Monthly Archives for March 2021.
If you’re a resident of California, and not already a member of Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, you can join and get a free intra-state trip. Technically what they’re offering is a $0.01 base fare, plus taxes.
Frontier Airlines cancelled its Miami – New York LaGuardia flight 2878 Sunday evening over a mask incident. The airline says that a ‘large group’ of passengers wouldn’t wear masks. The family, and some other passengers, dispute that characterization – say it was a maskless 18 month old who triggered the incident which caused the planeload of passengers to be rebooked for this morning.
With Chinese airlines off the table for MAX aircraft acquisitions, and Boeing struggling more generally, United clearly got much more favorable pricing than the standard 50% off of list to do this deal, and to do it now during the pandemic. United hasn’t aggressively retired aircraft types during the pandemic, either – so while they’ve been due for a fleet refresh timing on their end is somewhat more flexible than it otherwise would be as well.
At the beginning of February Delta devalued SkyMiles partner award pricing for the second time during the pandemic, and in a big way. Since the start of Covid-19 one way business class between the US and Europe on Air France and KLM went from 75,000 to 95,000 miles and now starts at 120,000 SkyMiles – for a 60% increase in less than a year at a time when flights are empty and prices low. Because they can.
Delta says they have no award charts any longer, but that isn’t true. They just hide their award charts. Mexico is a separate region from the United States, and while they’ve massively increased their award chart pricing for partner travel to and from the U.S., they haven’t (yet) done so for travel to and from Mexico.
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 »
