Category Archives for Airlines.
Plane Food Simulator 2021 is a free online game where you… try to eat food on a plane.
This isn’t hard because of all the Covid Cutbacks, and your airline just isn’t serving food. You choose your meal type (you can even pick a Japanese meal!) but you have to deal with turbulence and other challenges along the way.
American Airlines said last month that all Admirals Clubs except Honolulu were said to re-open ‘by August’ while Flagship lounges and First Dining would begin with Miami in September.
American now tells me they’ve already re-opened 35 of 40 Admirals Clubs. The five that are still closed will open in August.
All airlines have had long hold times, but Delta’s have generally been the longest. And their website doesn’t do a lot of the things you might need, like handling schedule changes well and erroring out with simple tasks.
Delta’s CEO was asked about what they’re doing to address telephone hold times, and what customers should do for help in the meantime, during the airline’s earnings call.
Even with the acquisition of more (used) Boeing aircraft, this move will make Delta less invested in aircraft from Boeing and its predecessors than before the pandemic since they’ve retired Boeing 777s, MD88s and MD90s.
Hyatt and American Airlines have new offers to fast track towards elite status for current elite members of the other program. Hyatt even gives free temporary status while you work on your challenge. They aren’t super easy, or with American necessarily the best way to achieve status we’ve seen in the market, however.
Last month I covered the passenger lawsuit to overturn the federal transportation mask mandate. Some of the arguments in the suit are legally persuasive, but included a lot of unpersuasive claims as well. I expected that the suit would be made moot by the expiration (and non-renewal) of the mask mandate on September 13, 2021 – before the case gets adjudicated.
However a couple of things have happened since then.
Texas Democratic legislators left the state in order to break quorum during a special legislative session and prevent Republicans from passing new voting legislation. This is the special session that was supposed to pass the bill the legislature ran out of time on when Democrats broke quorum last time.
They took two chartered flights on Monday from Austin to Washington D.C. to “apply pressure to Democrats in the U.S. Senate” to pass federal voting legislation to trump moves by Texas and other states.
United Airlines introduced map-based flight search last year for revenue flights. And the increasingly revenue-based MileagePlus program now has this new feature as well. This allows filtering awards by non-stop vs. connection, dates, one-way vs. roundtrip, along with an “interest filter.”
A doctor and mother, Farah Naz Khan, took a United flight out of Wyoming late in the week that was operated by United’s regional express carrier Mesa.
She was flying first class, and went to the back bathroom to change her baby’s diaper. She used a “scented diaper disposal bag” and placed it into the lavatory trash.
When she returned to her seat, the first class flight attendant “berated [her] for throwing away a poop diaper on the plane” calling it a “biohazard.” He forced her to retrieve the poop-filled diaper. Then, she says, he started harassing her after the flight.
Last summer American Airlines implemented an elegant solution for disinfecting planes. The chemical SurfaceWise2 was approved in Texas and was touted as killing viruses on surfaces for two weeks. There’d be no reason to spray planes as often during the pandemic.
It turns out the stuff may not actually work.
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 »
