You ask me, there is a ton of steaming baloney being dished up this week from Tampa, site of Sunday’s Super Bowl, where more than 4,000 credentialed media are humping out pointless stories that can be done (and are being done, and definitely will be done come Sunday), far, far better by the usual sources on television.

Face it, sports fans and editors: Sports (and football especially) is a story that television staked out a big claim on a long time ago — and now totally owns. If television has real competition on this score, it’s from online media, which often are being employed in conjunction with the flat-screen TV and Surroundsound.
[On the other hand, there is this trenchant point made by Charles P. Pierce in Slate about not only the feckless Arizona Cardinals, but also about the platitudinous shills who provide broadcast coverage of the game for the NFL. But hey, it is just a game.]

Anyway, speaking of online media, this site has an angle on the weekend’s proceedings that seems unique: A real-time feed from air-traffic control monitoring the air space over Tampa. I was just listening to it, and an air traffic controller was giving hell to a media aircraft for hogging the space taking photos over the empty stadium.

Last year, this kind of thing was fascinating, because more than 500 corporate and private jets filled the skies over Phoenix, creating traffic jams before and after the game.

This year, the grandees are cooling their jets. It’s too early to say precisely, but it appears that the number of private jets that will arrive for the Super Bowl is down very sharply.

Big corporate parties are also being canceled or severely curtailed. This ain’t no party; this ain’t no disco; with this crummy economy and everybody’s spending mood soured, this ain’t no foolin’ around, to invoke the ghosts of the Talking Heads.

Given that one of the Super Bowl teams is from Phoenix, a place with tepid football enthusiasm but loaded with boosterism, and given the desperation of the central Florida and national media to pump up this slimmed-down, economy-bummed Super Bowl, here’s my prediction of what we’re going to see over Tampa this weekend:

A lot of hot air.

###

Online ratings sites featuring critiques from customers have revolutionized the hotel-reviews business and taken a lot of wind out of the sails (and sales) of the traditional travel media and their traditionally determined objective evaluations.

By and large, the sites – TripAdvisor.com is the most prominent — do a fairly good job of weeding out obvious ringers, that is, they try to flag glowing reviews that seem suspiciously like they may have come from the desktop in a hotel front office, or horrible ones that seem to have come from a hotel’s competitor.

So by and large, the sites have real value. I often consult one before booking at an unknown hotel.

Anyway, here is TripAdvisor’s annual list of hotels that have managed to attract the attention for being:

“Top 10 Filthiest U.S. Hotels Identified Based on Traveler Cleanliness Ratings

NEWTON, Mass., Jan. 27, 2009 - TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel community, today announced the top 10 dirtiest hotels in America based on TripAdvisor traveler ratings for cleanliness. True to TripAdvisor’s promise to deliver the whole truth about travel-the good, the bad, and the ugly-TripAdvisor has identified the 10 dirtiest hotels in the U.S. for the fourth year running.

–Hotel Carter, New York

–Continental Bayside Hotel, Miami Beach

–New York Inn, New York

–Eden Roc Motel, Wildwood, New Jersey

–Days Inn Cleveland Airport, Brook Park, Ohio

–Days Inn Airport/ Stadium Tampa, Tampa, Florida

–Travelodge Bangor, Bangor, Maine

–Velda Rose Resort Hotel, Hot Springs, Arkansas

–Ramada Plaza Hotel JFK International Airport, Jamaica, New York

–Days Inn & Suites Gatlinburg, Gatlinburg, Tennessee

(This is the fourth year that the Hotel Carter, just off Times Square, has made the TripAdvisor list, “and its third year of having the dubious distinction of topping it,” says the travel site.}

Here are some choice comments from recent TripAdvisor traveler reviews on various hotels on the list:

–”I think it would have been cleaner to sleep on the street.”

–”Rooms were filthy; walls were smeared with unknown substance, furniture was broken and damaged…”

–”I’d rather sleep in my car”

–”One bed had blood on the sheets, other body fluids smeared on the windows, exposed wires, extremely poor service.”

–”Roaches everywhere! One so big he could have helped me bring my suitcase upstairs”

–”The room we checked in smelled like cat urine and the air conditioner didn’t work.”

–”My blanket had cigarette holes in it. The sheets were too small for the bed and barely fit around the bed corners…”

–”The bathroom was unsuitable for bathing. I asked for a cloth to clean the bathroom myself … and was denied any cleaning cloth or soap to do so.”

–”With growing horror I peeled back each layer and found more and more bugs on the sheets, on the mattress pad and on the mattress itself.”
–”It was one of those places where you sleep with one eye open.”

–”If you are reading the previous reviews thinking ‘it can’t be that bad’ - it is.”

–”…no towels to take showers.”

–”The bugs had a better meal at this place than we did.”

–”The first room we were given literally smelled like raw sewage.”

–”I felt like I needed another shower after using the one in our room.”

–”We woke up the next morning to visitors. Our room was infested with ants… I mean they were all over the place. It was awful. We even brought a bunch back home in our suitcase.”

[My note: Careful, they can charge you for taking the ants home.]

###

I wish I had paid closer attention back when I worked for the Wall Street Journal, and then maybe I would understand what the hell Mesa Air Group, the parent of greatly troubled Mesa Airlines, is talking about in this statement today, which says:

“Mesa Air Group Inc. said that the number of shares of its common stock issuable on January 31, 2009 in exchange for each $1,000 principal amount at maturity of its Senior Convertible Notes due 2023 (”2023 Notes”) is 2,525 shares. This number is based upon the average closing price of the Company’s common stock for the five trading days ended January 28, 2009.

“Only those holders of 2023 Notes that entered into forbearance agreements with the Company have the put rights referred to above. In addition, as disclosed in the Company’s press release issued on January 22, 2009, certain of the holders that entered into forbearance agreements have elected to enter into new agreements with the Company with respect to their 2023 Notes, pursuant to which these holders have agreed not to require the Company to repurchase their 2023 Notes on January 31, 2009.”

Man, is that good or bad news for the people who fly Mesa?

All’s I know is that Mesa shares closed today at, ahhhh, 18 cents, and its market capitalization is $5 million.

From Mesa’s boilerplate:

“Mesa operates 159 aircraft with approximately 800 daily system departures to 124 cities, 38 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, and Mexico. Mesa operates as Delta Connection, US Airways Express and United Express under contractual agreements with Delta Air Lines, US Airways and United Airlines, respectively, and independently as Mesa Airlines and go!. In June 2006 Mesa launched inter-island Hawaiian service as go!. This operation links Honolulu to the neighbor island airports of Hilo, Kahului, Kona and Lihue. The Company, founded by Larry and Janie Risley in New Mexico in 1982, has approximately 4,100 employees …”

[Update: Good thing I don’t still work for the Wall Street Journal. As has been pointed out to me re the headline (now fixed) on this post, 18 cents time 100 equals $18, not $1.80. As Bernie Madoff probably said, damn those decimal points).

###

The business jet industry, after several years of great prosperity, is in trouble. But the industry apparently just doesn’t comprehend the extent and cause of the public backlash that whipped it, starting when those three Detroit auto executives swanned into Washington in November in their heavy-metal corporate jets to beg for a federal bailout.

Instead, the industry continues to blame the press for its travails.

Business jets definitely have their place as productivity tools, especially in these days when what used to be a one-day business trip is now often a two-day trip, thanks to cutbacks in airline capacity and routes. (But this is not true for the simple Detriot-Washington routes, by the way.)

Anyway,  a rational case for business aviation has been made in the media — including, incidentally, by me.

But sometimes, as I have said here repeatedly (and with good and sufficient extra irony, considering my experience in the Amazon two years ago), a ride on a business jet is simply not a good idea.

The most recent example of corporate tone-deafness was when Citicorp, with $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money in its well-tailored pockets, tried to plunge ahead on an order to buy a $50 million Falcon corporate jet. Citicorp backed down this week amid a political outcry and a rather sharp nudge from the Obama White House.

I am not in the business of giving advice. But this particular industry does not seem to understand that those Detroit knuckleheads “set corporate aviation back 25 years,” as Bill Garvey quoted a flight department executive in Business & Commercial Aviation last week. Bill Garvey, one of the most respected aviation trade journalists, is the editor of Business & Commercial Aviation.

Nor does the industry seem to understand that taxpayer outrage is an entirely appropriate response to a company so indifferent to public perception that it tries to buy a new heavy-metal jet soon after it begged for and got emergency taxpayer bailout money.

It couldn’t wait a year?

In a letter to members of the National Business Aviation Association, its president, Ed Bolen, writes:

“As everyone in our industry knows, the business aviation community is facing severe turbulence on several fronts. Our industry is being stereotyped and pilloried by the press, and the people and businesses in general aviation are weathering one of the worst economic storms anyone has ever seen.

“The challenges coming out of Washington appear no less daunting: In the three weeks since the 111th Congress was sworn in, business aviation has repeatedly been in focus for lawmakers. A troubling pattern seems to be emerging in which some policymakers are discouraging and disparaging the use of general aviation for business purposes - a pattern in evidence as recently as this week.”

The industry dodged a bullet this month, by the way, when it managed to get removed from the bill authorizing the second phase of the bailout language that would have required any company that receives bailout money to get rid of its corporate jets.

But government is still bearing down on the industry with threats of requiring corporate jets to be subject to stricter passenger security (corporate jet passengers don’t go through TSA checkpoints). Also possibly looming are a slew of potential new fees, taxes and other onerous burdens on corporate aviation — much to the glee of the commercial aviation industry, the arch-enemy of business jets.

The case for business aviation has been made, and made well in recent years. But people have stopped listening, and Congress is hopping mad — and the industry is blaming the media?

The troubles the industry has are fundamentally economic — but they’re also partly atmospheric. In an era of massive layoffs and home-foreclosures, at a time when people are profoundly worried about the economic future, and cutting back on everything feasible and then some, three auto-company CEOs thought it was a good idea to take three big corporate jets on the 90-minute flight from Detroit to Washington to demand bailouts for their companies.

Naturally, the media made note of it. Labeling that “stereotyping” is quite a bit like the case of the young man who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because, alas, he was an orphan.

###

After several years of robust occupancy and sky-high room rates, New York City hotels really hit the skids this month.

New data out today from Smith Travel Research show that hotels in New York had a drop of 24.6 percent in average occupancy and a drop of 18.1 percent in average daily room rates for the week ending Jan 24, as compared with the similar week last January.

Revenue per available room (RevPAR) plunged a whopping 38.3 percent for the week.

“While it could be argued that levels of performance in New York probably had the furthest to fall, the luxury stigma and sheer panic-based perceptions surrounding the U.S. economy have done the greatest harm to that market,” said Brad Garner, vice president of operations/client services at Smith Travel, the leading hotel research company.

By “luxury stigma,” he was referring to fact, as reported here last year, that hoteliers are seeing some customers who would otherwise book rooms (or conferences) back away because of the public perception problem attached to spending on higher-cost goods and services. That’s only a part of the problem, of course. The bigger part is that people (and companies) simply don’t have the dough.

In the U.S. hotel business as a whole, occupancy fell 13.6 percent; average daily room rates fell 2.7 percent and revenue per available room, the standard metric for hotel performance, fell 16 percent.

You heard it here first, starting last year: The U.S. hotel business is in huge trouble.

It’s sad and, if you’re a hotel owner, manager or employee, it’s frightening. Many hotel property owners — as opposed to the big chains who own the brand names and manage the hotels — have never experienced a downturn in the business and are not prepared for the trouble they’re seeing, or the trouble that lies ahead, as revenue drops to a point where the mortgage(s) can’t be paid.

Foreclosures lie ahead for some. On Monday, PKF Hospitality Research reported that “the number of full-service U.S. hotels lacking the cash flow needed to pay their debt will increase by 25 percent in 2009.”

Right now, there is a free-for-all, especially among higher-level hotels, to institute flat-out discounts on rates, or to otherwise bake discounts (”credits” for food and other things; stay-two-nights, get-one-free deals) into the stay.

Layoffs of staff are mounting.

Smith Travel’s Garner said that 19 of the top 25 U.S. hotel markets reported “double-digit declines in occupancy, and continued softness” in average daily rates for the week ended Jan. 24.

Besides New York City, four of the Top 25 markets experienced year-over-year occupancy declines of more than 20 percent: Atlanta (-23.3 percent); Detroit (-22.8 percent); Minneapolis-St. Paul (-20.2 percent); and Chicago (-20.1 percent).

Besides New York, 13 of the the Top 25 markets reported RevPAR declines of more than 20 percent. And in Atlanta, the RevPAR drop was 31.2 percent.

Smith Travel classifies chain hotels in seven price/service segments. As has been the case for months, the luxury segment was hardest hit in the week, with occupancy down 19.8 percent and RevPAR down 22 percent.

###