Monthly Archives for February 2018.
British Airways is back with their buy business, fly first promotion.
British Airways business class isn’t a very good product so if you can get into first you want to.
A father and daughter were traveling from Toronto to London. The 14 year old girl is quadriplegic and has cerebral palsy. They had gone to Canada to watch ice hockey after her deep brain stimulation treatments.
At the airport staff dropped her wheelchair and broke it. Here’s British Airways’ response.
There’s a business class fare from June through early December of $1292 roundtrip between New York and Buenos Aires on Star Alliance carrier Avianca.
In contrast American Airlines non-stop business class is generally over $3000 (and sometimes $4000) on this route.
Senators Ron Wyden and Claire McCaskill sent a letter (.pdf) to the acting commission of US Customers and Border Protection today asking that the US government actually start using the “anti-tamper and anti-forgery features in e-Passports, which have gone unused by CBP since their implementation in 2007.”
Air France strikes are rarely worth covering. On any given day of course there’s a threat of a strike. They’re French. That’s what they do.
While much of the Air France KLM business has performed well, though not as well as peers, mainline Air France managed just a 1% operating margin in the fourth quarter. That’s despite holding labor costs constant. They have a revenue problem, and labor groups aren’t happy that they don’t have a cost problem too.
Southwest Airlines downplays the incident saying that the dog’s teeth “scraped a child’s forehead as the young passenger approached the animal, causing a minor injury.”
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
United is discounting roundtrip coach awards between the US and four destinations by 20%. Book by March 2nd and travel to Porto, Singapore or Sydney May 4 – June 17 and to Reykjavik May 23 – June 17.
Delta, American and United keep arguing that Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad accept government subsidies and that this violates the Open Skies treaties that the U.S. has signed with the UAE and Qatar. Only it doesn’t violate those treaties. At all. Anyone that reads the treaties knows that.
In the old Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom the cast makes an important point about journalism. The media is biased towards fairness and simply doesn’t call a lie a lie.
American used to share a ton of information about the financials of the AAdvantage program in their annual 10-K SEC filing. They stopped doing that last year. They no longer tell us how many members there are in the program, how many miles were issued, sold to third parties, and remain outstanding like they did up until two years ago.
Nonetheless as a result of their newly filed 2017 SEC 10-K form we know that the percentage of American’s seats occupied by award travelers dropped again in 2017, after a drop in 2016. When US Airways management took over there was clearly a new philosophy of not releasing award seats to customers.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
