Category Archives for Airlines.
Seventeen thousand Delta Air Lines employees, with an average of 25 years of service, have taken early departure packages according to a new internal memo from the carrier’s CEO Ed Bastian.
Even with this many people leaving the airline, Bastian says it helps them towards their goal of minimizing furloughs – it’s not, it seems, enough to eliminate layoffs.
The airline explains the reason for the promotion as celebrating the current good times. The global pandemic has sapped air travel demand. U.K. quarantine rules have limited travel further. So pop the bubbly by yourself in a socially-distanced way, fly to or through Heathrow if you’re able, 2020 is something to celebrate.
There aren’t that many places open in the airport anyway these days, so in many cases you aren’t missing much more than what’s on sale at Dunkin’ Donuts or Hudson News. But United wants you to know that under no circumstances will they pay for your donut while they make you wait for your next flight.
Airline miles conversion seems like at least a good start, to make it a little bit less taxing for passengers to make the right choice to cancel a trip whenever they are sick (and possibly contagious) without being penalized too harshly for doing so.
Former Spirit Airlines CEO Ban Baldanza walks through what issues are decided solely by management at an airline (in his experience) and what questions rise to the level of discussion by the Board of Directors.
There are clearly things that fall under the board’s purview – mergers, hiring and firing the CEO – and things that clearly don’t like which aircraft to schedule on a given route. But where’s the line?
Via Air had an F-rating from the Better Business Bureau and 71% of TripAdvisor reviews that were poor or terrible (at the time even Allegiant was only 27% negative and Southwest Airlines 6%).
In May 2019 they didn’t show up for an inaugural flight at a new airport and no one knew why. They weren’t returning calls from customers or even the airport.
An executive at another airline who managed a UV cleaning procurement process tells me they evaluated GermFalcon and found it “too fragile,” that it didn’t live up to its claims, and that the actual device is too unwieldly, JetBlue “will never get to use it on turns” the way they’re promoting.
If the passenger who hadn’t traveled to Wuhan did pick up the virus inflight, what’s remarkable is that with 15 people that had been in Wuhan in January ultimately testing positive for the virus only one other person on the aircraft got it. What’s remarkable is the lack of spread, rather than that there’s spread, considering the number of infected persons on board.
United Airlines branded its cleanliness efforts with Clorox. Hilton puts Lysol stickers on hotel room doors after the rooms have been cleaned. Now Delta Air Lines has struck a deal with Lysol as well.
Lysol will provide Delta with disinfectant spray and wipes and “develop new protocols for areas such as lavatories.” They’ll also work on “disinfection procedures at departure gates and in Sky Clubs, and Delta will deploy “care carts” with EPA-approved Lysol disinfection products.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby talked during his airline’s earnings call about the airline expecting to plateau at 50% of last year’s revenue ‘until there’s a vaccine’ and then expecting recovery to come very quickly to the airline business. American Airlines, too, talked about a vaccine for Covid-19 in its earnings call.
I’ve already written about a vaccine not being a silver bullet, that it’s likely not to be 100% effective and not everyone will take it. That means the virus will continue to circulate, people will still get infected. A vaccine may help – but perhaps less than you think – and isn’t the ‘trigger’ for travel everyone hopes.
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 »
