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.
Best can mean a lot of things. There are pure quality metrics, and we can debate those. But Starwood has done something interesting in coming up with a list of bests as deemed by Starwood Preferred Guest members which is to say that they are the hotels that best satisfy members and meet their needs (which is going to incorporate quality but also convenience of location and price point).
It’s an interesting methodology: What they did is they took the hotels with the highest customer survey ratings (“Guest Experience Index”), the best ratings and reviews on the Starwood website, and the most award nights redeemed. These three categories were evenly weighted, though they removed the properties that had low scores on customer surveys and online reviews, so ultimately removed several frequently redeemed-for hotels.
Back to the Future Day is this coming Wednesday.
In the ‘real world’ US Airways had its last flight on Friday, October 16. But thanks to Twitter, we learn that US Air actually survived as an independent brand at least until October 21, 2015.
Chilean carrier Sky Airlines flight 112 was forced to return to Santiago shortly after takeoff when a panel flew off the Airbus A319’s engine.
A passenger was filming the takeoff. This would have been scarier for me onboard than any other flight I’ve taken.
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.
Things went very smoothly this morning departing Austin the morning that US Airways transitioned to publicly become American Airlines. Computer systems were working, passengers were getting processed, flights were taking off. My own flight pushed back on time and even landed almost 15 minutes early in Phoenix. Not everything went as planned, though…
Agents went through training at various times. One that I spoke to had just done her training, she wanted to be fresh for the cutover. Another who trained in August told me she assumed that she would go to training and that would be it — she was surprised to be emailed her account credentials immediately after, and she had two months to practice.
Today the US Airways brand has been mostly retired for customers. The US Airways frequent flyer program was folded into American AAdvantage back in March. What were once US Airways flights are now American Airlines flights.
For employees though US Airways continues to live on in a very real way. Here are the US Airways systems that still need to be merged over the coming year.
I’m flying to Phoenix and back today to see how well the American Airlines-US Airways integration is going. Today is the first day of the combined operation where there’s no longer US Airways flights, only American flights and American reservations.
I decided to start the day early to see how things looked at the very beginning. And my goal was to fly on a legacy US Airways route, to a US Airways hub city, to get a real feel for how the US Airways side of things (the stuff that’s actually changing) was operating.
Here’s how everything is going as the day opens on the American-US Airways integration.
Delta has increased the price of lounge passes from $50 to $59, but they’ve tucked in another change. Lounge passes are now good for only one visit — you can no longer buy a full day’s worth of visits for that price. So the real comparison is what a single visit pass used to cost, which a year ago was just $25 and then $29.
Oddly if this were about crowding they wouldn’t charge $59, they’d charge $60, since they would want the price to seem more expensive. It’s about maximizing revenue.
Not only does most of the world have better lounges, they don’t charge elites for access at all — and it’s purely an historical accident that lounges come with paid access in the U.S. to begin with.
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.
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 »
