Monthly Archives

Monthly Archives for May 2003.

I don’t like Dulles either

After seeing three hour wait times to clear immigration at Washington Dulles airport, Lufthansa CEO Juergen Weber described the airport as “medieval” in a news conference. I can only imagine how he would have felt had he ever passed through the old United 1K rooms there…

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Start Your Engines…

Registration for Northwest’s Fly Free Faster 3 promotion has now begun. The prize is 10,000 bonus miles. I’ll have more to say on strategies for securing those miles in the coming days.

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Airport Security Lapse: the Screeners Themselves

The Washington Post reports that screening the screeners has been woefully inadequate, since several TSA employees have criminal histories More than two dozen federal airport screeners stationed at Los Angeles International Airport have been found to have criminal histories, prompting concern that the federal government did not complete required background probes of security personnel, people familiar with the matter said. The airport said it will begin fingerprinting and conducting criminal background checks next week on its federal airport screeners. Similarly, in New York, police have uncovered that at least 50 security screeners have criminal pasts at John F. Kennedy International Airport, according to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Turns out this came to light when simply asking some Los Angeles employees whether they were in fact criminals and they said yes… Meanwhile, a TSA screener…

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The world has changed. Someone tell the airlines.

The Dallas Morning News had a good piece on Tuesday about the much-analyzed trend of business travelers buying discounted airline tickets. Despite significant evidence that the buying habits of business travelers have changed, airline revenue management departments have yet to figure out how to adjust their models. Part of the problem may be a bit of denial. The piece quotes American’s new CEO as saying The industry has got to find a formula to get average fares up When he should probably be focusing on getting average costs down…

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