At the end of May, American Airlines announced the departure of Chief Commercial Officer Vasu Raja, and downgraded earnings projections, as business and managed travel revenue dropped off amidst a cost-cutting campaign that pushed those customers and resellers to move their interactions with the airline online.
He’s still being paid through January and isn’t going to speak too much out of turn. But he’s giving his first interviews since the split.
In a rare move, American Airlines American Airlines diverted a domestic flight to a foreign country and passengers are calling themselves illegal immigrants to the Bahamas.
American Airlines flight 2421 from San Juan to Miami wound up in Nassau on Saturday. Passengers couldn’t leave the terminal. Most weren’t carrying passports. “It’s like The Terminal with Tom Hanks” said one viewer of video on social media.
A Southwest Airlines employee at St. Louis airport has been charged with printing and stealing flight vouchers. For two months last year the customer service agent apparently generated vouchers in customer names – and redeemed them for himself.
He confessed after police found a stack of 119 travel vouchers worth $36,300 in his airport locker.
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.
Fiji Airways, which is becoming a full oneworld member and adopting American’s AAdvantage as its loyalty program, launches non-stop service from Dallas – Fort Worth to Nadi, Fiji on December 10. And like many new flights, it has loaded into the schedule with outstanding award availability. I would pounce on this opportunity quickly.
Sunday morning’s United flight 1116 from Washington Dulles to San Francisco cancelled… after passengers waited around for about 17 hours.
Several issues compounded here – from weather delaying the inbound aircraft, mechanical problems and an aircraft swap, to crew timing out and exceeding their maximum duty hours. Passengers made it onto the Boeing 787 twice and even pushed back from the gate. That’s a miserable travel day that, paradoxically, highlights something that United does really well: communicates with customers throughout.
Even with Delta’s CrowdStrike meltdown in July, it still had better on-time arrivals performance for the month than American. The latter was certainly more impacted by weather, but the results are still striking.
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce had to symbolically take the fall for the tragic decline in reputation and treatment of customers during and coming out of the pandemic. He was retiring anyway so he resigned two months early. This had basically no effect on him or on the airline, but was played as though he was paying a price, and that this was a moment to turn the airline around.
Now the board has ‘cut his pay’ and has ‘done so retroactively’. But it’s just a smokescreen to continue the government protection racket that dragged down the Qantas experience in the first place.
Bank of America across from Amazon’s “HQ2” in Arlington, Virginia was robbed on Monday morning. The getaway plan was unique.
When I’m traveling I almost always try to predict whether my flight will be delayed. That can give me an hours-long head start in getting re-routed, rather than stuck at the airport. I’ll have access to more flight choices, especially if I can leave earlier. And I won’t be fighting with as many passengers over a limited number of seats, since I’ll be ahead of them in grabbing what’s available – and with full planes, that’s often very little.
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 »
