Category Archives for Airlines.
Air Canada has had a long, hot, miserable summer of flight cancellations, delays, and lost luggage – that puts the dreadful performance of U.S. airlines to shame. And even when their flights do take off, it’s no bed of roses, as one woman found out after being offered nothing to eat on a 10 hour flight except a bottle of water and a napkin.
For the past 9 years Swiss has only made its first class award space available to top elite members of the Miles & More frequent flyer program. So if you have United, Air Canada, Avianca or other Star Alliance miles you’ve been shut out from redeeming for this product.
Delta Air Lines is offering generous business class saver award availability on its New York JFK – Zurich flight in November. Here’s availability for four passengers using 50,000 Virgin Atlantic miles apiece to take this Delta flight.
The American Airlines flight attendants union is reporting that the airline is firing three times as many cabin crew for cause as they would in a normal year. This isn’t a bad thing, for customers or for flight attendants!
To be clear, a route operated by a CR2 is better than a route that doesn’t have air service. And in some cases that’s the relevant margin on which the decision gets made. But that may not be true for every route Air Wisconsin operates for American. It’ll be a downgrade in passenger experience, but still a better passenger experience than a wagon train or horse drawn carriage.
Etihad business class award space has opened wide up. Etihad has business class award space broadly available from New York JFK, Chicago O’Hare, and Washington Dulles to their Abu Dhabi hub. You can use that to get to India, the Maldives, the Mideast or really much of where you’d want to go.
More space is bookable via Air Canada than American AAdvantage or Etihad’s own program at the saver level.
I have offered many focused criticisms of American Airlines over the past several years. I’ve long been of the belief that there is no U.S. airline with more potential to be better than it is today. But in the interest of fairness and balance I wanted to offer 5 reasons to be genuinely excited about American Airlines. They are the airline I fly most, and I’ve been at least an Executive Platinum member of their AAdvantage program for more than a decade.
They’re considering putting doors on their narrowbody lie flat business class seats. And this seat would balance their desire for a top shelf product without taking up a lot of real estate on the plane – they could literally manage to offer less than 35 inches of pitch (distance from the same point on two seats) because of the angling of the seats even as they do just one seat on each side of the aisle since each seat turns into a bed facing outward at an angle from window to the aisle.
The seat would basically back up against the window. That means passengers would all ‘have’ windows but it wouldn’t be easy to look out the window. Instead their back would largely face the window with their feet facing the aisle. Seats would be positioned at an angle in a herringbone pattern. The Collins Aurora seat resembles the Thompson VantageSolo seat which JetBlue uses for their new Mint product.
Boeing is delivering 787s again and American Airlines has 25 of the 787-9 variant originally slated to start entering the fleet in 2023, but delayed. These 787-9s are exciting because American Airlines will debut a new business class seat with doors on this aircraft, and the plane will have more premium seats, and fewer seats overall.
U.S. airlines agreed not to buy back stock until September 30, 2022 as part of their government bailouts during the pandemic. It would have been unseemly to pick taxpayer pockets and immediately turn around and distribute those same funds to shareholders.
Now that the buyback restriction is about to end, unions don’t want airlines to spend money that way, arguing that the funds should go into the operation instead (paying workers more, natch).
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 »
