Category Archives for Airlines.
The inimitable Brian Sumers interviewed the Vice President of the Delta SkyMiles program for Skift and put the question to Prashant Sharma why does Delta charge so many more miles for the best awards than other airlines?
And Sharma’s answer is pretty simple: it’s because they can get away with it, and customers keep earning SkyMiles and signing up for the Delta credit card.
Standbys are being cleared earlier automatically and upgrades are now being cleared earlier by the ‘Agent Assist’ program which was developed to make work at the boarding gate easier, support single agent boarding, and still allow a flight to go off on time.
But with standbys and upgrades happening earlier, more customers are showing up at the gate asking to get on board after most seats have already been given away.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was photographed flying first class on American Airlines Friday enroute to a Pittsburgh event where he campaigned for State Rep. Summer Lee who is running for Congress in Pennsylvania. Sanders was wearing a mask.
There’s an argument for slowing down spread when you’re on the cusp on prophylactics and treatments, or when hospital capacity is overwhelmed. Neither is the case today, so while a test prior to travel reduces the likelihood a given individual is infectious at time of flight it doesn’t have a material affect on the broader public health situation. And we don’t require testing prior to domestic travel, or for large gatherings.
Luggage shipping services haven’t ever really seemed quite ready to go mainstream even though they’ve been around for many years. However a Shark Tank contestant company pitches that you save both time and money shipping with them. Here’s the math, how it works, and the risks involved.
The only positive part of the American Airlines project to cram more seats into its domestic aircraft is that they’ve also added bigger overhead bins – big enough that each passenger should be able to bring one regulation-sized carry on bag onto the plane and stow it in the overhead.
Yet American Airlines still tells agents to make customers gate check bags on planes with these bigger bins.
We’re in a strange place in the pandemic where increasingly people think it is ok to travel while infectious with Covid-19. It is not ok to travel when you are sick and that was true before the pandemic, even though CDC advice used to say that it generally is ok for many people.
“[O]ne in four people who follow a cautious doctor who writes frequently about Covid..think that a known symptomatic Covid case should still go to a terminal and get on a flight.”
Processing standbys earlier does make it possible for customers to get a main cabin seat and then be eligible for an upgrade 40 minutes out. However processing standbys earlier makes it tougher for a customer to run up to the gate, trying to make an earlier flight, and still get on. Non-revenue customers may be cleared onto a flight ahead of paid customers trying to fly earlier.
I’m happy with the tradeoff because when the algorithm decides who gets the seats I shouldn’t need to worry about rogue agents.
This keeps happening at the Mexico City airport, described in the media as “panic over Mexico’s air safety” as Aeromexico flight 762 from Bogota had to abort its landing on Wednesday.
Mexico’s airspace navigation service director resigned over this past weekend’s Volaris incident. The Aeromexico incident seems more common if indeed it’s attributable to a slower than expected moving aircraft, and there don’t seem to be allegations that air traffic control handled the situation improperly.
Lufthansa – Germany’s national airline, the government is its largest shareholder – is continuing to do damage control after an incident where Jews were banned from travel on the carrier. Their first two statements on the issue were so bad they’re now trying to fix things putting their CEO into play.
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 »
