Business travelers are suffering now, without being able to pad their incomes with fraudulent expense reports. The travel industry as a whole is suffering more. Travel agents aren’t selling very much travel.
Hopefully none will resort to the sort of temptation that Cheryl Ethan Travel Services is accused of.
It’s not just passengers refusing to wear personal protection equipment that’s a problem at the airline. It seems another problem is passengers who wear too much. So last week American Airlines sent a memo to its customer care agents on “Prohibited Personal Protection Equipment (PPE).”
On Wednesday American Airlines gave instructions to all of its phone representatives on how to handle complaints related to the airline’s allowing crewmembers to wear Black Lives Matter pins on their uniforms.
This month Delta Air Lines is rolling out anti-microbial bins at security checkpoints in their terminals at Atlanta, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Los Angeles, New York-LaGuardia and New York-JFK.
TSA screening bins have more germs than the monkey in outbreak. Your fellow sick passengers touch the bins, they even put their dirty tissues and handkerchiefs in them before going through the nude-o-scope pockets empty.
On board and inflight is one of the safest indoor environments from a Covid-19 transmission perspective. But that doesn’t mean that travel is safe. Most planes (but not smaller regional jets and turboprops) have HEPA air filtration that’s highly protective.
That doesn’t mean the virus doesn’t spread. Often when this and other viruses are attributed to flights it’s likely spreading at airport security, in the gate area, or on the jet bridge. These are places where passengers congregate closely together and where the air isn’t filtered as well.
Jemima Aladin flew American Airlines out of Miami, and captured a man being brought up to the front lavatory to change his shirt, or else he wouldn’t be able to fly.
Video has been archived. I won’t embed it here, but you can watch if you wish. Language on the shirt is ‘Not Safe For Work From Home’.
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.
United Airlines has just fixed a glitch that allowed anyone to view the name and ticket details of customers who had requested refunds.
Anyone can check refund status online by entering their name and ticket number, but United wasn’t validating that names matched the ticket numbers whose information they displayed.
The federal government submitted false statements in court to defend terminating global entry applications for New Yorkers. Now the government said they just didn’t know what they were talking about when making the claims, rather than intentionally lying.
The real question here is whether’s it’s a bigger problem if the federal government lies to the courts, or if the people responsible for trusted traveler programs do not know what information they’re receiving, or what information they need, in order to determine eligibility?
The popular narrative seems to be that United, Delta, and American ‘eliminating change fees’ hurts Southwest Airlines. Southwest hasn’t had change fees, and this takes away one of Southwest’s advantages.
Other airlines still have their advantages over Southwest, from premium cabins to lounges, but those are the same as before. What’s different in the new environment is a growing cost advantage for Southwest, and most people misunderstand what ‘no change fees’ on United, Delta, and American means anyway.
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 »
