American Airlines Is Eliminating Flagship First Class – But They’ve Pushed Off The Beginning Of The End To Next Year [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • American’s long haul first class cabin sticks around a bit longer.

  • We should learn more about JetBlue’s plans for domestic first class soon.

  • Air France is moving to Starlink for wifi. That’s by far the best curret inflight connectivity option – not only is it the fastest but also with the lowest latency. JSX was the first carrier to offer it. It’s now being adopted by WestJet, Hawaiian Airlines, airBaltic, Qatar Airways and Zipair as well as United.

  • Without comment:

  • Umm.

  • The new Southwest Airlines uniforms, polos are out, going with more ‘professional’ for a more ‘premium’ airline I guess but I just see “we’re making Southwest just like everyone else” which isn’t a recipe for success.

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. What is the US Air Force, and especially a F-22, doing in Canada? Canada has a perfectly able Air Force. Fake news….Gary.

  4. Southwest made a HUGE mistake by not rolling out a first-class or European-style blocked-middle-seat premium product.

  5. I had the same thought as FNT. It’s an absolutely mind-boggling that Southwest didn’t introduce at least Euro-style business class. As Gary had pointed out, they do already let you book an extra empty seat. Why not let passengers split the cost of this, with no equipment changes necessary? Even Spirit and Frontier were able to do this.

  6. Cabin retros for 800ish planes is spendy and Daddy Elliot is tight with the purse strings. By going the cheap way the cost of re-adding a few rows is less than gutting a proper F (or LUV Seats…or whatever corny moniker they cook up,).

  7. Gary, what about the roll-out of AA’s XLRs? A management-level person at AA had said they would first be deployed on transcon routes. Then, Znotins says TATL. What’s up? And when? Last word was by the end of June 2025 but even that’s hard to believe.

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