Category Archives for Airlines.
On April 1 the President said that “they’re doing tests on airlines – very strong tests – for getting on, getting off.” It’s possible he was referring to taking passenger temperatures rather than administering COVID-19 tests. However even that isn’t happening broadly either.
Frontier doesn’t plan to start. Instead they’re making passengers promise to take their own temperatures and to wash their hands. And they’re asking flight crew to do the same.
Delta Air Lines has instructed flight attendants testing positive for COVID-19 to “refrain from notifying” people they’ve worked with, and not to post to social media about it. Now they say they won’t punish anyone who violates their directive.
Meanwhile American Airlines flight attendants are reportedly resorting to raiding catering carts and emergency kits for masks and gloves.
On January 14 the World Health Organization parroted China that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. The next day the U.S. had its first identified case but we wouldn’t know it for six more days. New York didn’t confirm it had a case until the end of February.
Vaughn Cordle was a United Airlines Boeing 787 pilot, flying out of Beijing several times a month. He noticed an uptick in sick passengers on his flights between China and Washington Dulles as far back as December, including a co-pilot making Beijing roundtrips. He fell ill in mid-January.
Amazon originally built out server capacity to handle the huge order surge for the Christmas holidays, and found that they had spare server capacity the rest of the year – and a huge capability in managing servers. So they expanded into the adjacent space of cloud computing (Amazon Web Services).
They’ve also built out a delivery and logistics shipping capacity to handle their own surges, and that gave them tons of extra capacity. Amazon delivers more of its own packages than other shipping services combined. They delivered over 3.5 billion packages last year, making their own internal shipping business two-thirds the size of UPS.
The lede to a piece in the New York Times on the bungled initial response to the novel coronavirus appears to suggest that the virus was first brought to New York by a Qatar Airways flight. It even further appears to suggest that if only New York had done a better job containing that first case, things would be different today. These claims make little sense.
If airlines are going to receive a bailout, taxpayers should receive some assurance of recovering the funds when times are good. And any deal should be structured to incentivize airlines to get out from under partial nationalization as quickly as possible.
The Treasury Department is asking airlines seeking bailout funds to detail the economics of their frequent flyer programs as one source of collateral.
Elite status is one of the most powerful motivators for frequent customers to stick with a travel brand. When programs extend status outright during this crisis, they’re giving up a tool to encourage business when customers are able to come back. So they’re going to have to reach into a different bag of tricks.
Alaska Airlines is planning to join the oneworld alliance and is scaling its partnership with American Airlines back up. Here’s some inside scoop on why American had been cutting ties with Alaska, and how they changed their mind.
The rejuvenated partnership continues to build even in difficulty times. As of today you can now earn redeemable milesand also elite status miles when crediting flights from one airline to the other airline’s progam.
United today announced that customers can have fees waived for changes to travel through end of the year provided they make their change or cancellation by April 30.
You’re better off waiting for a significant flight change or cancellation and insisting on a refund, and the April 30 deadline should be extended anyway. There doesn’t seem a strong reason to act now.
Israel’s Ministry of Finance turned down El Al’s request for a $350 million government-backed loan. In explaining the decision, the finance ministry said it “did not believe El Al would be able to repay” the money.
El Al has suspended all commercial flights and is operating only cargo and government-sponsored repatriation flights.
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 »
