Category Archives for Airlines.
United has a way for everyone to have confidence that travel is safe from the virus – test everyone on the plane before departure – and believes this can open up travel as well as bring back passengers. So they’re offering it free as a trial on several Newark – London flights that customers can choose to book. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Listening to the flight attendants melt down over this, or celebrate in pure joy, is an act of unrivaled schadenfreude. On your next American Airlines flight it may be the cabin crew brawling, rather than passengers in a mask dispute
Jamie Baker, in a research note for J.P. Morgan Chase, points out that if airlines get another ‘payroll support’ bailout they’d have to spend some of that money on extra payroll. In other words it isn’t all money straight into the kitty.
But will it happen? Baker says a new round of subsidies will happen (“We believe PSP 2.0 is a question of when, not if”). And then expect airlines to come back again for a third round.
One way business class between the US and Europe on Air France and KLM has gone from 75,000 to 95,000 miles. Partner one way awards to North Asia are up to 102,500 miles. And Virgin Atlantic business class one ways booked within 3 weeks of departure can run as high as 195,000 miles. That’s insane.
Spanish flag carrier Iberia is owned by British Airways parent company IAG. It’s a member of oneworld, and part of the same transatlantic joint venture as American Airlines. They have a nice business class product, and right now they have amazing business class award availability from several U.S. cities for four passengers for next fall.
Let’s take a look at American’s current lunch and dinner sandwich, enjoyed this past week on a flight from Dallas Fort-Worth to Washington Dulles. The standard offering appears to be a ‘low protein’ meal.
American Airlines still sells first class, and doesn’t discount it based on providing less service. This represents a current first class meal. The man who took this photo fo the current first class meal says “[g]lad I ate before my flight!”
A week ago Delta was briefly the largest airline in the world by scheduled seats. They’ve dropped back down to number three. However the largest airline in the world right now isn’t American Airlines, as they usually claim. It’s actually China Southern Airlines (which is part-owned by American, and also Qatar, though is largely a state-owned enterprise).
These are the top 10 airlines in the world based on their size (scheduled seat capacity) right now:
A black woman wearing a hat deemed offensive was kicked off a Delta flight. Video of the incident is circulating widely in social media. The woman’s hat has ‘the F-word’ on it to highlight the need for police reform.
Apparently a flight attendant asked the woman to remove her hat and she wouldn’t. And that’s when the captain got involved. He’s objecting to the hat she’s wearing, but the bigger problem seems to me that he isn’t wearing a mask.
A Lufthansa Group employee memo outlines plans for their airlines to “go into ‘winter mode’ hibernation” from mid-December through the end of February.
American Airlines Senior Vice President Vasu Raja explained that: “it used to be that 25% of the people that sat on our airplanes were AAdvantage elites… Today that number is about 15%.”
So how many people would make top status under ‘normal’ requirements this year? Raja says “there’s about 1000 customers out there who would qualify for Executive Platinum under our old rules. 40% to 50% of those were not our customer last year, they were [elites with another carrier].”
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 »
