For six years I’ve written about the frustration where American Airlines would begin boarding planes prior to scheduled boarding time. That often meant showing up at the gate correctly, finding the aircraft mostly boarded, and not having any overhead bin space left.
Customers don’t like it, flight attendants don’t like it, but a union is telling members that the airline believes they can keep on doing it.
Unfortunately a policy change that accompanies the American Airlines move to single agent boarding for flights that are less than 80% full will make it tougher to get onto an earlier flight or to have options during irregular operations, too.
Agent Assist (automated system) will “auto clear revenue and non-revenue customers on certain domestic mainline flights with load factors below 80% …at D-60.”
To fly from the U.K. to Ireland you need a negative PCR Covid-19 test. One woman, a U.K. health care worker, was denied boarding for her flight from Birmingham to Dublin despite having a negative PCR test.
The government doesn’t accept her test, because it was provided by the government – even though it isn’t one of the tests listed as unacceptable. Fortunately there was a workaround to add an enroute stop and avoid the non-sensical requirement.
The Last Hotel in St Louis abruptly left Hyatt on Monday. Customers with reservations were notified that future award reservations would not be honored. This is not unusual.
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.
Air India flight 105 from Delhi to Newark returned to India early Thursday morning after a bat carcass was spotted in row 8 of business class.
It’s all fun and games until someone pokes their eye out. Southwest has decided to indefinitely delay the return of alcohol service to its flights in light of a recent spate of Spirit Airlines passengers fanning out across other airlines.
On Thursday American Airlines went above and beyond for a group of passengers, requesting a change in runway, swapping gates, and sending a golf cart to make sure that they made their connection in Dallas in order to arrive at a family funeral in time.
It’s hardly the only time this week that American Airlines went to lengths outside of usual procedure for a group of passengers.
With the introduction of the ability for American frequent flyers to earn miles and elite status flying JetBlue, and vice versa I’ve gotten several questions about the relationship centering around taking advantage of both programs at once.
Business travelers are creatures of habit and develop certain preferences. I certainly do. When you’re a Senator running for President you have staff who enforce those preferences, and donors who will pay for them.
The ‘comfort memo’ Bernie Sanders’ staff put together outlining the Senator’s travel requirements when he was running for President has just come out.
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 »
