Category Archives for Airlines.
Effective June 9, American says they will begin to pay attention to cabin appearance (but to achieve this they need planes to have more time on the ground for cleaners to clean). They will care that catering is loaded. They will care that flight attendants follow service standards.
On Wednesday, Air India flight 126 from Chicago O’Hare to Delhi took off at 11:24 a.m. on its 14-hour journey. However, four and a half hours into the flight, the Boeing 777-300ER (registration VT-ALQ) crossed over Greenland as the the 11th out of 12 lavatories clogged and became inoperable. One business class lav still worked. The airline decided to fly the four and a half hours back to Chicago.
There are more seats flying today than there were before the pandemic but flights are still below 2019 levels worldwide, and we’re certainly not back to trend.
The current guidance is that food for sale is only available on “select flights” that are “over 1,300 miles” and not to expect there to be anything left by the time a flight attendant reaches your aisle because “limited quantities are available.” All they even sell is a fruit and cheese plate ($11), roasted almonds ($8) and cool ranch doritos ($5). That’s going to change.
You can only buy tickets in-person at limited hours, but you can’t buy tickets during those hours. That means there’s no real option to buy them in person, which means that booking online isn’t a choice customers are making, and therefore the web booking fee is not optional. Yet Frontier still excludes these charges from their domestic airfare excise tax calculation.
One of the unique benefits of lifetime status at United Airlines is that the designated companion of the million miler inherits their status. This benefit is changing.
I’ve confirmed that American Airlines is moving 20% – 30% of its IT operation to Hyderabad, India. There’s been some exaggeration online, claiming that ‘all’ of IT is moving. And I haven’t been able to substantiate that it reaches fully one-third or 40%, but it is clearly significant.
Choosing to undertake prohibited behavior doesn’t get a free pass simply because the intended audience consists of members of a protected class. And the flight attendant has said that wasn’t true anyway, she was doing the twerk for herself, to ‘celebrate the end of her probationary period’ and because she was bored during a delay.
JetBlue has made no secret of its plans to find suitable partners, and during its third quarter earnings call St. George said “it certainly could be with American” again.
Then during January’s earning’s call, they confirmed they were in talks for a partnership in line with the anti-trust ruling. Now their CEO is speaking out about the benefits.
Crashing the economy is a bad thing! But it’s not equally bad in all ways. In fact there are always some beneficiaries. It just so happens that one of those is likely to be the value of airline miles.
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 »
