Category Archives for Airlines.
Right on the heels of that spicy flight attendant telling people they shouldn’t use the lavatory when they first board a plane, a JetBlue flight attendant confronts a passenger demanding to know why they could possibly need to use the lavatory since they’d spent a three hour delay in the terminal. And the crewmember even went so far as to claim airplane toilets don’t flush while the plane is on the ground.
United Airlines has added language to its Contract of Carriage to say that they will not honor mistake fares, but that if you book one and incur non-refundable costs as a result they will reimburse those costs.
The airline also now says that booking flights likely to be delayed, and then complaining about the delays for compensation, is grounds to be banned from the MileagePlus frequent flyer program.
During a meeting with pilots last week, American Airlines Chief Operating Officer David Seymour reviewed the carrier’s recent performance from the holidays and February storms, noting that “[Dallas – Forth Worth airport] does not deal with ice that well.” DFW is known colloquially as ‘Doesn’t Function Wet.’
Kendall Lock, American’s Vice President for Airline Operations Technology, reviewed how the new HEAT system works to choose which flights to delay in order to end up cancelling fewer trips.
This month the number of non-stop commercial flights between the U.S. and China totals 48. That’s not per day, across all airlines. That’s for the entire month, according to schedule data from Cirium Diio Mi.
If you’ve wanted to get value out of SkyMiles you’ve needed to (1) usually fly coach, and (2) luck out with one of their ‘flash sales’ on domestic routes and travel to the Caribbean.
Even coach travel, though, is no longer reasonable even when it’s seats that are likely to go unsold in coach. They’ve started charging over 500,000 miles one way for some economy partner awards to Asia.
United’s seat map tool seeks out available adjacent seats during the booking process. They’ll use this to make more adjacent seats available, even in more costly coach seats, when children under 12 are part of a booking. A full rollout of the capability will happen by next month.
The airline will also allow free flight change without fare difference when adjacent seats aren’t available prior to travel. Their new policy applies even on basic economy fares.
‘Spicy’ flight attendant Cierra Mistt is back, offer more dubious tips. This time it’s about using the bathroom on the plane when you first get onto the aircraft. She thinks it’s a bad idea for two reasons. You’re getting in the way of flight attendants preparing for departure, and because if you’re in the lavatory you’ll mess up the passenger count.
American Airlines has fantastic inflight wifi on most of its planes, but there’s a portion of its fleet that lacks internet entirely and there are many planes where it’s unusable. There was a time when this made sense for technical reasons, because the flights these planes served were usually short, and because passengers weren’t as reliant on what’s become such a basic service.
Ultimately the flight attendant call button is for… calling the attention of a flight attendant. That means, if you need a drink, ask. But understand that they may make you wait, and if you’re on Spirit they may make you pay. They may also make you wait out of spite, because you pressed the call button.
There’s a meme circulating in financial twitter that airline frequent flyer programs are worth more than the market cap of the airline itself, which means the market is assigning negative value to the airline itself. The unstated implication here is that the airline should quit the flying and focus on the core credit card business.
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 »
