Category Archives for Airlines.
Mid-year Spirit Airlines announced a big expansion in Miami, an American Airlines hub, becoming the second largest airline there. Traditionally they had stuck with lower-cost Fort Lauderdale.
Now they’re making a run at American’s hub in Philadelphia. They’ve just announced 7 new routes, increased service to another and flights to 20 total destinations. Spirit and Frontier together are the next two largest airlines in Philadelphia after American.
American Airlines announced that Doug Parker will step down as CEO on March 31, 2022. He will remain chairman of the board. Current airline President Robert Isom will become CEO and join the airline’s Board of Directors.
Robert Isom becoming CEO points to a more or less a status quo future. And David Seymour was elevated to Chief Operating Officer at the airline after overseeing its disastrous summer 2019 operational meltdown.
Mandy Moore’s father just flew his last flight as a Captain for American Airlines. After 42 years of flying Captain Don Moore reached age 65 and mandatory retirement for a commercial airline pilot.
How much airfare a mile buys is different than ‘how much a mile is worth’. You can’t spend miles on nearly as many things as cash (and get lower value for things other than travel when you redeem that way). You don’t earn interest on your miles. There’s more devaluation risk with miles.
Here’s a stab at quantifying the discounts that you should consider taking when converting ‘how much airfare do miles buy’ into ‘how much are miles worth’?
Airlines make seats available as awards at the lowest level that they don’t think they can sell for cash. They also want to make sure not to release seats to someone who would pay cash. So you’re getting the leftovers.
That requires flexibility, if you start out saying here’s where I need to go, and here’s the dates I need to travel, and here’s when I need to make my booking.
During the pandemic airlines were gifted billions in taxpayer dollars to keep all of their employees on staff, ready to work when travel returned. Only they didn’t do that. They convinced employees to retire early, and they paid employees to stay home rather than staying certified and work ready.
As they tried to get employees to take unpaid leaves and early retirements, the offers sometimes got better and better. One United Airlines employee, who took an ‘early out’ is suing because United made a better offer than the one they accepted, and they want that better offer too.
Even though you are explicitly searching for “flexible” and are assured you can refund, there’s a $500 charge for that refund. In airline speak it’s refundable but I do think it is deceptive to a layperson.
They’ll use the same reduced criteria for earning status in 2022 that they used for 2021.
George Clooney defined having more than enough money as being able to say ‘no’ when offered $35 million for a day’s work filming a commercial for an airline.
He doesn’t say the airline or when this happened – but it was clearly about six years ago, and either Emirates or Etihad.
If they simply presented “here’s how much airfare your miles can buy right now” this would be an interesting exercise, enlightening even. However it purports to prove more than it does, and in doing so may lead readers astray overvaluing their miles in comparison to money.
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 »
