Category Archives for Airlines.
Weeks ago I reported that American Airlines was working to bring back hot meals to domestic first class over the coming months, replacing cold meal boxes.
The biggest challenge is supply chain, and that it takes time to ramp up this up after not having offered ‘real’ food on most flights for over a year. However we’re starting to see progress along these lines, and more details on what to expect.
The mom of a 3 year old girl named Delta enlisted the help of Delta Air Lines to petition not to call another Covid-19 variant ‘Delta Plus’ – to please move on from Delta.
This new site is a status match concierge service for customers. So far it’s just airlines but in the next few weeks they’ll add hotel programs and eventually cruise lines, casinos, and car rentals (the need here is to get agreements into place).
A lot of airlines would do status matches if they had a formal process for it. Instead customers make unprompted asks to programs and get ignored or rejected. And they have contracts or relationships with several airlines.
I recently wrote about my reasons for not transferring points speculative into Air France KLM’s Flying Blue program – even when there’s a great bonus to do so – I explained that it’s because of their expiration policy.
What I failed to point out is that the official policy isn’t always enforced, in fact I was able to extend my miles by two years without taking a flight or putting a charge on their credit card.
American Airlines has a new unpublished award chart level for flights between the U.S. and China, now charging as much as 490,000 miles one-way for a redemption. This includes American Airlines flights to Hong Kong as well.
American and United are still trying to press elites into service for 2021 revenue, but there’s only so much that can be done because business travel isn’t back and the Delta variant of Covid-19 is slowing down its return. Large companies and corporate travel buyers are going to be more conservative about pushing employees back into the office and ultimately onto the road.
Looking at Saturday data from American Airlines shows just how skewed towards leisure travel the skies are right now. The number of elite frequent flyers traveling is paltry especially at the very top level.
Here’s a rather odd sight from an American Airlines flight out of Georgetown, Guyana: a catering cart filled to the brim with Pizza Hut pizza. That’s not the usual meal service from American.
A group of 50 passengers took KLM from Kyiv, Ukraine to Amsterdam where they were supposed to connected to a Delta flight to New York JFK.
Eighteen of the passengers didn’t make it out of Amsterdam, however, because the girls started eating their own Kosher food against instructions from the crew.
United Airlines announced today that all employees would have to get vaccinated starting in late October.
Now Frontier Airlines announced that all of its employees must be fully vaccinated by October 1. Only not all Frontier employees will actually need to be vaccinated.
United has two new ways to earn elite status for next year. One lets existing elites keep their status for modest spending, while the other gives those who don’t currently have status or have already re-qualified a boost in reaching a higher elite tier.
It’s not quite ‘giving up’ on 2021, but it does make earning status much easier, and still requires more spending than other airlines.
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 »
