Category Archives for Airlines.
United is holding an event on Tuesday with Boeing at the aircraft manufacturer’s facility in South Carolina. They are expected to announce a major order for Boeing 787 long haul aircraft.
These new planes will come with the same economy and premium economy seats United currently uses on their Boeing 787-10 aircraft, however business class with be a new seat – ‘next generation Polaris’ – which offers suites with doors.
Etihad Airways parked its 10 Airbus A380s during the pandemic, and its CEO said they’d likely never fly again. That’s sad because their best passenger experience was on this aircraft. Indeed, many airlines had their best seats and amenities on the world’s largest passenger jet.
Despite appearing that the planes would never comes back the airline has announced their return, and the Etihad A380 features some of the best seats in the world.
We’re entering another Covid wave. Peak will probably come in mid-January. In the meantime there’s a lot more Covid in the U.S. We can see that in case numbers, but most cases go undetected. Perhaps the best data source is wastewater measures. Flu and RSV are rising at the same time!
There’s been a lack of clarity for years over whether customer experience matters, or just operational metrics, and whether American is trying to be a premium carrier or a Spirit and Frontier competitor.
So I’m not surprised to see an internal memo going out to flight attendants telling them not to worry about missing catering, customers just want to depart exactly on time and that crew does passengers a disservice when they ensure long flights have food on board.
It wasn’t surprising to see Kirby personally go down to meet picketing pilots during the airline’s board meeting in Houston. And it was a terrible look to see those pilots turn their backs on the CEO. And then for the union to brag about it!
Alaska Airlines and El Al announced a partnership three years ago. It’s taken until this week to introduce award redemption. You can now earn and redeem Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles for travel on El Al.
I still see Flying Blue as the most useful SkyTeam program, with better award availability on Air France and KLM for their own members than is offered to partners and mostly reasonable pricing when saver inventory is available. The addition of free stopovers on one way awards is great, and modest pricing and region adjustments are things most will be able to live with.
British Airways has introduced a ‘Reward Flight Saver’ option for long haul premium cabin travel that – as long as you’ve earned at least 1 Avios in the last 12 months – lets you pay more miles for substantially reduced surcharges.
Southwest Airlines is offering a 25% discount on tickets booked by December 7 for travel December 24-25 and December 31, 2022 and January 1, 2023. These are the Saturdays and Sundays of holiday weekend, and generally less-traveled days since many people will be taking off on Friday and Monday. Use promotion code HOLIDAY25 to get the discount. You’ll see a ‘strike-through’ of the original fare on eligible flights. Not all flights will have discountable inventory. Two key points: Since Southwest awards can be cancelled with points redeposited with no fee, you can make speculative redemption bookings to take advantage of this offer. If you have existing tickets you want to reprice, check the new price and then cancel/rebook. Seeing Southwest make a move to try to fill seats this late in the game suggests that…
There’s a debate, mostly in Europe, over whether to ban frequent flyer programs for the environment because: flying contributes to carbon emissions, frequent flyer programs encourage flying, and it’s inequitable that some people get to fly and destroy the environment while others don’t.
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 »
