News and notes from around the interweb:
- Bank income from credit cards is dropping as rewards expenses rise (HT: Sarah Silbert)
- This week I offered 6 great tips to make holiday travel less stressful. The New York Times carries some of my advice on the subject as well.
Choose your low-fare carrier carefully. A cheaper fare can come with drawbacks, said Gary Leff, co-founder of InsideFlyer.com. Low-fare carriers don’t have as much redundancy in their schedules or the same kind of partner networks as their mainstream counterparts, so a delay or a cancellation could mean being stranded for days rather than hours.
…Beware the short layover. Missing a connection is bad enough, but with planes packed to capacity, finding a seat on a later flight can be a challenge, Mr. Leff warned.
- A customer manifesto on how to make American Airlines great again. There’s much similarity between this piece and my own How to Fix American Airlines and the AAdvantage Program along with personal experience with gate agents improperly managing upgrades because all they’re supposed to care about is closing the aircraft door on time.
The overall sense is that American has moved from being an airline that caters to the needs and convenience of business travelers to one where customers need to modify their behavior for the convenience of American.
If this made American an on-time airline, it might even be understandable, but their focus on “D0” has left them at the very bottom of on-time statistics — in 10th place among US airlines for August and only 0.1% ahead of Spirit.
- Japan Airlines Mileage Bank one-way intra-Japan domestic awards will be going down in price (to half the cost of a roundtrip) effective April 1. (HT: @FFBonuses)
- Some American pilots are looking for their independent union to re-join the larger Air Line Pilots Association after more than 50 years.
- Virgin Australia customers losing access to Air New Zealand lounges, will replace with Singapore lounge access, and also trial paid liquor in their own lounges.
- American Express Plenti has a dining program. Look at how excited these women are to be getting a dollar? And since they have to split it between them, that’s thirty three cents each!
off topic, but do you know how long it takes to get the Ritz Carlton 3 nights free awards to post to your account? I signed up through your link and spent $7k in the first few weeks. My statement closed a few days ago but have yet to see the certificates in my account. Thx
I posted this as a comment to the manifesto’s blog, but it’s worth repeating here:
All of these points are spot-on, but the most egregious is American “forgetting” how to update departure status.
Since it is obvious AA’s management only cares about the bottom-line, the only way for them to get the message is reduced enrollment at Admirals Clubs. After all, why pay ~$500/yr for a membership if you’re forced to sit by the boarding gate anyway?
I just spent $260 at Macy’s online on some things I needed to get & got a whopping 26 Plenti points – I don’t get how that math works – 1 point for every $10 spent??? 26 cents! Luckily, I also used eBates and some other coupons, but c’mon!