MESSAGE CENTER

Sunday, March 4, 2007

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Underground Toronto

GREAT ARTICLE on Toronto's underground PATH ["Under Cover in Toronto," Feb. 25]. I am an academic who plans to write an article on the PATH as an example of public/private cooperation in building municipal infrastructure. (I also live beside the Skydome, so I use the PATH all the time).

If Andrea Sachs had wanted to get to Montreal and explore its underground without going "above," she could also have taken the VIA train from Union Station to Montreal and never have been exposed to the elements!

Dimitry Anastakis

Toronto

I WAS born in Toronto and spent a lot of the early '90s wandering around the PATH. It seems that the directions are not much better than they used to be -- fun if you are wandering around on the weekend, but aggravating if you are on a schedule during the week.

Grant Matthews

Houston

JUST A NOTE on the "ersatz Pentagon Mall" nature of Eaton Centre. Eaton Centre opened in 1977 and was considered a groundbreaking design for downtown malls. The idea of putting a major mall downtown was fairly new, and Eaton Centre was copied all across North America. The design of the interior was also considered cutting-edge, using exposed pipes and elevator machinery a la the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Having visited Pentagon Mall and finding it gently underwhelming, I have to think that you had your ersatzes backward. I have never seen a mall like Eaton Centre, but Pentagon Mall looks pretty much like every other mall I have seen. However, on a more positive note, I found a pair of boots at Cole Haan at Pentagon that I couldn't find even in New York.

Dan Lawson

Port Hope, Ontario

Hawaiian Sea Glass

ENJOYED YOUR article on sea glass ["In Hawaii, She Sees Sea Glass on the Seashore," Feb. 25]. I live in Hawaii after living in Micronesia for a number of years. We built a number of projects (water, small electrical systems) on the outer islands.

Mogmog Island and the rest of Ulithi Atoll is covered with sea glass -- the U.S. Navy recreation center was there toward the end of World War II. Plenty of beer must've been consumed!

Stephen Savage

Aiea, Hawaii

Nonrefundable Tickets

YOUR ITEM on changing nonrefundable airline tickets ["It's Still the Same Old Story," Feb. 4] did Southwest Airlines a disservice.

While you mentioned change fees charged by other airlines, I think Southwest deserved a mention for the fact that it charges no fee for changes of any sort or for any reason. You don't get cash back (other than the security fee if you ask for it), but you get a year to apply the entire fare to another flight -- and it doesn't have to be for the same destination or even the same traveler. You can even do it online.

Warren A. Rawson Jr.

Amissville, Va.

Car Seat Conundrum

WE WOULD like to add a wrinkle to your item on baby seats in rental cars [Coming and Going, Feb. 18]. When making a car rental reservation, we have not found a practical way to indicate that we will be bringing a car seat (so we don't need to rent one) and thereby secure a car that is suitable.

On our last such trip, we rented a full-size car but found ourselves wedging our toddler's car seat into a two-door car that wasn't intended for such -- never mind the hassle of moving our son in and out of the seat throughout the weekend. If there had been a way to indicate the need for a four-door when making the reservation, these annoyances could have been avoided.

J.P. and Angie Green

Fairfax

Baggage Tag Mishaps

AS A 20-year-plus veteran of airline customer service with United Express and a manual writer for Independence Air, I can vouch for what the United flight attendant told reader Richard Boyden [Message Center, Feb. 18]. Unfortunately, baggage tag and boarding pass swaps are very common and usually happen when agents are working too fast. We used to call it "working faster than the speed of thought." At many airlines' counter positions, two agents share a single boarding pass and tag printer to keep equipment costs down. This is a leading cause of lost bags and pass swaps. Over the years, I came to think of this as a false economy.

Two things that I always did (and trained others to do) as both an agent and a supervisor was to match the name on the boarding pass with the name displayed on my computer terminal at check-in, and then check the destination against the boarding pass. It only takes a few seconds. Then I would tell the customer that I had just checked X number of bags to city Y. I occasionally prevented exactly what Mr. Boyden reports.

I always encouraged my customers at check-in to review their boarding passes and baggage tags before leaving the counter. Both the boarding passes and the baggage tags have the cities' and passengers' names clearly printed on them.

Of course, this all takes time, which is anathema to many airline managers who judge their employees on how many customers they can "process" per hour. They need to be reminded that the point is how many passengers and bags are accurately processed per hour, not the raw numbers.

Gregg Bender

Charles Town, W.Va.

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