A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
It’s been widely reported that United’s Glasgow – Newark flight had to be cancelled on Saturday morning when two pilots showed up to work intoxicated.
However United’s efforts to inconvenience passengers weren’t limited to two intoxicated pilots, they continued to inconvenience passengers through the decisions they made recovering from the incident as well.
As a result of bad weather Wednesday’s Tel Aviv – Newark flight diverted to Cleveland, which is no longer a United hub.
United is offering non-stop Newark – Paris roundtrips from $257 roundtrip. And it’s not just for a few dates either, but across much of the schedule for about six months.
The last planned strike was called off but London Heathrow workers were planning a strike for this Monday and Tuesday. Now they say Monday’s strike is off. As of now, though, Tuesday’s is still on.
Uzbekistan Airways now has Boeing 787-8s and those have 4.7 tons greater cargo capacity than 767s. They may not be able to carry a full cargo payload when full and servicing long flights, that shouldn’t be an issue for Tashkent – London for instance. It makes sense for the carrier to consolidate operations.
However given Amazon’s penchant for growing its cargo fleet I wonder if listing the planes on Amazon Marketplace might turn out to be a more effective platform.
British Airways settled a class action lawsuit over fuel surcharges. See, these fees had nothing to do with the price of fuel (as required by the Department of Transportation). They awarded cash or miles to a whole bunch of frequent flyers, but continued charging the fees — they just stopped calling them fuel surcharges, and started calling them surcharges. In other words, extra fees that no longer even pretend to have a purpose.
While fuel surcharges aren’t a government tax, they are a tax on frequent flyers, a fee for using miles for free travel (ironic, huh?).
Interesting research from Alexander Luttmann at UC Irvine suggests that slot controls don’t actually reduce delays at congested airports because large airlines at major airports “already internalize congestion” when planning their schedules.
That makes sense. Heavily congested airports take longer to get planes in and out. Flight times are longer. That means flights are more expensive — they take up more aircraft time and airlines have to pay their crews more, too.
While the busiest airports see plenty of flights, their largest airlines don’t just keep adding flights because that’s expensive, both for the new flights and for all of their existing flights which suffer greater delays and ultimately get longer flight times.
While violence has mostly been concentrated at major protest sites, police are using tear gas and there have even been protests at the airport. Protesters are planning to appear outside the gates of Hong Kong Disney on Monday.
Until now most tourist locations have avoided also being hot spots for demonstrations, though there have been protests outside the Intercontinental, and also outside the Peninsula. Some tourists have reported being gassed.
Since Glasgow, Scotland is part of the UK and Brexit hasn’t happened yet, this flight delay should be covered by Regulation 261/2004 entitling passengers to significant cash compensation. Given the distance and that passengers won’t reach their destination within four hours of schedule, they’re clearly entitled to 600 euros cash each (US$677).
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 »
