Category Archives for Airlines.
Delta is going to start paying flight attendants for time spent boarding aircraft to coincide with moving up boarding time on domestic mainline narrowbody flights by 5 minutes (although the pay increases apply to flight attendants working all flights).
Starting June 2 Delta will begin boarding for domestic narrowbody aircraft 40 minutes prior to departure. And they’ll take off prior to scheduled departure time more often, too.
Delta has made a move that’s going to be a huge hit with employees, and engender jealousy across the industry. Flight attendants are getting a raise, and it’s coming in the form of addressing a real sore spot in compensation. This could keep unionization at bay, while trolling employees of their biggest competitors.
JetBlue’s pilots have formally voted ‘no confidence’ in the airline’s Senior Vice President for System Operations, after miserable flight operations and terrible recovery efforts in recent weeks and months. Here’s what that means.
Singapore Airlines joined Star Alliance 22 years ago. You’d expect that when they look to feed passengers to and from their U.S. flights they’d work hand-in-hand with United. Except that’s not what’s happened over the years.
At an employee question and answer session with executives after the American Airlines earnings call on Thursday, one crewmember asked, “Now that we’re serving alcohol and making food available for purchase in the main cabin, will alcohol be free to customers in Main Cabin Extra again? And also do we plan to expand our food for purchase options?”
In fact, alcohol is already free of charge in coach for passengers seated in Main Cabin Extra as well as Executive Platinum and Concierge Key members. And there are going to be new food options for sale in coach, but this program won’t start until after summer.
After the American Airlines first quarter earnings call on Thursday, employees and executives – led by CEO Robert Isom – gathered for aa discussion of the ‘State of the Airline’. A recording of this event was reviewed by View From The Wing. Here are 7 things that I learned, apart from items that I’ve reported on separately.
Employees have complained for several years about being confused over the kind of product they’re supposed to offer – whether they’re a premium carrier, or an ultra low cost one – and what that means fro the service they’re supposed to deliver to customers.
One of the biggest mistakes American Airlines has made in the past several years is its new domestic product. They crammed more seats into planes, removed seat back entertainment screens, and now passengers board thinking they’re on old aircraft.
Ex-CEO Doug Parker greenlit the Torquemada-style seating program and didn’t even try his airline’s product until it was flying for about six months. It turns out they didn’t even build a mockup of it first to see how it would work for passengers and employees. New CEO Robert Isom has previously described needing to make the best of it, since they’re stuck it with it.
At the start of April I wrote about an offer to earn 465 American AAdvantage miles – and elite status miles – per Uber trip up to 4 times via SimplyMiles. That’s 1,860 elite status miles for taking Uber and charging the trip to a Mastercard registered on the SimplyMiles site by May 31, 2022.
I now see that I have two other Uber offers as well, which I’ve now activated.
The federal transportation mask mandate has been suspended. Voluntary mask wearing varies by region of the country. Flying out of Austin and New Orleans this week perhaps 5% of passengers were wearing masks, perhaps a little bit more but definitely less than 10%.
What I didn’t understand was that a majority of people who were wearing masks were wearing either cloth or medical masks. Those aren’t protecting the person wearing one, and for several reasons it’s more important for many people to protect themselves on planes than before.
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 »
