Category Archives for Airlines.
Unions take political positions their members disagree with all the time. And members should feel free to communicate with their union leadership over those disagreements. It’s fair to proscribe the time, place and manner for those disagreements – but shocking for a union President to secure for the firing of a union member over an internal union matter.
U.S. airlines now require that passengers wear masks in order to fly. They’ve been lobbying the federal government to require it, but it seems like compliance on planes is actually better than average compared to many states where it’s a legal requirement.
Passengers who have medical reasons not to wear a mask are exempt from the requirement. Delta is going a step farther than other airlines (as they often do, for better and worse) requiring passengers who want to claim a medical exemption to have a medical consult prior to travel. If you’re faking, you get your money back.
I’ve been told by more than one person that in an internal call United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told managers that American Airlines is dumping capacity at low fares, and he says that United won’t follow.
United is selling some cheap tickets, but nothing like what I’m seeing from American right now – like $49 roundtrips on major routes.
Sabre is being used by the FBI to track suspects. Put another way, your digital travel footprints are an open book for law enforcement.
The crazy thing? The government doesn’t actually have explicit authority to do this, and so relies on the 1789 All Writs Act.
In previous challenging times airlines cut back on their cleaning, going as long as 18 months between deep cleans. Now despite losing billions of dollars per quarter airlines have stepped up their level of cleaning every day.
That needs to continue. Covid-19 isn’t the only threat to health. People are going to have this experience fresh in their minds. Masks are likely to persist at least for some, even after they’re no longer required inflight. Airlines and hotels are going to need to compete on clean.
Many readers have said consistently throughout the pandemic that they will not travel until there is a vaccine. I think it’s the wrong paradigm for thinking about future travel both because a vaccine won’t be the cure all many people expect and because travel itself seems pretty safe, the issue is what you find at your destination.
We know a lot more about Covid-19 than we did three and four months ago. Much of what we think we know is still speculative. There’s learning which suggests real optimism, even as the virus spreads rapidly through much of the country (especially the southern portion). But the idea that we’re just hanging in for a vaccine, and once we have one everything goes back to normal, no longer holds up as we learn more about what vaccines against the novel coronavirus can do. At the same time it’s one part of a tool kit that will bring life and travel back to what it once was – and taken together likely even get us most of the way there in the first half of 2021.
Florida Senator Rick Scott thinks it is wrong wrong wrong that airlines took payroll support money and are going to turn around and furlough workers – and he wants to meet with airline CEOs to give them a piece of his mind!
Senator, let me save these CEOs the time of meeting with you so they can focus on saving their businesses.
Vietnam, with its borders still closed to the world, actually has more domestic flying scheduled now than they had a year ago. Vietnam is one of the countries that did the best battling COVID-19, despite sharing a land border with China. They haven’t had a single death.
China, too, has brought back substantial flying – and is at nearly 85% of the domestic seat capacity that it was a year ago. That may not be all driven by demand, but by a mandate to keep workers employed and the economy moving even when flights aren’t full.
The U.S. is actually only 11th in bringing back domestic flying capacity.
This new American Airlines-JetBlue partnership paints a path forward for American Airlines to grow and compete in New York, one of the key elements that has been missing from its strategy, including from its co-brand credit card strategy. It has the potential to make American Airlines more relevant to cardmembers in the financially-important New York market, just as the Alaska Airlines partnership can help in the Bay Area and Seattle where tech money is significant. Whether or not this succeeds comes down to execution and whether the partnerships grow to their potential.
Frequent flyers know the feeling of waiting for a ‘battlefield promotion’ at the gate. We have our elite status and upgrade requested, and we’re hovering waiting to see what our chances are.
Now you don’t have to wait until four hours prior to flight to begin refreshing the upgrade list obsessively in the American Airlines mobile app because it now shows your flight’s upgrade list 12 hours prior to departure.
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 »
