News and notes from around the interweb:
- How the Thai government promoted Pad Thai as a national dish
- The benefits and risks United faces after eliminating award charts.
- American’s app finally notifies you when your flight is boarding. This is apparently tied to the gate reader scanning boarding passes onto the plane.
Love the new boarding push notifications on @AmericanAir! They’ll notify you when your flight begins to board and when the doors will closed. Hopefully this results in more on time flights and less customer mistakes in missing flights. pic.twitter.com/gQRN0lPreW
— Jamie Larounis (@TheForwardCabin) April 28, 2019
- Rental car companies don’t scrub the names of previous devices that connect via bluetooth to their cars. (HT: Brian B.)
Her @Alamo @alamocares….hired a really nice Nissan from your team at #LAX last week. I thought the car was ok…..but the Bluetooth pairing name wasn’t ideal 😱😳🤭 Mentioned it to your team and they were apathetic about it. I would hate for anyone with a young family to see it pic.twitter.com/dOFvOkGyQ5
— Scott Bateman (@jumbo747pilot) April 28, 2019
- Boeing had turned off ‘angle of attack disagree alerts’ on 737 MAX aircraft without telling airlines flying them. So airline manuals were wrong about how the plane operated. (WSJ)
A Southwest spokeswoman said that before the loss of Lion Air Flight 610, the carrier had assumed the alerts “as operable on all MAX aircraft.” Boeing “did not indicate an intentional deactivation,” she said. Today, the reinstated feature offers “an added cross-check on all MAX aircraft,” even though none are flying.
- Southwest’s 737 MAXs.
- Hyatt opening 5 new hotels in Saudi Arabia. For a time there was a shortage of rooms as some had been re-purposed in the country.
The rental car one appears to be the other way around: Someone renamed the car’s Bluetooth name to POS, rather than someone’s phone being named that.
The Benefits and Risks analysis from PDD is very well done. However I think it undervalues the cost hit to United because of the following factors:
(1) More customers will redeem for *A partner awards, which could cost UA real $$ when it has to true up accounts with its partners
(2) Conversely, UA customers may instead decide to use *A partners to book award travel on UA (to the extent those partners offer cheaper awards on UA metal) and thus UA loses out on revenue from UA mileage sales
(3) the value of lost sales from top customers who decide to start booking elsewhere (because they no longer want UA miles) is significant but not calculated.
UA has been way off in the past when forecasting the costs/benefits of new programs (e.g. Basic Economy) so no reason to think they got it right here.