Monthly Archives for June 2019.
Southwest Airlines started out as an underdog fighting government cronyism meant to keep it from flying. Now it’s the beneficiary of government cronyism meant to keep others from flying. The Supreme Court isn’t going to undo that, though Congress should. However the court could fix an important precedent that allowed Love Field gates to be taken from their owner without payment.
The only club at the airport is the USO Lounge. There’s no American, United, or Delta lounges, and no Priority Pass or other pay-in lounge.
HMSHost, though, is advertising for an Admirals Club bartender.
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 Dowell family found three seats together in the last row of their Boeing 737-800, and were struggling to juggle their bags and accoutrements for their baby. That’s when Wesley, one of the flight attendants on board, offered to hold 9-month old Alayna while they got themselves situated.
She was “screaming her head off for quite a while” while inflight so Wesley came back and offered to take her — walking her up and down the aisle, shushing her, and calming her. He did this for 15 minutes, “rubbing her back, walking up and down the aisle like it was just a day in the park” before returning her to her parents where she fell asleep.
The airport’s former manager is in the midst of a federal criminal trial. James Warner is accused of “fabricating invoices, overcharging the airport for work performed by contractors and receiving more than $5 million worth of kickbacks during a four-year period” — which is even more than Detroit’s former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick took in payoffs.
Apparently — and unsurprisingly — Star Alliance member airlines were resistant to giving new benefits to a higher tier of alliance partner elite, preferring to keep exclusive benefits for their own elites and for joint venture partner airlines.
Last month I received several questions from readers about why United wasn’t showing award space on Air Canada that appeared to be available to every other Star Alliance partner?
If you called United and spoke to an agent they’d generally be able to ‘see’ the inventory (in other words, X and I buckets for economy and business appeared to have space) but they couldn’t book it. What’s more that’s at a time when Air Canada availability looked excellent when searching on other partner websites, like Singapore Airlines Krisflyer, even for tough-to-get flights like Vancouver – Sydney.
THAThai Airways has transferred a lot of its domestic and regional flying to THAI Smile, its lower cost subsidiary which operates 20 Airbus A320 aircraft. That makes award travel to many Thai cities problematic, because THAI Smile isn’t a Star Alliance member so miles from United, Aeroplan, LifeMiles and other Star programs don’t allow redemption on THAI Smile flights.
Thai Airways itself no longer operates any narrowbody aircraft.
Delta is known for their operational reliability. But the very true saying goes ‘you get what you measure’. Since Delta doesn’t want to cancel flights they will do take extreme steps to fudge the numbers. Sometimes instead of ‘cancelling’ a flight they’ll just ‘delay’ it a day.
On May 12, it seems, an employee in operations took the edict not to cancel flights too far. The Toronto flight faced a maintenance delay, and crew at the end of their duty delay. Flight attendants were reaching the point where they would have to volunteer to keep working or the flight wouldn’t leave.
Kenneth Copeland’s ministry once disclosed that it owns at least 5 planes, including a Gulfstream V which was purchased from Tyler Perry. Copeland says the Lord speaks to him, and performs maintenance on his aircraft.
The minister has described flying commercial as getting in a long tube with a bunch of demons. Lisa Guerrero ambushed Copeland with a surprise interview for Inside Edition and asked him about that.
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 »
