Monthly Archives

Monthly Archives for December 2020.

Will 2021 Reduced Elite Qualification Rules Make Status Too Easy, Benefits Hard To Get?

by Gary Leff

economy seats
Dec 01 2020

Whether 2021 status requirements are set too high or too low really isn’t clear yet, because we don’t know what travel is going to look like even as it starts to come back once the pandemic begins to get under control. And not all benefits are scarce, so that more elites mean fewer benefits for those who earn it ‘the hard and usual way’.

If it turns out there are too many elites, how a program handles that is still entirely within their control. But we’re going to have to wait to see how the 2021 travel year develops, and how programs continue to respond. Laying out elite qualifying criteria is the start of this, not the finish.

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Gogo Isn’t Gogo Anymore, They’ve Sold Their Commercial Inflight Internet Business

by Gary Leff

gogo plane
Dec 01 2020

Gogo has gotten out of the business of providing inflight internet to commercial airlines and will focus on the private jet market instead. They sold their commercial aviation business to Intelsat.

Intelsat believes it can negotiate more favorable terms with airlines (raise prices) and offer more bandwidth (allowing Delta to make internet free to passengers). Intelsat will lease Gogo’s air-to-ground network for 10 years as part of the deal, because commercial airlines (especially regional jets, which largely lack the capacity for satellite internet antennas) still use the technology.

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Delta Blames Covid-19 For Thanksgiving Operations Meltdown

by Gary Leff

Dec 01 2020

Delta, which can go hundreds of days at a time without cancelling a flight, cancelled hundreds of flights in days over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Delta blames Covid-19, offering “We didn’t expect the effects of a sharp increase in capacity in the last part of the month to be compounded by rising number of positive COVID cases and quarantine requirements among pilots and other factors.”

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