News and notes from around the interweb:
- Alitalia used its government bailout money to buy its frequent flyer program back from Etihad. Etihad had purchased a 75% stake in the MilleMiglia program for €17 million euros. Etihad purchased that stake for over 100 million euros four years ago. (HT: One Mile at a Time) GDPR notwithstanding surely Etihad could have exploited the value of a program with over 5 million members for more than they generated through this sale. Expect Alitalia award prices to rise.
Copyright: jvdwolf / 123RF Stock Photo - Garuda Indonesia year-end 70% off award sale and of course Citi points transfer to miles, but Garuda doesn’t always make things easy..
- Hackers used the official Qantas phone number to scam text people and ask for money.
The text message addresses the customer by their first name, telling them they have won a prize from the Australian airline’s weekly mystery box competition, with a link to the supposed prize.
- The Korean Air flight attendant victimized by nut rage has been awarded modest compensation
- Interesting business: selling full sized toiletries post-security. That’s really just a subset of something every large airport should have, a proper CVS or Walgreens-style drug store. With groceries. Airports should also have dry cleaners, let me drop off my cleaning (or laundry – fluff and fold) on the way out of town, pick it up on the way home or vice versa.
- Qantas has started paying the Perth airport only those fees the airline thinks are deserved and the airport is suing.
- The federal government has spent over a billion dollars deporting people via charter flights
- NSFW: Here’s what flying is like when you don’t take the airline’s co-brand credit card (HT: J.Z.) Ok, let’s actually call it ‘what flying is like this holiday season’.
Western Airlines is proud to announce their new guarantee to fuck your shit up when you travel this holiday season. pic.twitter.com/YdB77iLt28
— Funny Or Die (@funnyordie) December 20, 2018
Sadly, there is another article linked at the bottom of the story telling us that the nut rage exec had been returned to her position at the airline…I just cannot imagine people acting like this and continually getting away with it but rich people have always been able to do horrible things and buy their way out of it, the current climate in the U.S. isn’t much better.
Full sized toiletries after security doesn’t make sense to me. If you are traveling to a location you wouldn’t want full sized stuff (normally) because you still need to go back home at some point and would have to thrown out the excess. If you are buying them post security on the way home it really doesn’t make sense either as you could likely it cheaper someplace else (as if Boots would be that cheap on this???). I like the thought though. I fail to understand why companies like Victoria Secret, Walgreens type stores or even movie theaters haven’t taken better advantage of airport offerings.
To save the readers time: the Korean flight attendant was awarded appx $ 17,800 USD.
So I suppose that it’s ok for me to pay Qantas what I think their product is worth rather than what they charge. That’s just using their own logic.