Category Archives for Airlines.
Former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz is out with a new book, Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies.
Munoz showed promise for United early on but stumbled. It’s his choice of airline President that is his legacy.
Airlines offer ‘customer service’. You get in a line when you have a problem and they’ll rebook you. That sort of resolution isn’t hospitality – and for high cost airlines that’s costing them profits.
Why are they even training for a middle of the night interrogation inside a hotel with guests sleeping?
Pilots have a lot more sway at airlines than flight attendants. It’s harder to become a pilot, in part because government regulations make doing so time-consuming and costly. That makes it hard to replace pilots. Pilots also have a lot more say over an airline’s operation, so can slow it down dramatically.
Those are important reasons why pilots are paid more. They receive better benefits. And their life on the road often features better hotels, better ground transportation, and higher meal allowances. Is that… fair?
American Airlines has eliminated its ‘saver’ and ‘anytime’ awards. Now when you’re using American’s miles to fly American Airlines, the only option is web special awards, which have been renamed Flight Awards. Nothing else changes at this time, though a number of things flow from this decision.
Most awards were already web specials. There’s a new award chart, but it doesn’t provide very much information. Overall I consider the change negative, but mostly just recognizing past devaluations rather than representing a new devaluation.
American Airlines has eliminated Saver and Anytime awards, and replaced those award charts with a new ‘starting from’ pricing chart for American Airlines flights. There are no changes to partner awards or upgrade awards. And since most American awards were already dynamically-priced web specials, in practice little changes at all.
Here are the full details.
The flight attendant’s vaping is an issue because it’s illegal and subject to fine, not because it’s inherently problematic the way smoking on board would be (exposing other passengers to the smoke).
Most of the time cabin crew are ‘unmonitored’ and while there are procedures, in practice there’s quite a wide latitude for deviation.
If any pandemic precautions were to last it was my hope that actually keeping planes clean would be at the top of the list. At least clear out seat back pockets of trash from the passenger on the flight before you! But with the return to normal has come cleaning cost cuts, too, and prioritizing turning planes quickly during connections rather than cleaning between flights (and, oddly, not doing a proper cleaning job overnight either).
American Airlines will only sell basic economy fares directly, not through traditional or online travel agencies. There are some cheaper fares that they reserve to their own channels as well. But generally speaking there are two sets of fares depending where outside of American Airlines that you book.
Google has just introduced a price guarantee for airline tickets. If you buy a flight they say is at the right price, and the fare drops later, they’ll give you the difference. This should bring more attention to the generally-excellent Google Flights.
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 »
