News and notes from around the interweb:
- As rental cars fade away Avis will do anything to survive
Avis in Miami - How important is Sydney to Singapore Airlines? 5 of its top 12 connecting markets by revenue involve Sydney – London, Delhi, Mumbai, Zurich, and Paris. (Airline Weekly, June 4 2018)
Singapore Airlines Lounge, Sydney - Now that Wyndham acquired La Quinta they’re offering status matches and points transfers between the programs.
- Lots of recent stories like this one and this one and this one about points transferred from Chase (and perhaps American Express) not posting properly to Air France KLM Flying Blue.
Apparently the points go over, and Air France isn’t posting them to accounts properly. Air France has been ‘live’ with American Express for years, and their partnership with Chase was delayed for a year by IT integration issues when Chase insisted that their points post instantly as well. Yet right now there are several reports where points just aren’t showing up, and Chase and American Express generally won’t dive in for at least a week.
- American Express is extending warranty protection from one year to two and extending purchase protection from 90 to 120 days.
- Air Canada is looking at ways to stop gadgets from falling into business class seats
As we all know Singapore Air is a brilliant product.
For Australians it is especially valuable. In case you are not aware , Australia is a long way from anywhere …..and not served by enough airlines. Singapore Air fly Melbourne-Singapore, I think, 5 times daily.
I choose SQ over QF every time even though both are great to fly in the air, purely because QF use their Sydney hub way too much. Flying ex MEL via SYD is truly awful. It adds 3 hours to already long flights and is very inconvenient . With QF, MEL-SYD leg (1 hour) is domestic, collect bags, bus to international terminal, immigration, recheck bags. What a pain. Contrast to SQ flying MEL-SIN direct and then onto the rest of the world.
Obviously Uber and Lyft have really hurt the rental car business, however greedy local governments have caused alot of it with huge surcharges to rent at the airport etc. I have seen fees on some rentals in the past that are 50% or more of the car rental price. Outlandish 20% fees than a bunch of stacked fees for convention centers and such. The rental companies also try to nickel and dime customers.
“As rental cars fade away Avis will do anything to survive” is an example of the kind of poorly researched stuff that Wired will print nowadays. 2017 was a year of record revenue for the car rental industry in the US
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https://www.autorentalnews.com/fc_resources/PDF/arnfb18-market2.pdf
The only thing that is in danger of fading away is the reputation of Wired and Alex Davies, author of this article.
“a New Points Transfer Option” Read this article 3 times and don’t see any reference to a new points transfer option…
3rd bullet
Typical Silicon Valley BS. It is highly unlikely that people will trust driverless cars (and their inability to be hacked) to this extent in the next 10 years.