Coming and Going
New Site Helps Rate Flights
Sean Bunoski with some of the soccer gear that finally reached its intended recipients in Jamaica.
(By Joshua Mckerrow -- Annapolis Capital Via Associated Press)
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GIVING BACK
A Kick in the Pants For Good Intentions
Severna Park High School senior and state all-star soccer player Sean Bunoski was on a trip to Jamaica with his parents when a soccer game in a schoolyard caught his eye. His heart sank as he noticed that the players did not have proper gear and were using a can as a ball .
Back home, the 18-year-old began a drive to collect soccer balls and equipment. Before long he had enough gear to fill 10 big moving-style boxes. The price for shipping just four: $1,100. Sean decided to donate six boxes to the Baltimore City Police Athletic League. A coach got a 75 percent-off shipping deal from FedEx for the remainder. The Green Hornets, a local youth team, raised money to pay the shipping bill.
Sean addressed the boxes to a worker at a Jamaican resort who had agreed to deliver them to William Knibb High School, near his home. The gear arrived in Jamaica in early January and sat in the customs office for months. The problem: duty charges .
Initially, Sean's father, Steve, figured he'd just write a check for the duty tax. But customs officials refused to tell him how mu ch duty was due. Steve Bunoski said the officials would tell, in person, only the addressee, who lives far from the customs office and has no car.
The Bunoskis, and more recently CoGo, were running in circles trying to fix the problem. Finally, the efforts paid off: FedEx was able to make the school principal the new addressee, and she sought a duty waiver from the Jamaican Ministry of Education. Last week, FedEx was able to make the delivery.
Lesson learned: No good deed goes unpunished. Customs officers can be inflexible. Check the rules of the country to which you are shipping, or give before you leave.
WEB WORLD
New Site Helps Rate Flights
Woe to the shopper who saves a few dollars by choosing the cheapest flight but discovers too late that he has booked a chronically late flight in an old plane that is always packed .
A new Web site that launched its testing phase last week, http:/
CoGo tested the site by requesting flights from Dulles to Dublin in mid-June. The cheapest round-trip flight: US Airways, for $857 . The flight's trip quality rating: 67 out of 100. An Aer Lingus flight for $894 was rated 97 .
Given that the Aer Lingus flight was nonstop and the US Airways flight connected through Philadelphia, CoGo wondered how they'd compare if you didn't consider that difference , and recalculated. Even so, the Aer Lingus flight was rated 85, compared with 67 for the US Airways flight.
You can tell the site to disregard any criterion that doesn't matter to you . If, for example, you're a little person who never checks bags, tell the site to ignore legroom and lost-bag records. Once you click on a flight, you're sent to Orbitz to make the purchase.
The site requires that you have Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2, or later versions. If you hit testing snags, wait a minute and try again.
