Nothing Can Bring Full Return To Office As Airlines Exaggerate Return Of Corporate Travel [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • A victim of ALPA’s cronyist 1,500 hour rule man rented his house on Airbnb to afford to become a pilot. The tenant wouldn’t pay, wouldn’t leave, and re-lists the place on Airbnb. So the deadbeat tenant is generating income from the property, has a free lawyer appointed to defend him, and it’ll be at least four more months for an eviction hearing.

  • Business travel expense management company Expensify gives up on back to office and shutters its bar. There’ll be more travel, different travel, but business travel is forever changed. Claims about managed corporate travel having returned 75% or 85% are disingenuous, those aren’t adjusted for inflation…

    The company purchased a legit liquor license for a quarter million dollars, installed a proper U-shaped bar where laptops were welcome, and hired a full-time concierge/barista/mixologist to man the bar. And in a theatrical flourish, every workday ended with the sabering of a Champagne bottle, and bubbles all around for anyone who wanted some.

    …he focus, when it comes to team building, will be on trips that the company takes and encourages — like an all-hands trip to Spain last year, and its much-ballyhooed Offshore program, which the Chronicle wrote about in 2022, in which employees can take expenses-paid trips together to wherever they want, just to get work done.

    Barrett makes some bold statements this week about the general push to repopulate offices, after noting that even a free cocktail bar and drinks and cappuccinos delivered to desks wasn’t really enough to lure people back in any significant way.

  • Los Angeles will vote in March to require all hotels with empty rooms to use those to house the homeless. It’s being pushed by a union representing housekeepers, whom I’m normally quite sympathetic too. They have a tough job, and I want to see hotels offering daily housekeeping.

    This is a very bad idea, because the problem of homelessness isn’t just about giving people hotel rooms and making them move from hotel to hotel every day (among other reasons!). And it seems like it could even be bad for hotel workers (those same housekeepers). The union supporting the measure still has the power to withdraw it from the ballot.

  • Passenger hides pot in their diaper to go through TSA.

  • The Latin America O/D market has been one where in-person ticket sales was still a thing.

  • One way to get your airline complaint heard is to set it to music (though, statistically, complaining about United and saying that with American you know your bag will be there is a bit rich).

  • Although, in fairness, I don’t actually find United to do a good job delivering checked bags timely and efficiently.

  • But it’s not like Delta is actually premium, that’s mostly marketing (it kinda was real before the pandemic). Their employees are marginally friendlier, and their operations marginally better.

About Gary Leff

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 »

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Comments

  1. Hyatt has said business travel isn’t coming back. It has pivoted toward all-inclusives and high-end brands. They have also put an emphasis on independent properties joining soft brands. Meanwhile, Delta seems to think customers with OPM are coming back based on their frequent flyer changes. Both can’t be right. I don’t know anyone in sales or business development who is traveling like before the pandemic. The days of someone flying cross-country to take a client out to dinner are over, at least once the client is signed and on the books.

  2. Another Airbnb tenant not paying. The housing crisis will only get worse if the government doesn’t solve this type of abuse and people quit renting out their property.

  3. Unite Here 11 organized the homless-in-hotel-rooms ballot initiative as part of their strike. It was designed to add leverage in negotiations. The ballot initiative process in California is terribly broken. The most common use of it is to threaten lawmakers that if they don’t agree to something that the proponents want they will use the ballot initiative. Then the only remaining proposed initiatives are the looniest and we ask a short-term focused public to make a decision. The worst laws in California have been passed through the ballot initiative process.

  4. There are a ton of jobs that do not require going back to the office and I’m not saying that because it benefits me, it doesn’t since my job usually requires me in the office due to sensitive work.

    There are a lot of managers that freak out about employees goofing off at home but goof offs always find ways to avoid work and if you are a manager and can’t figure out who is working and who isn’t then you should not be a manager.

    This might be stretching it but I was watching an employee at chick fila taking orders on a tablet and I was thinking you could almost do that from home via a cellular or internet connection.

  5. Once so many persons realized how much they can get done from remote or hybrid work arrangements, many such people have tended to not want to go back to the pre-pandemic practices of being all in-office. Also, at least partial hybrid work has long been the norm for many a senior exec at major companies — but now more are into the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” in this regard. This has implications for business travel and also leisure travel habits.

  6. The pilot 1500 hr rule is only an interesting side-note to the housing debacle that is Seattle. That house is in a historically-sketch part of Seattle.

    Seattle is very liberal, and post-Floyd and pandemic they passes many extreme anti-landlord laws that make cases like this not uncommon. Small landlords are being crushed, with eviction nightmares like this, and as a result 10s of thousands of rental units are leaving the market.

    There are even left-wing ‘protestor’ and ‘housing outreach’ groups that are coaching prospective tenants on how to exploit all the extreme tenant protection laws.

  7. @rich

    Most of them fast food places in Europe have large touch screens where you input they order yourself – so already eliminating a working position in there process…

  9. The two ladies at the AA Fort Lauderdale Ticket Office were simply amazing every day. AAngels!

    So sad to see it close, but times are changing.

    I dropped off some goodies for them last week to thank them and wish them well.

  10. As the advantages of remote and hybrid work arrangements became apparent to a significant number of individuals, many of them have expressed a reluctance to return to the pre-pandemic norm of exclusively in-office work. This sentiment extends not only to employees but also to senior executives at major corporations who have traditionally practiced some form of hybrid work. Now, there’s a growing consensus that what works for top management should also apply to the broader workforce. This shift in perspective carries important implications for both business travel and leisure travel patterns.

  11. I regret the closing of airline CTO’s (City Ticketing Offices). Back when Cathay would release first class space to partners for awards within a week of departure I would visit the Bangkok CTO to get seat assignments when the online system didn’t work. Much, much earlier in my youthful travel agent days I would often visit the Pan Am CTO in Coral Gables for all kinds of in-person help. They were a great resource. So sad to see them go.

  12. Toronto airport’s carousel issues have nothing to do with United.so why you are highlighting this and inferring it as a United problem is mystifying. Do better…

  13. SuperFlyBoy,

    Some of the fast food places at ORD have those self-service touchscreen ordering points also like we have seen in Europe. From what I see here in the US, it seems like they are becoming more and more common in the US too at fast food chains. The accompanying reality of such changes is that the speed of serving customers only initially was sped up by such tech uptake. But then these employers tend to hold back on hiring or cut back on labor hours and we ended up with longer wait times and more service mess-ups taking longer to fix for customers.

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