Category Archives for Airlines.
My dinner parties could use some new recipes featuring “the ingredients, techniques and flavors of” United Polaris on board dining. Don’t tell my wife, she’s a former professional chef. But shouldn’t we all have a ‘seasonal salad’ in our repertoire that is the same every season?
To be among my favorites an ad needs to be more than clever or visually appealing, it needs to be effective and make sense for the brand that’s doing the advertising.
As we come out of the pandemic, and associated recession or depression, there will be empty seats to fill. While on the way down the first and easiest place to cut spending is marketing, we’ll know there’s business to earn and our economy is beginning to recover when we see airline advertising. That means people are ready to fly, and airlines are ready to compete for this business.
The Administration wanted the CDC to do temperature checks at airports. They refused. U.S. airlines have been lobbying for the government to do these checks – they don’t want the responsibility of doing it themselves, even though that would be better for travelers. Now the TSA is preparing to do it at security checkpoints.
This isn’t going to make air travel safer, and it’s going to make the travel experience worse for a long time to come.
Unsurprisingly with so little demand for air travel airlines are doing their best to get workers to take leaves and early retirements. United has a new offer that includes airline elite status and miles.
Ellen Church was a pilot and a nurse. She sought a pilot job with United Airlines (then Boeing Air Transport) but got nowhere. Then she suggested the airline hire traveling nurses, helping to ease the fear of flying people had so early on in aviation.
She was hired in 1930 as head stewardess and she then hired seven other women on a three month trial basis. They formed the ‘original eight’ of what would become flight attendants.
Vietnam, like Taiwan, is so far one of the great COVID-19 success stories. Despite sharing a border with China they have fewer than 300 confirmed cases and not a single reported coronavirus-related death. And they’re going to some extreme lengths to keep it that way.
A Vietnam Airlines pilot from the U.K. is the most critically ill patient with the virus in the country right now.
Airlines receiving the first tranche of government bailout money are required to continue serving nearly all of the cities they flew to prior to the pandemic. In exchange for billions of dollars to fund payroll, the government required that the nation’s air transport system remain intact.
Despite some exemptions from the Department of Transportation, airlines are getting creating launching new short flights to efficiently meet these obligations at the lowest possible cost. And reportedly that means a new, shortest domestic route from American Airlines.
On Tuesday American Airlines moved operations in San Francisco to the Harvey Milk Terminal, B side of terminal 1. This puts all of American Airlines in one terminal at the airport, instead of having the old US Airways gates a long walk away.
The new ticket counter location is between doors 3 and 4 of the terminal. Their gates are B22 – B27, which despite the move doesn’t give them room for growth. The opening date for the new Admirals Club, across from gate B13, hasn’t yet been announced.
More than 650 of Delta’s planes are parked, but in another sign that airlines believe their future is going to be smaller than their past – at least for the foreseeable future – the airline has decided to retire its fleet of 18 Boeing 777s.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian sent a memo to the airline’s employees about the decision, and the internal document was shared with me by a source.
At American Airlines some of the required hours didn’t get paid during the mid-May pay cycle, and in fact many flight attendants whose scheduled flights were all cancelled received $0 checks. Others who got some pay appear to be missing hours. Many American Airlines employees will have to wait to get paid because the airline’s pay systems weren’t programmed to handle the way they’re currently paying employees.
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 »
