the airline, which builds out the true costs of travel by charging even for carry-ons, tried to spin the new rule as an erosion of American justice, saying it is being forced “to hide” taxes in your ticket quotes now.

Spirit’s fear-mongering email is typical of the false victimhood that hucksters hide behind these days:

New government regulations require us to HIDE taxes in your fares.

This is not consumer-friendly or in your best interest. It’s wrong and you shouldn’t stand for it.

Starting January 24, 2012, fares are distorted.

Why?
Thanks to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s latest fare rules, Spirit must now HIDE the government’s taxes and fees in your fares.

If the government can hide taxes in your airfares, then they [sic] can carry out their [sic] hidden agenda and quietly increase their [sic] taxes. (Yes, such talks are already underway.)

“They can carry out their hidden agenda”? I’d put on my tinfoil hat, but Spirit would charge me extra to carry it on. You’d think the Boston Tea Party took place on an Airbus. It’s not fooling customers who know the issue is not about taxation but about advertising deceptive prices, a charge that it paid a fine for.

Spirit alleges a federal conspiracy because it can’t pretend airfares cost $9 anymore. California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer is having the company for lunch, and rightfully so. It’s detestable and disingenuous to manipulate customers into believing that their liberties are eroding when the only thing eroding is Spirit’s ability to deceive them with impunity. Since it has built its business model on the old bait-and-switch, of course it’s mad. It also has to pretend that the way it’s been misleading you all this time has been just.

Booking Buddy sent me this [emphasis mine]:

BookingBuddy Traveler,

Starting today, January 26, 2012, the Department of Transportation is requiring airlines and online travel agencies to include all mandatory taxes and fees when advertising fares. This is a big win for travelers.

We wanted to alert you to this as it will make flights and vacation packages appear more expensive than you may be used to. In reality, you are simply seeing more of the taxes and fees up front. Base prices themselves are not increasing, and the taxes and fees are the same…

The way Booking Buddy breaks the news makes me wonder: Well, if it’s so great for travelers, then why weren’t all the vendors doing it before today?

Is it because up until today, they didn’t care much about what would be great for travelers?

I give credit to the few third-party booking sites that were adding in mandatory fees to begin with, including Kayak and TripAdvisor. Add those guys to the top of your browser bookmarks because they were being frank with you anyway.

They didn’t need partial or incremental disclosure to make sales more attractive — and didn’t require the wrath of the government to quote costs fully.

The financial incentive for providing bad service

 Blog
Dec 092011
 
Colonel Tom Parker: How Much Does It Cost If It's Free

He was a crank, but he was right

Hard-core capitalists and campaigning Republicans love to tell us that the free market does for America what is best. Given time and the protection of a velvet rope, competition will mollify inadequacy and the blessings will trickle down upon us all.

It’s bullshit, of course. That’s not the way it works in America anymore. Anyone who has been to a movie in the past 15 years — and sat through 10 minutes of unwelcome TV-style commercials before the show — will tell you that the movie-going experience was better before we had to do that, and that ticket prices did not come down as a result. The product got worse.

The truth is competition will not equalize squat if a business can do one thing: lower the expectations of the consumer. Because all the cinemas across the country shoehorned commercials into the bill at the same time — just as the cell phone providers are capping speeds together and the airlines implemented baggage fees together — consumer expectations were suppressed.

Once you’ve got the expectations low, you can do a few things to make sure your competition can’t end-run you now that you have cheapened things. One is to snag exclusivity with another big partner. But that can backfire. Everyone knows that if AT&T, which diligently bricks some 36 million bricked smartphones nationwide, didn’t have the benefit of years of exclusivity for the iPhone, it would have hemorrhaged customers.

Exclusivity can be expensive, too, since it dings your potential market. After all, if Pepperidge Farm licenses the recipe to the intergalactically awesome Australian cookie Tim Tam , but it only sells them through Target and refers all customers to Target to buy them, then everyone in Manhattan, where there is no Target, will suffer without Tim Tams. This makes bearded travel writers extraordinarily testy, so as you can see, exclusivity can backfire on you.

But there is a second, more lucrative thing you can do once you have subtly gotten Americans to accept your downsized, diminished, flimsified product. That magic money-maker: the add-on fee that makes it whole again.

Take Royal Caribbean Cruise Line. Traditionally, cruises were all-inclusive. But in 2008, it had the bizarre notion of charging customers $15 if they wanted a steak. At the time, it spun the surcharge by saying the meat would be “all natural,” hence the cost.

Which should have begged a big, loud question in the travel press (but didn’t): Does that mean Royal Caribbean is admitting that its regular meals are artificial?

When businesses charge customers more for the “good” variety of their product, they are admitting their core product is substandard. In fact, to make more money, they need it to be.

Don’t you think that Six Flags is more likely to convince you to splash out another $80 for its line-jumping Flash Pass if its makes its queues as Purgatorial as possible?  Isn’t it in Apple’s interest to confound consumers to the point where they either buy AppleCare or lay out $49 for a pay-per-incident consultation with customer service? Why replace the old padding on the coach seats if it prods your ass into buying a paid upgrade?

Nearly every major cruise ship also has several additional restaurants that compete with the non-fee meals served in the main dining room. These supplemental restaurants charge extra fees because the food is deemed to be (and often is) gourmet, and those meals are talking points among passengers on every cruise you’ll ever take.

That begged the other question no one in the press seemed to ask: “Why isn’t your main dining room as good?” It’s hard to come up with an answer that doesn’t make excuses for the vendor or patronize the consumer.

And if they’re going to assume passengers are going to crave that better meal, why do people at the cruise lines get so agitated when I write that their food is substandard? They want it to be substandard — so I feel obligated to spend more money in the supplemental restaurant. They just want it to be subtly so.

At the Apple Store, the shelves are stocked with software that, if you squint, exists because there’s a failure of some kind in the boilerplate system software. Why else would I need to buy a program that cleans up my iTunes songs or makes my iPhoto images easy to edit? If the standard Apple product was as splendid as the fanboys say it is, then you wouldn’t need to embellish it by buying more stuff to plug its holes. There wouldn’t be any.

The airlines have learned to turn this concealment of incompetence into a profit model. It will sell you a seat, yes, but if you want a good seat — not one in the middle, or one in the back — then you have to pay more. US Airways’ Choice Seats fees are levied on windows and aisles toward the front of the plane.

For decades, the airlines spent millions on TV ads proclaiming how comfortable their seats and service were. They drummed it relentlessly into our ears. Now, though, the airlines need you to be dissatisfied with their standard service. They need you to upgrade. Their stock prices depend on it.

So you will only hear airlines praise their first class service now.

Even the TSA has gotten in on the add-on bonanza. If you have the cash, you can buy yourself some faster screening. That’s the function of Clear, which enables richer Americans and corporate expense account holders to pay for better access to a government function. Hey, only the little guys wait in line anymore.

The net effect of all these fees is that classism is now oozing into many of the American industries that used to be rather democratic.

Apologists for these add-ons, like the companies themselves, twist things around to rhapsodize that you don’t have to pay them. They will tell you that they provide the option of comfort only for those who demand it. This, to me, is sophistry, and it ignores the historic and unmistakable fact that companies have intentionally eroded their core products to the point where an optional upgrade is nearly necessary, and they have done it under our noses.

The basic product is intentionally designed to be not good enough. It was never like that before.

So how do you persuade consumers that your basic product is basically unworthy without exposing yourself to outright scorn? Simple. You do it by covering your flanks with those two important defenses: exclusivity agreements, like AT&T did, or passionate brand loyalty, like Apple.

It only works for a while.

 

 

$600 a night and not a drop to drink

 Blog
Sep 232011
 
KAWS statue at The Standard New York

Everyone's a critic: The KAWS sculpture weeps for luxury values at the Standard

On the first day of this month, the New York nightmare happened to me. The apartment beneath me caught fire. The girl who lives there wasn’t at home, but I’m lucky I was, because I had just returned from three weeks away. I’m fortunate my apartment wasn’t empty, because I smelled the smoke, then I heard the crackle of a large blaze, and finally I called 911 as the air in my home became rapidly unbreathable. I stopped the flames, but I everything I own was smoked. I’ve been living in hotels ever since.

The first thing I have learned is that having insurance is worth every penny. Believe it.

I’ve had to switch from hotel to hotel because Fashion Week logjams swept in and swept me out. So now I’ve moved four times, which has enabled me to see New York as a visitor sees it. It’s not a pretty picture.

A hotel may have comfortable beds and a pretty structure, but it always reveals its true attitude toward guests through its amenities. The rooms were built by architects and designers who have long since moved on, but the administration of amenities shows what the people who now run the place really think of you.

Forgive me if I’m cranky (I warned you about that in my last post), but I haven’t slept in my own bed for nearly a month now. And although I do understand these hotels need to make a buck, I also recognize that the nickeling-and-diming of the American traveler has eroded the proud values of the hospitality industry to the point where it’s not often worthy of that name anymore.

John Cleese recently said that what interested him in doing Fawlty Towers was all the hotels he’d been at where things were run for the convenience of the staff and not for the convenience of the guests. He said he could tell in a minute after setting foot in the lobby which hotel he was in. Only some hotels truly care to be hospitable to people stuck away from home. The selfishness of the hoteliers in the other category was what inspired him to create Basil Fawlty.

When I checked into the Standard New York, the model/clerk asked how I was. I told him I was checking in because of a house fire at home. He didn’t say another word until, “Here’s your key.” Not hospitable, no, but perhaps the awkwardness won in that instance.

Soon, I realized that chilliness was endemic to The Standard. The Standard’s rooftop bar, featured prominently in its marketing, was usually closed to guests. It was always rented out at peak cocktail hours. One night, a friend of mine asked whose party was happening, he was told by a model/host, “I’m not going to tell you that.”

W Hollywood Pool

Putting the traveler second: The W Hollywood Pool, pictured here without hotel guests

I found the situation just as prickly last year in Los Angeles, when I tried to use the pool as a guest of the W Hollywood and was told to go away. My complaint caused quite a furor, was covered in The Economist, and elicited some non-apologies from the hotel management. But the trend persists.

The hotel also advertises free wi-fi, but once you check in, you learn the truth: The free wi-fi is a crappy version that tops out at 512 Kbps and kicks you offline during downloads. If you want to do much of anything, including watch movies or YouTube, you have to pay a ghastly $20 a day for the high-speed variety. Were they kidding? Andre Balazs Properties, which was charging me $700 on some nights, actually went through the trouble of creating two wi-fi networks — one of them intended to be junk for the have-nots? They can’t throw in high-speed internet for rates like that?

This week, CNN wrote about this issue, which I’ve been pointing out for years at Budget Travel and AOL: The expensive hotels rip guests off on Internet, while the cheap ones know that including quality wi-fi will guarantee future repeat business.

I think someone should create a blacklist of hotels that advertise free Internet access that, in reality, stinks. Just because a hotel tells you it was wi-fi doesn’t mean it works. Last month, I found the same wi-fi bait-and-switch at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Avenue in Chicago: It advertises free wi-fi that, in truth, is often impossible to use.

In fact, I’ve found that about a third of the time, it’s lousy despite the fact it’s listed as an amenity. You’d never tolerate algae in the swimming pool, or a faucet that only yields a trickle, but we seem to shrug and overlook clogged or inadequate web access.

The Dream Downtown, famous for having windows in the bottom of its pool that are visible from the lobby lounge, was kind of a mess. It boasts about fancy in-room bells and whistles, such as a desk-side panel where you can plug your MP3 player in. Except there were no instructions or cables, and no one who worked there could explain how to use it. Unfortunately, rates of $600 a night are too steep for members of the Geek Squad.

Nate Berkus

Style icon? Or just a bigger celebrity than Lisa Simpson?

Like so many new urban hotels, The Dream Downtown is essentially a life support system for its event spaces, so guests are not prioritized highly.

On the first night I was at the Dream, Nate Berkus was on hand to get an award from US Magazine as one of the city’s best-styled people. (He accepted it in, um, a grey tee shirt and an open denim button-down.) The next night, Marc Jacobs had his show’s after-party there. So those were two nights I pretty much had to stay in my room. On my last night there, I tried to get up to its buzzed-about rooftop bar. I was a paying guest — a heavily paying guest at that — but at the kiosk I was told it would be up to “the doorman’s discretion” whether I could have a drink there. No, thank you. Not gonna submit myself to rejection at a hotel I’m paying already to stay at.

I joined the plebes at the ground-floor bar instead. It had run out of several ingredients, making my order impossible. The next lady who sat down beside me wanted a pinot and they were out of that, too. At the sound of her voice, I glanced aside and saw that it was Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson.

It was gratifying to know that it wasn’t just me. Even multimillionaire celebrities get the shaft at Manhattan’s overtrendy hotels.

Then at 11:45, the half-stocked bar declared it was last call and trounced us all out, leaving us with only one option: the bar where the doorman wouldn’t look twice at us because we were not 22 with perky boobs.

The company that manages the bar replied to my tweet about it — incidentally, that’s what the W Hollywood did, too; it blamed my dissatisfaction on a contractor — but the way I see it, I laid out the problem in plain English already. It’s not my job as a customer to jump through hoops, to keep emailing customer service reps, to make sure it’s rectified. It’s theirs as professionals who claim to be in the “hospitality” industry.

These hotels look pretty, even if they all charge for $17 for the most basic of cocktails, which I have required several of during these trying days of contractors and movers, and I can only imagine how delightful they would be if they rose to their price bracket and truly treated customers with luxury. Then again, value has never been at the forefront of fashion.

I peck, but it’s not all bad. I did have a good time at a third hotel I’ve stayed in, the Soho Grand Hotel. It let me borrow a fish during my stay. And it even had an amenity that the Standard and the Dream would never permit to clutter its hyper-styled decor: a free coffee machine for guests.

It was so thoughtful, for a minute I thought I’d died and gone to Best Western.

 

Standard Hotel wi-fi sign-in screens

They don't warn you that cruddy Internet comes standard at the Standard

Why I peck

 Blog
Sep 202011
 
James Morton

It's not water off my back

A friend recently gently accused me of being too vocal on Twitter about bad customer service. “Do I henpeck too much?” I asked her. “It’s what makes you you,” she said. “Keep pecking.”

Being a consumer reporter is one of the things I do. Being a travel writer, too, is a form of consumer reporting.

But beyond the fact that it’s one of my bailiwicks, it’s also the right thing to do in a society that increasingly marginalizes and takes advantage of the masses.

Bad value is a form of poor governance.

I could get all Naomi Klein on you right now. In our society, corporations are the new governments. In fact, in many cases, they hold the puppet strings to the government itself.

And when businesses treat customers poorly, or milk them, or coddle them, or rip them off and refer them to script-reciting Indians to be assuaged, then they are bad stewards of our destines, and fighting becomes a form of good citizenship.

I feel the same irritation with a business that cavalierly betrays me as I do with a politician who disregards my vote, or calibrates the denial of my needs as an acceptable loss.

Some people permit poor customer service as a necessary byproduct of a capitalist society. They say businesses have to make money somehow. I see it more as a breach of trust. So some see it as complaining. I don’t. I see it as having my say after a business has had theirs.

There’s not much justice to be had in our consumer culture, partly because the natural state of consumption is to become apathetic. When people deign to appraise the value of the consumables, or gauge the essential ethics of the contract, it makes some people nervous.

Pecking, to me, is a form of critical thinking. It’s a way of keeping consumer culture in check.

“I’m a huge critic of abusive systems,” I told my friend. “And the best way to do that is to point out abuses.”

The three excuses airlines use to weasel out of anything

 Blog
Jul 252011
 
Warning: Slippery travel

Warning: Slippery travel

Last week, I caught Delta trying to charge me more for a flight found when I was signed into its system. The same flight was $79 cheaper when I wasn’t signed into its system.

In its response to me, Delta doesn’t deny that it delivered two conflicting prices to me. But Delta claims that the difference happened because the price of the flight fluctuated while I was searching. It wrote, “it appears that during the short time between your searches (according to our logs it was about 11 minutes), the inventory for that flight changed and a lower-priced fare class (a T class) became available. The change in the lowest-available fare was unrelated to SkyMiles status.”

There are a few things I find ludicrous about this attempt to defend the discrepancy. One is that Delta claims the elapsed time between my flight checks was 11 minutes. I searched immediately, partly because I was in sticker shock and partly because, as a consumer reporter and a travel writer for more than a decade, I am perfectly aware that prices can change at a moment’s notice. I went back and forth between the browsers, double-checking, which means there were at least three searches by me; I screen grabbed only the last ones I did while they were still on the screen.

Then again, the airline also hedges by saying “it appears” this was the case. It can’t be sure.

But I didn’t expect anything different. Delta just gave one of the standard-issue excuses that all airlines give when they’re accused of fare shenanigans:

“Prices are always changing.”

They can weasel out of a lot by claiming that, and because they keep the pricing opaque, customers can’t fight back with any facts.

“We realize that airline fares can be complex and can fluctuate,” Delta continued, (and, although I’m defensive, somewhat condescendingly), “which is why if you find a lower fare by 12 midnight Eastern Time on the same day you purchased your ticket at delta.com, you can access your itinerary via delta.com and click on the “Change Flights” button. Your new fare will be ticketed and the refund for the difference in fares will be credited to your original form of payment.”

Nice to know. My translation: “We know we’re incredibly confusing and our pricing may indeed screw you. That’s why we give you a chance to do even more research and clean up the mess as long as you do it by midnight.”

There are two other all-purpose excuses the airlines use to get out of consumer complaint—legally.

“We’re just keeping up with our competitors.”

That’s how, minutes after the FAA stopped charging tax on flights this week, Delta (and other airlines) raised fares by exactly the same amount, pocketing $200 million a week.

The airlines, with few exceptions, claimed they couldn’t give consumers a break because none of their rivals were. (That doesn’t make much sense to me. You’d think the airline that’s cheaper would win in the marketplace. But things don’t have to make sense in Airline World. They just have to be legally defensible. And profitable.)

It’s worth noting that Delta and AirTran are both reportedly under investigation by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Also, a judge rules that a class action lawsuit, filed by passengers who accuse the two of colluding to institute baggage fees at the same time in 2008, may proceed.

The other all-purpose excuse the airlines use to dodge sketchy behavior?

“It’s the weather’s fault.”

That’s how, last December, I was stranded at JFK for 32-plus hours when Virgin Atlantic refused to let me out of a flight even though it was scheduled to depart at the peak of the snowstorm of the decade. And once it marooned us, there were no blankets and no food. Irresponsible? Yes. But if an airline finds a way to blame the weather, as Virgin Atlantic did, the government can’t punish it. This one often works even if the skies above your airport are crystalline clear and the bluebirds are chirping sweetly — surely you’ve been handed this excuse on an apparently beautiful day. You can’t speak for what the weather is doing somewhere else.

These excuses are pretty much iron-clad. Why? Because you can’t prove them false. You aren’t privy to the truth.

Delta charges more for signing in as a frequent flier

 Blog
Jul 212011
 

Take a look at the screen grab below. To the left is an air ticket priced by a passenger who is signed in as a Delta Air Lines frequent flier. To the right is the same itinerary, except this one is quoted on a separate Web browser, without signing in. They were priced at the same time.

Delta wants to charge the passenger who signed in $79.30 more for the same flights.

The search happened when the passenger needed to change an existing reservation. Notice that the first legs on these itineraries register as a different fare class (T or K). For whatever reason, the frequent flier was not offered the lowest-priced fare leg. (Nice catch, @SimonTravels.) That bumps up the cost of the ticket for the SkyMiles member by nearly $80.

How much does Delta stand to make from all the passengers who fail to notice this discrepancy? Few customers do price checks in separate browsers when they need to change a reservation, so ripoffs like this, if they happen, go undetected.

When Delta was telephoned for a price quote of the same flights, the lower price was offered there, too.

The cheap price simply wasn’t given to the person who had signed in as a customer and attempted to conduct a flight change online.

Let me reiterate my common warning: Whether it’s intentional or not, online airline pricing is a shrouded world prone to shifts that will rarely be in your favor. Always check your flight reservation prices on several browsers, including one without cookies enabled and with the cache cleared.

If you’ve ever searched for an airfare and seen the price suddenly leap higher when you went back to double-check an earlier option, you know how manipulatable, and how unreliable, online searches can be. Always go to a brand new browser and compare what you get there.

And if there is any disparity, contact the airline. In Delta’s case, it honored the lower price, although so far it has not accounted for how this highly suspicious overcharging happened.

Delta’s customer service Twitter account, @DeltaAssist, is looking into this. The phone rep apologized “for the inconvenience” but admitted no fault.

Delta overcharge for SkyMiles members

Left: Signed in. Right: Anonymous on another browser. Frequent fliers are asked to pay nearly $80 more without being offered the cheaper option. Click to embiggen.

 

Update: @DeltaAssist offered the following excuse by Twitter DM: “Fares fluctuate based on avail – not on whether you’re a SkyMiles member or not. When you reissued your ticket you got it at $528.80 … If you were to reprice now, that fare class is no longer avail which is why it’s more.”

My response: “These were checked simultaneously. How do you account for differing fare classes offered to me?”

For my readers: The lower price was obtained only after I discovered (through the second browser) that it was available, and I phoned Delta to object. Both fares were double-checked. First, the signed-in quote, then the anonymous/new browser one, then back to re-price the SkyMiles quote. Neither quote budged over the course of it. At that point, the screen grab was made, so claiming fluctuating fares as a defense is not a realistic in this case. The issue here seems to be one of fare classes being offered (K versus the cheaper T), a facet of the query that Delta has so far not addressed.

For more on this issue, read my follow-up post on it.

When bloggers attack

 Blog
Aug 302010
 

I recently wrote about bloggers who seek to elevate themselves by launching unprovoked attacks on other writers in their field. As if on cue, someone has tried it with me.

A British writer, whom I have never met nor named in any of my published work, went after me for the warning I wrote for WalletPop about iPhone travel apps, which often require expensive data connections to function. The problem lies, essentially, in 1) exorbitantly pricey international access and 2) apps that suck data from the network without telling you how much you’re actually using. People get routinely slammed with massive bills, and they are taught by AT&T itself to thwart disaster by switching their iPhones into Airplane Mode the minute they board the flight to fly abroad.

The bigger the claws, the weaker the venom (Photo by H. Dragon)

This guy hated the example I supplied of a $3,000 bill because it happened in 2007 — even though I linked to the report of it so readers could fully investigate for themselves. He was fixated on the fact apps weren’t yet for sale then, but the truth is that astronomical charges unquestionably still exist. A friend went to Toronto for two days last week and was charged $300 for just 20MB of usage. (Can you imagine a full vacation’s worth of damage?)  He hated the headline that said a person can spend “thousands” using data on vacation. (They can. You have to know the tricks.) He also didn’t say much about my publication, which is owned by Aol, or post constructive comments beneath the story in question, where true corrections would presumably most help the public, choosing instead go after me by name in a post published on his home platform.

Unfortunately, this man was disingenuous about his primary assault. For one, he neglected to disclose he has a dog in the fight: He makes and sells travel apps. He only admitted, near the bottom as a sort of footnote, to being “an app developer.”

Fortunately, his tirade has not gotten much traction, which is probably good for him, because the unpleasant truth hiding behind the attacks is that his own guide apps work best when they access Google Maps, otherwise, you don’t get to enjoy the entire functionality. (It must also be pointed out that Google Maps was one of the culprits in the $3,000 bill this guy didn’t like reading about.)

This is what my critic told his followers about his apps:

“All our travel apps store content when you first download them. All the images, all the information, it’s all inside the handset and you don’t need a data connection to access it.”

Notice the perhaps-tactical omission of the word maps (and what good is a travel guide without a map?). I can’t locate a clear truth on this one. This screenshot (below), taken from the App Store product page of one of the apps he is associated with, contradicts his presentation of the facts: As you can see, it declares that users “need a 3G or wi-fi connection to view Google maps [sic] or external website links.” Another sales page for another of his products words it as “you only need an internet connection…” for the same features. Still other sales pages for apps he sells make no mention at all of the warning, but I don’t know if that means the maps are stored offline for those. Now, data connection for external sites can be forgiven, but when it comes to protecting the traveler from shocking mobile phone bills, Google Maps is dangerous indeed.

This app needs the Web for full functionality: Its product page from the App Store

I can understand why this man might object to my call on consumers to be smart about their travel app purchases, because he stands to lose money if I drum up awareness about iPhone app design that allows data charges to creep in the back door. Most consumers are not as versed as app designers, and many people have no idea how much they stand to lose by using a travel app that accesses the Internet.

He also didn’t seek any comment from me for his first post despite the fact he repeatedly named me and invented assumptions about my professional practices.

Those omissions, together, raise significant questions about his motives and standards.

Considering the omissions so far (and there are other perceived misrepresentations that reach outside the scope of iPhone apps), it will surprise no one to learn that his three posts about me, plus updates, are selectively presented to make it appear as if it were me who picked the fight. He even published tweets I sent to his personal account to his wider platform, and then claimed it was “defamation.” It is not defamation, however, if 1) it’s true, and 2) you yourself are the one disseminating it.

Regardless, with his third attack post, he’s finally taking a more reader-conscious course by countering with solid information of actual service to the purchasing public. This morning, the guy put up a list of 11 data-use workarounds for using your iPhone while you travel. I must say there’s quite a bit of helpful information in there, particularly if you have bought one of his travel products (of which I have no opinion otherwise) and want to use Google Maps.

But if expensive data connection expense isn’t much of a problem, why did he feel the need to craft a long list of helpful tips, tricks, and hacks?

Having written this, I fully expect a fourth installment in his self-serving vendetta, and more fixation on minor points at the expense of the whole. I know I have played somewhat into his game. But this man’s hyperbolic campaign obscures the truth behind it — a truth that’s obviously more complicated than a rabble-rousing 140-character tweet. His vociferous objections to my consumer reporting remind us that you should never believe everything you read on the Web. Motives are shadowy things.

Update: I was invited to discuss this topic on Arthur Frommer and Pauline Frommer’s national radio show. You can get the .mp3 here; the chat starts about midway through. I encourage everyone who uses apps to make sure they understand the possible expense of data usage, and to be duly appraising of those with vested interests who try to deflect attention from, or blame consumers for, this very costly problem.