Category Archives for Airlines.
You can earn elite status by traveling with an airline and spending nights in hotel beds. You can get some of the benefits from status with the right credit card. And once you have status with one, many programs will match your status because you look like a valuable customer.
There are shadier ways to get status, too. Sometimes you’ll find status for sale. There are usually two ways that this works.
For the upcoming member year (March 2024 – February 2025) there is no change to the number of Loyalty Points required to earn status, and no change to the number of Loyalty Points required to earn choice benefits.
There are, however, changes to the choice benefits.
American Airlines has announced upcoming changes to the AAdvantage program, and they are (1) most importantly, not big changes and (2) generally positive. That’s not something we’ve come to expect!
JetBlue announced on Monday that CEO Robin Hayes would step down effective February 12, 2024, and will also leave the board at that time. If this were a voluntary transition it would likely be longer. However if misconduct were involved it would likely be immediate.
Hayes, clearly, was a failed CEO – having failed both shareholders and customers.
During inspections following the Alaska Airlines loss of a a decommissioned exit door during flight, United Airlines has found at least 5 Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft with “loose bolts and other parts.”
A kid had their shirt pulled out the missing piece of fuselage, while his mother held onto him. There were lap infants on the plane being held by their parents, while flight attendants assisted with oxygen masks. Luckily there wasn’t anyone seated in the seat beside the inactivated exit door the came off of the plane.
There were two cell phones that flew out of the plane. Here’s one, an iPhone that dropped from more than 16,000 feet and was found on the side of a road. It was in airplane mode and had details of the owner’s checked baggage up on the screen. It had apparently been plugged in to charge, and was yanked off of the charger and out the side of the aircraft.
Following the recent Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 incident, the NTSB determined that the cockpit voice recorder, in place to help review aviation incidents and make flying safer, had already been recorded over. Two hours of recording time isn’t enough when it takes awhile to recover a ‘black box’. But pilot unions say their members’ privacy trumps safety.
Air France does a nice job generally selecting its business class wines. Their customers expect it. But budgets are still constrained in business class, both in the air and on the ground.
So I was shocked when a reader spotted a single bottle of 2011 Chateau Branaire Ducru St. Julien in their Paris Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2E Hall M business lounge. Wow. It turned out to be the last or only bottle they had, and he finished it off for them.
United Airlines’ elite status rules for 2024 see only minor adjustments, with the most notable change being the enhanced role of credit card spending in status qualification, not as extensive as American or Delta. Additionally, United’s response to Delta’s controversial changes includes maintaining its status match offer, leading to a surge in requests following Delta’s initial announcement of more stringent elite status qualifications and lounge access. Now their status match offer is back.
Alaska Airlines quickly completed inspections on at least a quarter of the aircraft, failing to find any issues similar to the 10 week old plane on which “a kid in that row [where the aircraft’s fuselage ruptured] had his shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn’t go with it.” Passengers reportedly had cell phones sucked out of their hands and out of the aircraft as well.
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 »
