Category Archives for Airlines.
Elite frequent flyers in each airline’s program have benefits like extra legroom seats, not just the usual priority check-in, baggage and boarding benefits. And for nearly two years upper tier elites have been able to upgrade when traveling on the other airline.
Now, quietly – neither airline has sent out an announcement – the upgrade benefit has been extended to more frequent flyers.
Singapore Airlines frequently makes plenty of award space available towards the end of its booking calendar. If you’re searching 9 or more months in advance you have a good shot at finding a plethora of options, although right now there’s good close-in availability as well.
I want to make a few additional points though.
There’s another way to combine miles and that’s literally to move the points from one account to another. Airlines usually charge a fee for this. But British Airways has cut theirs by 90%.
Southwest Airlines expects the cancellation of 16,700 flights over the holidays to cost them up to $825 million though the exact amount depends on how much passengers seek reimbursement for after having to find other means of travel – and how much Southwest actually approves in claims.
While the Department of Transportation is pressuring Southwest not just to provide the refunds, but also to do so quickly (noting that credit card payments must be refunded within 7 days), the sheer volume of requests is taking time to work through and also invariably means that some passengers get stuck in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
The idea that United Airlines could convert 175 domestic aircraft in 2023 seems unbelievable at first, considering they haven’t completed changes to prototype aircraft yet. However this is a scaled back ambition from 200 planes, and it’s not a notional number but one that’s tied to a real plan. It could still slip, but having over 300 planes including new aircraft with the new interior in service this year is a real possibility.
The FAA’s NOTAM system, which alerts about procedures and risks in flight, went down and the failure has led to hours-long delays and possible flight cancellations even as the air travel delay begins.
Several hundred delays have already been logged domestically before 6 a.m. Eastern. The FAA reports that “Technicians are currently working to restore the system,” but had no further comment beyond what was listed on their website.
Qatar has one of the best business class product in the world in its ‘QSuites’ that offer doors and movable partitions that allow two and even four passengers to travel together in their own space.
Right now there’s fantastic award availability at the end of the booking window. You can use this for travel from the U.S. to Doha and beyond to the Mideast, India, the Maldives and even to Africa.
The World Health Organization is recommending that countries re-institute masking on long haul flights, tying the policy to the XBB.1.5 subvariant of Covid-19 and should apply to “passengers arriving from anywhere where there is widespread COVID-19 transmission”.
WHO does not, however, indiscriminately recommend pre-departure testing for Covid-19.
Once you’re on the bus you can usually be confident that you’ll at least make the plane. I’ve never seen passengers miss a flight once on the bus.
Yet somehow Indian low cost carrier Go First boarded passengers on a 1058 mile flight from Bangalore to Delhi onto a bus and then forgot them. Reportedly 55 passengers were left behind. Four buses were used for the flight, but only three bus loads of passengers actually made it into the cabin.
Dubbed United NEXT, the fleet plan was ambitious and positioned the airline as a more premium airline. And then… nothing happened. A year and a half passed and they didn’t actually do any of the retrofitting of their existing planes to offer more premium seats, seat back TV with bluetooth, and fast internet as they’d promised. There was hand waving about supply chain.
That’s finally changing.
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 »
