Alaska’s San Francisco lounge is back in Priority Pass, but access now comes with a mandatory $15 co-pay on top of your visit. The fee is annoying, but the bigger signal may be what it says about Alaska’s shrinking presence at SFO: the airline now has enough spare lounge capacity to start selling access again.
A monkey strolls right up to a hotel buffet in Playa del Carmen, grabs breakfast, and leaves like it owns the place. Also Air Canada and United’s reciprocal free wifi, American’s “temporary” Heathrow catering upgrade, and the FAA accusing American of letting flight attendants return after positive drug and alcohol tests.
A Frontier pilot taxiing out of LAX says two trucks suddenly cut in front of his Airbus A321neo so fast that the crew had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting them. The FAA is now investigating the airside vehicle incursion, which the pilot described to controllers as the closest call he has ever seen.
Turkish Airlines has abruptly replaced both its chairman and CEO despite strong financial results and no public scandal, framing the exits as retirements while offering little real explanation. The succession appears to have been arranged at a high political level, but the choice of an insider commercial CEO and finance-focused chair also suggests continuity in airlinr strategy.
American Airlines is not just raising bag fees. Basic economy fares matter to elites because business travelers are also leisure travelers, and they’re also stripping away some of the most important status benefits on these fares.
Chase has brought back a 100,000-point bonus on the Ink Business Preferred, giving small-business owners and those of you with a side hustle one of the strongest bank card offers available right now. The card’s $95 annual fee is low for a bonus this large, and the points can be transferred to valuable airline and hotel partners like Hyatt, United, Air France KLM, British Airways, and Singapore Airlines.
Delta and JetBlue have quietly begun charging passengers to check bags curbside at some airports, turning what used to be a convenience into yet another fee. The change looks small at $3.50, but it is part of a bigger shift: outsourcing a once-premium service, lowering labor costs, and monetizing the airport curb instead of treating it as part of the ticket.
United mechanics say their own union let United turn a contract wage-reset formula into a black box, leaving employees short of raises that were supposed to keep them ahead of peers at American and Delta. A judge just threw out most of the case, but the ruling still leaves mechanics one narrow path to challenge the pay process through a grievance on their own.
Airlines keep pointing to higher fuel costs when they raise bag fees, and that is rhetorically powerful because passengers understandably expect lower costs to mean lower prices. But that is not how airline pricing really works: fees are one tool carriers use to manage total revenue, and they have no reason to promise those fees will fall just because one input cost does.
A passenger boarded a flight with a boarding pass for seat 27E, only to discover that there was no 27E on the aircraft at all. The most likely explanation is a last-minute aircraft swap that changed the seat map without giving the traveler a new boarding pass.
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 »
