Monthly Archives for May 2018.
Cubana flight CU972 was carrying 104 passengers today enroute from Havana to Holguin, Cuba when it crashed not long after takeoff.
The plane reportedly went down “near a motorway and a high school in the Boyeros neighborhood” next to the airport.
United Airlines sent two memos to flight attendants scolding them for their personal grooming.
United’s Vice President of Inflight says “We lost our focus on the value uniform standards have on our customers’ perception of our company.”
The TSA has “created a new secret watch list” of passengers they believe have behaved badly at airport security checkpoints.
This includes behavior like “swatt[ing] away security screeners’ hands” and passengers “who loiter suspiciously near security checkpoints” as well as anyone the TSA deems to present “challenges to the safe and effective completion of screening.”
According to a Border Services Agency memo between May 28 and September 16 they are moving border and customs agents out of Toronto and sending them to Montreal and Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle in Quebec because they’re expecting an influx of refugees crossing from the U.S. into Canada seeking asylum.
These cases have tripled, and Canada’s solution is to divert border personnel away from legal arrivals of tourists and businesspersons to handle the refugee cases.
Two weeks ago I wrote that United had confirmed cutbacks to meals in domestic first class on flights under four hours outside of departures between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. They also cut several beverage choices.
The blowback was swift and immediate. First they brought back tomato juice. Now they’re bringing back food.
Running out onto the tarmac and chasing after your plane though is a very bad idea. Nonetheless a passenger in Melbourne, Australia who was late for his flight to Adelaide on Jetstar, the low cost Qantas subsidiary, decided to try it.
He “missed his flight Thursday bolted out across the airport’s tarmac, ran up the stairs to a plane, and tried to rip open the locked cabin door” — and was caught on video doing it. But that’s not even the best part.
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.
The Surgeon General of the United States came to the rescue of a passenger on a Delta flight on Wednesday while enroute to Jackson, Mississippi.
He was headed from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta on Delta flight 1827. The plane returned to the gate when the customer became ill. A passenger lost consciousness while the flight was waiting to take off.
Security wait times hurt an airline’s business for short haul flights. Having to get to the airport early means that total travel time can take as long or longer than driving. In the Northeast for instance Amtrak has taken a lot of business away from the airline shuttle routes between Boston and New York and between New York and DC just because of the need to turn up at the airport earlier.
So if airlines can convince you that total travel time is less than you think — a ‘security wait time guarantee’ — you may be more inclined to buy tickets for those flights.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote that British Airways would be joining TSA PreCheck.
Then the updated list of airlines went live on the TSA website — and British Airways wasn’t on it. The strange thing was BA had sent out a memo saying they were going to launch. BA went into damage control mode saying this was misinformation, with non-denial denials.
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 »
