November 2007

Last night was a disaster, England lost to Croatia at Wembley. I was there and it was awful.

In the pouring rain England were outplayed and out-thought, their Euro dream washed away and with it my football holiday to Austria/Switzerland in the summer of 2008. Bloody morons!

I have been to dozens of new stadiums around the world so I was really looking forward to my first experience at the new Wembley Stadium. I have missed every game since the Stadium opened, I have either been in the US or in the case of the FA Cup Final, I voluntarily gave up my ticket for a mate’s birthday (and I won’t let him forget it).

I love going to England games, the passion, the noise, the general camaraderie. Last night I witnessed none of it (other than 5 minutes of the game when England had drawn level).  I think the new stadium has a crowd problem, the fans are not the same as before, not as vocal, not as loud. It may have been a combination of nerves, stadium design, the rain or even the fact that the new Wembley is now largely attended by the “prawn sandwich” brigade but one thing is certain, the crowd is lacking something. England fans, Wembley is waiting, where are you?

To say the stadium was a waste of money would be the understatement of the year. It is diabolical that over £800 million was spent on creating such a lifeless, boring bowl. It may look pretty from aerial photos or night shots but inside the ground it is simply atrocious. I judge stadiums by their atmosphere, defining features or uniqueness. Sadly Wembley has none of these.

What it does have is logistical problems, plenty of them. England has still not managed to master selling food and drink at stadiums. Queues everywhere until they run out. Its surprising there are any queues at all considering a hotdog costs £4 and a disgusting english burger and chips costs more than £7!

Generally it would take a good 45 minutes to get from the stadium to the train station, standing in huge queues in the pouring rain was not something we felt like doing after such a poor result. So instead we found a pub nearby and waited for the crowds to diminish. All told a really bad night made worse by my disappointment at the £800 million it took to create the greatest stadium flop on earth.

British Airways is pathetic. I have given them considerably more than £10,000 worth of businees over the past couple of years and yet when I make a simple spelling mistake on a booking they insist on charging me £25.

This is the kind of service I have come to expect from British Airways, a national “premium service” carrier with no accountability to its customers whatsoever. I thought I’d check what the budget airlines charge for minor spelling mistake correction, so I called Easyjet and was told they do not charge for this!!

I guess thats why Easyjet are now making all the right headlines and British Airways stagger from one disaster to the next:

It lost 20,000 passengers’ bags, was fined £270 million for collusion and one-third of its flights were late, but British Airways still managed to hike its profits by 26 per cent this summer. (Link)

This incident has also reminded me of my worst airline incident to date, it happened back in April 2007 in Chicago, and yet AGAIN British Airways were at fault. At the time I wrote a letter to BA detailing the incident, I am still waiting for a response, 8 months later……

Read the letter detailing my ordeal below:

Read the rest of this entry »

So whilst watching some of the South Africa vs New Zealand test match today I noticed that the muslim player Hashim Amla does not wear the sponsors logo - Castle lager. Maybe this is old news in SA but I haven’t been aware of it until now. How pathetic that SA Cricket allows this and furthermore that Castle Lager stands for it. This man is allowed to flout rules which apply to everyone else based on his “religion”. SA Cricket is weak, the sport itself is weak judging by Sunday’s attendance at the test match I watched and in comparison to its nearest relative - Baseball - it is dying a slow death.

As well as being an official Olympic sport in Beijing next year, Baseball had a record season in 2007 with revenues topping $6 billion. With the T20 and the world cup this year, I’d love to know how much cricket made.

Yeah but this ain’t no ordinary baker, its Tiger Brands trading as Albany, a household name in South Africa. Turns out they have been colluding with other members of the bread bakers oligopoly in South Africa to fix price increases. This type of collusion within an oligopoly is commonly referred to as a cartel, but unlike some of the other more famous cartels trading in diamonds and oil, this cartel provides a staple food product in a country where thousands of people live below the poverty line.

Only yesterday I wrote about the Airline (and cellphone network) oligopoly in South Africa, now it appears we have a bread oligopoly cartel. Could it be that South Africa is the land of the cartel/oligopoly, just try thinking of a few yourself, maybe start with the paper industry, the sugar industry………

PS: There are many other fascinating oligopoly, duopoly theories you may want to research. Yesterday I mentioned Nash Equilibrium but there are many other economic (and game) theories which apply to oligopoly’s such as the Stackelberg or Cournot or Bertrand competition.

Frustrating at times but overall I’d say its the best phone I’ve ever had. I’ll try and avoid raising common known irritations such as ringtones etc and I’ll refrain from stating the obvious benefits everyone already knows.

Pro’s

The interface, by far the best of any phone I have had, and YES, I have owned an HTC Touch and it is rubbish!

The standard apps like iPod, photo’s, youtube, google maps, phone all work as they are intended to. No lag, delays or crashing….. a welcome change from other pretenters to the crown.

Don’t be put off by EDGE, its actually quicker than I expected and in London there are loads of free wifi hotspots the phone will automatically connect to.

Cons

- Mail doesn’t allow search or list functions, so its basically like SMS 0.1, what the hell were they thinking.

- No cut and paste function. WTF?

- Battery life isn’t that great, you’ll need to be frugal with wifi, bluetooth, videos, ipod etc if you want it to last the WHOLE weekend! I must have played with it a lot because mine did not even last 24 hours.

- Its as slippery as a fish wearing a banana skin jacket! I dropped it in a gooey bowl of icecream within the first 24 hours. I licked off all the icecream and sucked the chocolate sauce out of the cracks - I recommend getting the silicone cover.

- It really takes a long time to charge when synced up with my Macbook, no idea why, but make sure you allow a good few hours for charging if you are charging through your laptop.

- Don’t look at other peoples hacked phones, you will become jealous because yours looks lame and doesn’t have any interesting apps on it (web apps suck ok). Roll on February 2008 when hopefully the true potential of this phone will be unleashed!

NB: This refers to last weekend, I tried posting this but my web hosting company blocked access to my site.

Heavy weekend. Started it off in Putney with a trip to Zulus to watch Kevin “Michael Naicker” Perkins, classic stuff the guy is hysterical, heard a lot of it before but he is still well worth seeing. Haven’t been to that side of the world in many months so we decided to spread ourselves around, hit Zulus, Thai Square and then Fez club all in one horrible booze fueled night, it ended up with a basketball game at 5am on a council estate court outside a mates house in London Bridge.

Instead of going home, I went straight to the Emirates stadium to watch the football in a pub outside the ground with Russ. Starting drinking again before 1pm and by the end of the game I’d thrown a few too many lagers down my neck to realise that I was running late. Train home, afternoon hangover hits, get ready for the seventies night at Carwash and head back into London.

Carwash was fantastic, full on seventies revival night, everybody dressed up in their disco best, bopping along to the classic tunes of the era. We had a blast but another 5am to bed and dreadful train journey home the next morning laid me out for the rest of Sunday. Roll on this week when hopefully I can take it easy and recover!

I have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to obtain the cheapest flights between Joburg and Cape Town. Its really amazing the number of conventional (SAA, BA, Nationwide) and low cost (Mango, 1Time, Kulula) airline operators in South Africa, and based on my experience using all of them over the last few years, they all generally provide an excellent service relative to other airlines I have flown around the world. My favourite domestic airline is 1Time, mainly due to a combination of excellent service, price, comfortable cabins and punctuality.

I do have one major gripe with the South African domestic airlines though - their websites are pants! Like cellphones, where in nearly every case a phone is perfect except for a few niggly issues which each brand or model fails to perfect, the websites for each of the airlines mentioned above have their own particular glitches, some of which are very annoying. It will take me too long to mention all the frustrations encountered on each website but to provide some proof of my allegations I will give a few quick examples.

The biggest airline in South Africa which also happens to be our national carrier, SAA, can’t even configure their website for Firefox without allowing a few glitches to slip through, try it and see. It might take you a while too, considering their load time was by far the longest out of the 6 airlines.

Try Mango’s website, get all the way to the end and then, oops, you need to change a time or maybe a date, use your browser back button or the button provided on the actual page, and you get sent right back to the homepage, you’ll need to put all the information in again.

1Time has a similar problem but the coding on the website itself allows you to go backwards and forwards during the booking process, just don’t use that browser back button. They also don’t have a calendar function anywhere on their home page, so you have to manually input the dates and need a seperate calendar to confirm the actual day eg. Monday, Tuesday etc. You’d think calendar input should be standard on any travel website.

Nationwide has a pretty decent system which seems to work really quickly, until it comes to selecting the actual flights you want. They have chosen to do things differently to the other 5 airlines by scheduling the inbound and outboud flights together which makes it really difficult to select the exact inbound and outbound times you desire. I gave up and moved on, no time for that kind of bother.

Why does all this matter, surely if they are all pretty much the same, you will take a few minutes extra and go with the cheapest one?

Well thats the problem, they are all priced almost exactly the same, the low cost airlines are around R1300 - R1400 and the conventional airlines are roughly R1350 - R1450. So certainly not enough variance to differentiate them on price, nor is there really enough to differentiate them on service (in my opinion, and not taking into account after-sales service). So perhaps the most important sales weapon is…..wait for it….. the website  - which in the case of modern airlines now doubles as everything from a shop front window to an honest and helpful salesman!

Unfortunately although they’re all really different in appearance, the websites are all just as bad as each other. You’d think that in this supposedly “competitive” market a bit of money invested in a really efficient and user friendly website might give one airline a competive edge over another.

Or would it….? Well, as it turns out maybe not! Maybe most bookings are done over the phone, maybe the percentage of online bookings is really small in a country with limited internet connectivity, maybe the airlines don’t really care because the customers have no real alternatives, maybe the website ACTUALLY doesn’t matter!!

Like cellphone networks, the airlines aren’t really in competition, they have an oligopoly and there is some kind of weird Nash Equilibrium in place where nobody believes that achieving the perfect booking site will actually increase profits, especially seeing as the rest of the cartel group will just copy the perfect site and there will be no change in turnover! Now its easy to see why they are complacent and the customer, going forward, is just going to have to put up with rubbish websites!

OK, so having vented my frustrations, who am I going to go with? Well ultimately 2 things have become the dealbreaker, brand loyalty to 1Time or going with BA and getting the airmiles.  So I am flying BA down to Cape Town and 1Time on the way back!

Lastly, I often get asked who my favourite airline is, for the record the answer is very easy:

Best International Airline - Qantas (Australia)

Best Domestic Airline - 1Time (South Africa)

Somewhere in and amongst the mayhem that was my weekend I managed to get hold of one of the greatest gadgets of 2007 in the new Aliph Jawbone bluetooth noise cancelling headset.

When I first saw the Jawbone in the US a few months ago I knew straight away I had to have one in the UK. Considering the new draconian laws here regarding driving and calling, this little beauty is not just a pleasure to use, it is also going to save me a lot of money and points on my license. Of course, its main selling point is the noise cancelling function which, given that I drive a convertible, should come in very handy, I shall just have to wait until summer to find out.

I figure that playing with the Jawbone this week is the perfect pre-cursor to my impending acquisiton of the iPhone which launches this Friday. I played around with the iPhone in the states when it launched and I’ve also spoken to a few iPhone users, so I know I want it and I also know that its way better than the slow, overhyped, bug-ridden HTC Touch that I have been using for the last 3 months. Even though I have used them for over 3 years now I have really begun to hate Windows Mobile phones, I guess Apple can take a bit of credit for that.

Driverlane really kicks ass and I have been waiting for them to release their debut album for almost a year now, what the hell is taking so long guys? Last year back in SA we were lucky enough to catch a couple of Driverlane gigs, one in Durban and another one in Cape Town. Although I was already a fan of their music before, the stuff they played live blew me away. I’m really hoping to see them again this December and pick up their new album.

I was asked today by a friend from SA whether Razorlight are any good live…..hello….they’re brilliant! I have seen them live three times now and I’d say they’re at least as good as Driverlane, both well worth seeing.

Click here to listen to their new catchy single Radio, the already immensely popular Regular Flavour and the title song from their long awaited new album, Digital Rainbow.