American Airlines believes that investing in product, while necessary to keep up, won’t be a sustainable advantage. All airlines can buy the same products. So the real competitive advantage has to be culture.
The airline does a weekly podcast for employees. This week’s episode is about the airline’s Elevate Training.
When United delayed several flights overnight this week at Chicago O’Hare, passengers took to cots provided by the airport. But airport security rousted them all at 4 a.m. adding true insult to injury.
Austin’s airport is adding 37% more gates next year, and Delta is preparing to make it a focus city complete with SkyClub with outdoor deck.
Focus city status isn’t official for Austin yet, but as of Friday it is for Raleigh-Durham which serves the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where Delta is already the largest airline (carrying one-third of passengers, with 10% connecting connecting traffic). Delta’s other focus cities are Cincinnati and Boston (of course Cincinnati used to be a hub).
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.
Hilton has been running double points since May 1. Hilton usually runs double points, for instance they basically ran it all of 2016.
Apparently they’re not ready to launch a new, exciting different promotion right away because instead of ending double points August 31 they’re extending it.
They were both on American Airlines regional flights. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the son of the President, or if you have an unlimited scope and the full resources of the federal government at your disposal to investigate that President. Everyone is brought down to size at Gate 35X. Truly, it is the most humbling aviation experience in the country.
I’ve written before that the previous administration could have closed the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and just moved terrorism suspects to this gate.
Delta sometimes makes decent business class award space available to Europe, generally when prices are at their lowest for paid tickets. Getting to Asia on Delta can be much harder without paying exorbitant mileage costs (e.g. 200,000-plus miles per person in each direction).
However Delta’s partners, especially their Chinese partners China Southern and China Eastern, offer good availability from West Coast gateways.
After each quarterly earnings call American Airlines senior management holds a ‘State of the Airline’ town hall with employees, where employees can ask questions and get answers.
Some of those questions were about American’s decision to become less restrictive (allow full-sized carry on bags) with their basic economy fares, and the mechanics contract (an issue that never seems to get resolved). However there were several items of broader interest to customers or that offered new insights as well,
Aeromexico which is in some sense a vassal of Delta these days doesn’t own their own frequent flyer program in its entirety. Aimia owns nearly 49%.
And following on Air Canada’s public offer to buy Aeroplan, Aeromexico came in with a lowball offer to buy back their stake in the Club Premier program. It was an offer that was already rejected, but included a kicker straight from the Air Canada playbook.
Like Syria, Yemen is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The UAE is generally aligned with the Saudis.
On Thursday Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed to attack the Abu Dhabi airport with drones. They didn’t do major damage, instead they content they demonstrated their ability to fly drones to attack critical UAE infrastructure.
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 »
