Category Archives for Airlines.
American Airlines, and in particular current Tempe management, is known in the industry for being ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’
They spend lavishly on aircraft, investing in foreign airlines, and a new corporate headquarters (now supported with $10 billion in taxpayer cash over the last 18 months) while taking short cuts on employee pay and customer experience. And it winds up costing them more money in the long run.
In exchange for $79 billion in direct subsidies from the federal government, airlines agreed not to drop any of the routes they flew before the pandemic without permission from the Department of Transportation.
If a customer goes to the JetBlue website and books a JetBlue flight, they expect the JetBlue product. Having to pay for wifi, getting less legroom, and with no seat back television is going to be jarring. And it risks undermining the brand JetBlue has built.
Legacy US Airways planes were heavily skewed towards lots of economy seats. US Airways didn’t sell a lot of premium seats, and when they did they sold those seats cheaply, which matched both their route network and their inflight product.
When US Airways management took over American Airlines they set out to take business class seats out of planes and add seats to lower cabins. Chief Revenue Officer Vasu Raja suggests this needs to change.
The American Airlines-JetBlue codeshares cover New York and Boston. American’s new New York – Tel Aviv and Athens routes are both served by Delta. Now Delta is retaliating against that new service by adding the same destinations from Boston.
Is Delta doing anything here other than proving that the American Airlines-JetBlue partnership spurs competition in the Northeast?
Vasu Raja is American’s Chief Revenue Officer. He’s risen rapidly in the organization during the pandemic. I love listening to him because he makes bold claims about the world, sometimes not entirely backed by facts or evidence. But he’s never mealy-mouthed in his assessments.
At the start of the pandemic airlines were cancelling flights – and keeping customers’ money. The U.S. Department of Transportation generally forced U.S. airlines to provide refunds, and pursued foreign carriers too.
E.U. consumer protection, generally thought to be stronger than in the U.S., came down on the side of the customer – but couldn’t actually do anything about it. European airlines have been stealing passenger money for 18 months.
Several airlines have notified employees that the federal government will require to be vaccinated with no alternative for regular tests instead. That’s because the Biden administration has decided to treat airlines as federal contractors, and subject to their order that government contractors must have 100% vaccination among employees, rather than companies with 200+ employees under a pending OSHA rule.
If the Biden administration doesn’t blink, pilots are going to have to be vaccinated to fly. They don’t currently even have to wear masks in the cockpit.
While many unvaccinated pilots will get jabbed, and union senior rules mean that the more senior the pilot the harder it is for them to just leave and go fly for someone else, the concern is that the most senior pilots will take retirement. That will also have a cascading effect requiring pilots to get retrained on different equipment, also as a result of union rules.
US Airways used to be the ‘official consolidator of Star Alliance premium class inventory’, a role since taken up by Avianca LifeMiles selling points cheap so members could book awards on partner airlines. They make money selling other airlines’ seats at a discount, but for more than they pay for inventory that would otherwise go unsold.
When US Airways management took over American they brought the mileage sale philosophy to AAdvantage.
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 »
