Dueling Delta and Airtran BOTH Announce Free Holiday WiFi with Google/GoGo

Have to laugh at this one. Delta and AirTran, arch enemies extraordinaire have apparently both been played by Google for the holidays.

In press releases issued minutes apart, both senior marketing types at Delta and AirTran announced free GoGo wifi for the holiday season courtesy of Google Chrome. A great boon for travelers but how ironic Google managed to get both AirTran and Delta signed up for the same deal.

Delta opines about their 540 aircraft that have GoGo installed (including a DC-9 I was recently on!) while AirTran states they are the only major airline with 100% GoGo on their entire fleet.

The promotion dates are even the same - November 20th through January 2nd.

Lets hope we can use Firefox and still get it free.

Wi-Fi is Wi-Free on Virgin America Over the Holidays!

Virgin America just announced free Wi-Fi over the holidays - and it is quite a definition of the holiday season - almost as long as Bloomingdales defines it - November 10th to January 15th.

Google and Virgin have partnered to make Gogo Internet Wi-fi free as "two California-based companies known for innovation, entrepreneurialism and for connecting people in new ways, have again joined forces to give Virgin America fliers the gift of in-flight connection." Wow.

Possibly of greater interest is that Virgin estimates that 12-15% of their passengers are using the service with 20-25% of passengers on long-haul routes using it. That is some serious ancillary revenue for all the airlines.