News and notes from around the interweb:
- The top performers making inflight credit card announcements onboard American Airlines flights enjoyed a getaway in Clearwater, Florida. It always amazes me,
- How many flight attendants don’t make the announcements, resenting them, even though it’s only financial upside. Plus it’s now part of American’s internal employee scoring system for crew.
- How many flight attendants make the announcements on super-early and late-flights despite official guidance as to when they should be made like the institutional overhead announcements in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or helicopters plasting Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in ‘Apocalypse Now’.
- How often cabin crew stray off script with superlatives for the card unmoored from reality.
- Delta and Amex “have one P&L, we get our percentage, and they get their percentage” and I’ve heard the new American Airlines – Citi deal described as a joint venture as well.
Aligning incentives for growth is a huge departure from the old way of doing cobrand agreements – nearly a decade ago Scott Kirby said United hadn’t been doing onboard card acquisition because Chase wasn’t paying extra for that, which he noted was dumb because you had a fixed audience of high intent consumers. Of course, aligning financial incentives isn’t enough to overcome bureaucratic inertia and turf challenges and so you still get suboptimal products. It’s not enough for the CEOs to get on the same page.
- Mother’s Day has become the latest hotel cost-cutting excuse. (And they’re squeezing the incomes of those housekeepers, too, plus why is the bar closed?)
- A week ago I wrote that Hotel Scammers Now Know Your Reservation Details — Demand Payment Through Zelle, PayPal Or Venmo
Things are about to get real scary.
I got a WhatsApp message about a hotel reservation I made on https://t.co/OdeYaFmoQ3. They have my correct hotel name, correct dates, correct amount, everything. They ask me to confirm my CC details, without which they'll cancel my res. pic.twitter.com/TSJ0FQl0AV
— Quentin André (@andre_quentin) May 10, 2026
- This incident is going viral again it’s actually three years old.
A woman confronts a man sitting next to her on airplane about his racist text.
by
u/IamASlut_soWhat in
BlackPeopleofReddit - InKind is a pretty valuable restaurant rewards program where you earn rebates, and you can often purchase restaurant credit at a significant discount. Here’s my walkthrough of it and here’s how the economics works.
It looks like they’ve moved from flat 20% back to variable 5% – 25% which I take to be mostly a devaluation, but still highly useful.
- Register by May 31 and earn 5,000 bonus miles per Frontier Airlines roundtrip, up to 20,000 miles, booked and flown by August 31. (HT: Frequent Miler)
Gary writes, “American Airlines Flight Attendants Get Florida Getaway For Credit Card Pitches.” The second prize is TWO Florida Getaways for Credit Card Pitches.
Let me understand. The American Airlines flight attendants get rewarded for annoying passengers (when sleeping, reading, etc.). They should just put up a advertisement sign, if interested ask a flight attendant.
Can we get AA to give them a perk like that for actually cleaning the lavatories during flight? Or at least attempting to clean them? Just a tiny bit of effort.
The Hyatt letter is dated March 9, 2025. It refers to the day after Mother’s Day as May 11th, which matches 2026. I would wholeheartedly endorse this if I thought many of the staff wanted this. But, I suspect Gary is spot on. The hotel just pays for one less day of cleaning.