Category Archives for Airlines.
A few months into the pandemic Alaska Airlines started running promotions offering elite qualifying miles for credit card spend. That’s a trick they repeated. And they’ve brought it back for the rest of 2022.
The AAdvantage program has been without a Vice President for several months. Rick Elieson, who took over from Bridget Blaise-Shamai in the huge American Airlines pandemic leadership shuffle, announced his departure has fall. They’ve named a new Vice President in Julie Rath. Julie has been Vice President of Customer Experience and Reservations and becomes Vice President of Customer Experience, Loyalty and Marketing. American has also been without a Vice President of Marketing since Janelle Anderson’s departure. She previously worked at Delta Air Lines and Northwest, where she went to work out of college in 1991. Ms. Rath continues to report to Alison Taylor, Chief Customer Officer who has overseen sales, and whom many have expected to leave after being passed over for incoming CEO Robert Isom’s Senior Leadership Team. Heather Samp, the current Managing Director…
The Biden administration wasn’t quite ready to let the federal transportation mask mandate lapse, out of fear they’d look stupid if Covid-19 cases surged again. But they know the mandate is on its last legs. Every state is eliminating its indoor mask mandates (or has already done so). Even if cloth masks were effective against the Omicron variant, this mandate would do very little on its own.
The federal mask mandate for commercial airlines, airports, trains and buses was set to end March 18. It will be extended through April 18. That one month extension, announced a mere 8 days before the rule would have lapsed, is the shortest extension yet. And, barring unforeseen events, is likely to be the last.
United Airlines imposed a strict vaccine requirement for employees ahead of the federal government pushing large employers and government contractors to do so. And they weren’t liberal about encouraging and approving exemptions the way that some other large airlines were.
The fact that the transportation mask mandate is set to end in nine days and no decision about its future has been announced yet – or even leaked – tells me that the administration has had internal disagreement and uncertainty on what to do with it.
While I anticipated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine I didn’t anticipate that it could play into the decision over whether to extend the federal transportation mask mandate. But the decision is ultimately a political one, and current politics could move up when the mandate gets lifted – no longer having to wait until close to the midterms.
One of the major drawbacks of the ‘low cost carriers’ has been that they didn’t set up the ability to put you on another airline when your flight cancels. However Spirit Airlines and Frontier, which are merging, have been flipping the script. And Frontier may have the best cancelled flight approach of any airline now.
Qatar has one of the best business class product in the world in its ‘QSuites’. These are revolutionary suites with doors and movable partitions that allow two and even four passengers to travel together in their own space. Right now there’s fantastic award availability booking for October through January.
According to internal American Airlines documentation issued to coincide with the official launch of ‘Loyalty Points’ as the new way that frequent flyer tier status is earned, customers will no longer be called elite. Instead “[t]he term “Status” replaces Elite.”
United Airlines has asked the government for authority to fly Washington Dulles – Cape Town, South Africa three times a week using a Boeing 787-9, effective November 17, 2022. They already offer scheduled service from Newark to both Cape Town and Johannesburg. But they may not be allowed to do this.
Lufthansa sees first class as crucial to their brand positioning, but they quite correctly don’t see a market for it on all of their flights. They’ve offered the cabin on more routes than where it made sense because they didn’t want multiple configurations of the same plane, and have wanted the flexibility to deploy an aircraft across different routes.
I wrote three years ago that I expected them to continue offering first class, just with fewer seats, and “could imagine offering just one row of first” on new Boeing 787s and Airbus A350s. The A350 is getting first class, will debut next year, and is expected to be just one row.
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 »
