Category Archives for Airlines.
Other airlines will be picking up the slack bringing package holiday goers to Spanish resorts. Customers out money in the short-term likely won’t be rebooking until next season, however. Spain’s response is a complex web of arcane regulation and subsidy.
Moving maps, thousands of movies and TV shows, and systems that let you create playlists and favorites and even keep your favorites from flight to flight using your frequent flyer number, inflight entertainment has come a long way.
As KLM celebrates 100 years they’ve made a ton of material available from their archives. The very first inflight video screens is something I had never seen before.
The best deal in travel has to be the Southwest Airlines Companion Pass.
There’s no question that a rewards card with big initial bonus offer is the easiest and fastest way to earn a Companion Pass (in addition to being really big on its own towards reward travel). However there are other fast ways to earn a Companion Pass even without a Southwest Airlines co-brand credit card. And it’s even more enticing with a new 2000 point bonus offer.
The drive to ban reward travel confuses the average and marginal effect of flying on the environment. Saver award travel has, by definition, the lowest environmental impact of any flying. Airlines make saver inventory available when they’re flying anyway and they believe a seat won’t sell.
We’re a long way from back when United Airlines used to offer men-only flights. This year U.S. airlines started offering new gender options to passengers when booking their tickets.
Do you remember when people felt so attached to an airline brand that they paid more money to spend extra time flying, just to demonstrate enough loyalty for when they’d fly in the coming year? It’s hard to say there hasn’t been something lost.
Last month I reported that American Airlines was still considering whether to allow lifetime club members to keep accessing Admirals Clubs when not flying American or its partners same day.
According to spokesperson Leslie Scott, they’ve made the decision to honor access for lifetime members. She tells me, “We are making an exception for lifetime members, we will not require them to have a same-day ticket on American or partner airline in order to access the Admirals Club.”
While Snopes actually has an entry debunking whether United Airlines has an ‘armed seating and apparel division’ the airline is now coming under fire for doing nothing over a passenger’s t-shirt.
On yesterday’s United flight UA824 from Los Angeles to Boston a passenger was wearing a t-shirt advocating hanging of journalists.
Willie Walsh, the former CEO of British Airways and now head of IAG, parent company of BA, Iberia, Aer Lingus, and Vueling, has gone public that he’d do a better job than current BA CEO Alex Cruz at resolving the airline’s contract dispute with pilots.
Public efforts to throw his handpicked British Airways CEO over the side and lay blame at his feet for the failure to get a deal done aside Alex Cruz doesn’t even outsource a single IT job without Willie Walsh blessing it first.
United Airlines has declared that miles no longer matter at all – a strange position for MileagePlus to take. Distance flown no longer matters for earning miles. Redeeming miles is more revenue-based with the elimination of award charts. And now even qualifying for elite status will be based on spending starting next year.
You can earn status by spending more than before and counting up the number of flights you take, or just based on spending alone. Here are 11 takeaways from this historic change.
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 »
