Category Archives for Airlines.
When your travel plans include a connection, but you miss your connection and you’re forced to spend the night in a city you hadn’t planned, you may expect the airline to provide you with a hotel room for the night. Good luck with that.
I woke up this morning to ConciergeKey status on American Airlines, and several readers did as well. Based on all of these data points it appears to be the result of earning substantial AAdvantage miles from activity other than flying which is new.
Etihad Airways has finally become profitable, disclosing $690 million in adjusted earnings and $296 million in operating profit during the first half of 2022 on operating revenue of $2.29 billion. The state-owned carrier did not disclose net profit.
Despite only limited information, it’s still clearly a huge swing for an airline that lost $2 billion in 2016, and $1.5 billion in 2017 pursuing a strategy of buying stakes in nearly every dumpster fire airline they could get their hands on (but still refusing to take a stake in South African Airways, which even for Etihad at the time was a step too far).
In a move that should make it even easier to buy Southwest Airlines tickets they’ve announced that their credits will never expire. All Southwest Airlines flight credits active starting today – however you’ll see a ‘placeholder’ expiration date of December 31, 2040 with tech updates later in the year eliminating the expiration date and process entirely.
Yesterday Spirit Airlines shareholders rejected an agreement to sell to Frontier with JetBlue offering far more money.
Now Spirit’s board has agreed to sell to JetBlue under the same terms as the New York-based carrier’s last offer – a price 40% higher than Frontier was offering at the time it was made a month ago.
JetBlue wants to buy Spirit for parts – gates, slots (though they’d divest many of those), pilots and planes. And they’re willing to pay $400 million for the chance to get the deal to close in the face of government opposition.
Meanwhile the most likely way to get regulatory approval is to trade the American Airlines joint venture, which the federal government is also opposing. If they can make that deal quickly, they can presumably have Spirit.
On Monday July 25 Delta flight 9923 from New York JFK to Accra, Ghana headed out over the Atlantic and then diverted back due to fuel issues. The flight had already been delayed from the day before, reportedly due to a sick pilot, and was operated as a special extra section.
However the second attempt at the flight took a turn for the worse. A couple of hours out over the Atlantic the captain announced that the Boeing 767 had a fuel issue, and that they would have to return to New York. Emergency crews met the plane on arrival.
The airline, which generally mishandles more bags than competitors, is making process improvements so that bags are more likely to make connections – especially at their Dallas – Fort Worth hub.
Lufthansa is being forced to cancel nearly all of its flights starting on Wednesday as ground crew prepare to strike. The job action is expected to cripple the German flag carrier’s operations at Frankfurt and Munich, lasting through the weekend.
The U.S. government imposes numerous rules to keep commercial airline pilots scarce. This is done under the guise of safety, but the rules don’t actually have anything to do with safety.
The problem is that more available pilots means less leverage for pilots unions, and since union contracts determine who flies which aircraft, which routes, and which schedules – and therefore how much a pilot gets paid – largely based on seniority, a higher retirement age while good for older union members is bad for younger ones.
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 »
