Southwest Airlines Begins Service to Austin from Philadelphia This Week: A Great New Route for a Relatively New Philly Carrier

"In 2004 SouthwestAirlines announce[d] its 31st consecutive year of profitability and begsouthwest.com. The on line feature provid[ed] additional convenience to Customers by allowing them to proceed to their departure gate without stopping at the ticket counter, Skycap, or self-service kiosk. On May 9, SouthwestAirlines launche[d] service to Philadelphia, its 60th airport. With the addition of its Philadelphia service, Southwest then operated 2,800 daily flights to 60 airports in 59 cities across the United States."

People in Philadelphia at the time were hoping the addition of the city's first discount airline would result in savings for air travelers across the board. Many people had gotten in the habit of traveling to Baltimore's BWI airport to save money on trips. This was especially the case for small business owners who were paying for trips out of their own pockets not so much a problem for corporate business travelers whose tickets were paid for by the travel offices in their bloated bureaucracies. So many talented people struck out on their own after September 11th or in our field, (high finance) found themselves unceremoniously down sized. Luckily most of the men and women I knew were able to find work as consultants or supermodels and so forth. They were great salesmen in any case and so much of being an international hottie is attitude. You could hop a train to New York for a photoshoot just as easily as the shuttle and it was so much more relaxing and dollar productive than trading stocks and bonds.

In any case, even millionaires are cautious about spending money and I think they key to personal finance is choosing to spend your money on some things and not others. Jean Chatzky was talking about this earlier this week on TODAY. You an actually email her questions and each week she answers a few representative questions from the messages received. What she seemed to be saying is you can have what you want, everything you want, but you'll have to narrow it down and prioritize. So for a simple four day weekend getaway you may want to tool around on the Internet and book a bargain fare. For a once a year family vacation or a honeymoon you may want to pay extra for the advice of a travel agent and always for cruises you want to use a travel agent because the 35 tier pricing structure begs for professional advice.

So in this article I've provided links to three websites which will help you. Please note that Southwest will be adding non-stop service form Philadelphia to Denver in May of this year. The Town and Country website will help you plan extraordinary itineraries when you are planning a more extensive trip or a trip that has to be perfect from beginning to end to mark and anniversary or retirement perhaps. The 3rd sight is another TODAY show find from the editors at Real Simple magazine. It features hotels priced under $150 a night even in some expensive towns and cities like Malibu or New York. The was also a notice about Megabus which is starting service in May from Philadelphia to NYC for just a dollar.

The price is booked on line and it goes up the closer to the date you want to travel. So I hope everyone will consider the benefits of getting the hell out of town. Cities get so much noisier when the weather is warm and the ghetto blasters are rolling by with their windows down and there so called music blaring. People wonder why people go to the shore every year? There's no sleeping in the city during summer nights and the weekends are the one chance we have to restore sanity and get some quality sleep. Those people don't have much to look forward to, deafness and early death I suppose. Oh well, such is life. City living has it's benefits and privilege has it privileges.

Source: www.southwest.com