Virgin America is moving forward with an initial public offering of shares despite poor financial performance when the airline industry overall is doing well. Ultimately, Virgin America hasn’t succeeded because it doesn’t work to be a high cost, low fare carrier. And because they have neither the frequencies nor the reach to appeal to high fare business travelers. Initial investors have waited far longer than expected to get some of their cash out, and the financial markets have recovered enough that there may just be an appetite for a Virgin America IPO to allow them to do so. In the meantime Virgin America is pressing as hard as they can at the retail level — perhaps underscoring that the IPO isn’t exactly oversubscribed at the institutional level? Employees are being offered the opportunity to buy…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for November 2014.
Starwood Just Became the First Hotel Chain to Let You Use Your Phone as a Room Key
Scott Mayerowitz writes about the Starwood mobile room key which has launched today. Your SPG mobile app is your room key if you wish, although only so far at the following 10 hotels: “W Downtown” is the New York property down by the World Trade Center. The SPG app has been updated to include new functionality. Your phone will use bluetooth — but requires actually being touched to the outside of the hotel room door in order to function because they don’t want you coming to the door from the inside, phone in hand, and accidentally opening the room to a stranger knocking.
Star Alliance Partners: Who They Are and How to Book Award Tickets With Them
Here’s your guide to booking award tickets on Star Alliance partners using your miles to travel on any of the 27 airlines in Alliance — along with resources for people looking to book these Star Alliance partners, how to find the seats, how to book them, and how many miles they will cost. These are the 27 Star Alliance partners that you can use your miles on. Basic Principles: Here are the three things to understand about your miles before we get started using them to travel the world using Star Alliance partner airlines. You can use miles you have in any Star Alliance program to book travel on any airline that belongs to the Star Alliance. You may have United miles, or Air Canada’s Aeroplan miles, or Asiana Club miles for instance or even…
Starwood Adds a New Airline Crossover Rewards Partner, Hyatt Eliminates Status Challenges, Citi to Give You Your Credit Score, and American Updates Award Rules
News and notes from around the interweb: Barclaycard was on this a year ago. (HT: Million Mile Secrets) The Trip Sherpa is reporting that Hyatt’s fast track to top tier elite status, which was easily abused, has been eliminated. I’ve reached out to confirm this, and if true to see whether they are replacing it with any alternative way to smooth the path for elites with other hotel chains to move their business to Hyatt. (HT: @ManchesterKyle) My Ultimate Guide to Booking American AAdvantage awards needs a slight tweak, because JonNYC is reporting that the language for allowing connectings in a third region when traveling between two regions has been modified slightly for connections in Sri Lanka (SriLankan is a new oneworld airline). North America to Indian Sub Cont/Middle East Central/South America Zone 1 to…
Review: American Airlines Admirals Club Buenos Aires
You’ll Also Want to Be Sure to Read: American Airlines Flagship Lounge, New York JFK American Airlines First Class, New York JFK – Buenos Aires Review: Park Hyatt Buenos Aires Eating Around Buenos Aires: Four Notable Meals to Consider In Search Of — and Forgetting — the Past in Buenos Aires Once checked in in the departures hall, and without a bag to check, I proceeded upstairs to clear formalities. Once you cross through passport control and security, you’ll head towards gate 9 — which is in the opposite direction from the American Airlines gates, but none are especially fare — and then head upstairs. American has built a new lounge, quite stylish, and I wanted to check it out. On the same level is the LAN lounge, and as a oneworld top tier member…
The Very Best Travel Tips and Tricks in the Past Month
Here are the best travel tips and tricks, the highlights of View from the Wing posts from September. Last month I summarized the very best travel posts from September and the previous month, from August. In July the most useful and interesting developments from June. I also wrote a post with the most useful advice I’ve given, overall. It turns out, surprisingly, that this feature is really popular, at least judging by the emails I get — people that don’t read the blog every day really appreciated the recap and not having to dig through all of the posts to find the most enduring ones. These are some that were my favorites from October. I hope you were happy with some of the posts and got something out of them as well. Award Redemption The…
Free Money and Free Miles from Softcard
Softcard is the former Isis Mobile Wallet, renamed because they had a little bit of a branding problem. Via an app it lets you use your mobile phone for tap to pay transactions at retail merchants. And they want you to adopt their system in an increasingly competitive space, such as against Google Wallet and Apple Pay. So there are plenty of Softcard bonuses out there, and you can take advantage of each and every one of them if you have the requisite cards to link (which many readers will have). Here are the current Softcard Bonuses! Through December 31 Softcard will give you a $10 Amazon gift card for every 5 times you use it on a single credit card. You can do this 3 times with 3 credit cards for $30. Through December…
ACT QUICKLY: Entire First Class Cabin Open for Awards, American’s New Los Angeles-London Flight
I noted yesterday that American is launching a second daily Los Angeles – London flight. That gives American two flights, and their joint venture partner British Airways two flights. (BA used to operate three flights, but reduced frequency when they up-gauged to an Airbus A380 from LAX.) Often when flights are loaded into a system there are anomalies with frequent flyer award space. And sometimes they’re just lightly sold so award space is more available than you’d otherwise expect. (On the other hand, sometimes with a new route an airline isn’t sure what its sales patterns will be, they don’t have historical data, so they can be extra tight-fisted.) Per One Mile at a Time, when between March 28 when the new flight comes onto the schedule and May 31 the first class cabin on…
In Search of and Forgetting the Past in Buenos AIres
You’ll Also Want to Be Sure to Read: American Airlines Flagship Lounge, New York JFK American Airlines First Class, New York JFK – Buenos Aires Review: Park Hyatt Buenos Aires Eating Around Buenos Aires: Four Notable Meals to Consider I’m not by any stretch an expert, scholar, or specialist in Argentinian politics. But what I wanted most while in Buenos Aires was to see first-hand some of the political history, to try to gain a better understanding — the country is very much in the midst of transition and instability. There’s a widening gap between official exchange rates and black market rates, the government has accessed airlines of manipulating the currency, and there are restrictions for instance on the purchase of American Airlines tickets inside of Argentina — no doubt the airline is wary of…
How Aeroplan Stopped Offering 50,000 Point International First Class Awads, and Several Interesting Articles
News and notes from around the interweb: Aeroplan had a huge award pricing opportunity where they were giving members international business and first class award tickets for the same miles as a domestic award. The first thing they did when they decided to put an end to this offer was take down the ‘multi city search’ tool on their award booking page. Though they changed the underlying pricing issue, the multi city tool remains down. Hopefully it will return soon! Airbus will assemble A321neo aircraft in the US IATA launches cybersecurity toolkit for the air transportation industry What does air traffic control do when radio contact with a plane fails? Europe’s struggling airlines face more turbulence You can join the 40,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive…
