Just a short hop from Florida, flying to Cuba should be easy. But restarting scheduled airline service after 55 years has been anything but a milk run for US airlines. Regular flights won’t exactly be normal for US passengers, either. Just as Cuban society often appears frozen in time to Americans, so, too, will airline service. Self-service and advance check-in are foreign concepts, at least for now. Long airport lines and longer waits for luggage have plagued charter service to the island. Getting through immigration can be tedious and eligibility requirements complicated. But US airlines say they are trying, in effect, to stage a service revolution, and they are confident they can overcome obstacles such as some technical systems that aren’t compatible and export constraints on some vital passenger service encrypted software. “It won’t be a fabulous experience, but it won’t be a poor experience,” says Peter Cerda, regional vice president at the IATA, who has worked closely with Cuban authorities and US airlines. “Sooner or later, the technology that we take for granted now…will have to be put in place in Cuba.”<br/>
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After hours-long airport security lines frustrated travelers and airlines alike this spring, TSA officials boasted that nearly all passengers experienced dramatically reduced wait times this summer. About 98% of fliers waited 30 minutes or less for screening over the summer months and about 92% waited less than 15 minutes, secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said Wednesday. The seven busiest airports in the USA clocked wait times of less than 10 minutes, he added. Just months before, a combination of tighter security, more travelers and a smaller TSA staff sparked unwieldy lines, including hours-long waits at airports such as Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta and Seattle. Johnson largely credited the shorter wait times to more signups for Precheck and a Congressional funding shift that allowed the expedited hiring of hundreds of new TSA officers.<br/>
Priceline.com is no longer letting travelers name their own price for airline tickets, a feature that kicked off the online travel pioneer’s business but had lost traction with customers. Priceline Group Inc. on Sept. 1 quietly removed the online auction option for airfares from its namesake website. The company still lets customers make an offer for hotel rooms and car rentals, though such transactions are fewer and fewer. “We’ve removed the need for the consumer to bid,” said Brigit Zimmerman, Priceline.com’s senior vice president of air and vacation packages. ”It’s a heck of a lot easier." The feature’s demise shows how much online travel has changed since the late 1990s, when the website introduced a new business model that promised steep discounts to bargain-hunters and an easy way for airlines to fill unsold seats. The company allowed customers to bid on everything from plane tickets to rental cars and took a small spread based on the difference between what it paid and the customer’s offer. Its early success spurred executives to try the feature on other markets from groceries to gasoline.<br/>