Category Archives for Airlines.
One of the best tools in travel years ago was Travelocity Dream Maps. You’d plug in the city you were starting from, and how much you were willing to spend, and it would give you a map of all the places you could go for that amount or less. The tool was decommissioned about a decade ago, but American Airlines has an award map that is similar for miles.
Alaska Airlines is surveying potential changes to their program, including moving to revenue-based earning and offering elite tiers starting at just 5000 qualifying miles.
While programs survey potential changes all of the time, and many of the potential ideas being surveyed never see the light of day, since it’s reasonable to expect to see changes to the program coming as a result of the American and oneworld partnership, changes that Mileage Plan is surveying now become especially interesting.
On March 5, 1980 Trans American flight 209 from Los Angeles made a miraculous landing in Chicago after the pilot Captain Clarence Ovuer and First Officer Roger Murdock suffered incapacitation due to food poisoning during the flight.
One of the flight attendants, Elaine Dickinson, managed to activate the aircraft’s auto pilot while a passenger on the flight, Ted Stryker, took the controls.
American Airlines President Robert Isom first tells a group of employees in Philadelphia that they need to do it all, but when it comes down to it he says run on time.
The aviation world has been rocked by coronavirus, as demand for travel shrinks. Businesses are telling employees not to fly. Discretionary trips are being cancelled. And there’s tremendous uncertainty over the future.
While U.S. airlines have been healthy and better-positioned to handle what is so far a less extreme hit to their business as carriers in China, Hong Kong, and South Korea they’re certainly scrambling to figure out what’s next. United has been proactive communicating with employees, first with a note over the weekend and now with another message outlining drastic steps they’re taking to reduce costs given reductions in revenue.
In making the announcement of the renewed codeshare with Qatar Airways this past week American said that “the issues [of subsidies] had been addressed” between the two airlines. That’s bullocks, the U.S. airlines failed completely in their effort to get meaningful government action against their Gulf rivals.
On Wednesday American Airlines CEO Doug Parker spoke to employees at an internal town hall, a recording of which was shared with View From The Wing. There he explained the carrier’s change of heart.
A 56 year old man flew on Delta from Amsterdam to Atlanta on February 22. He had connected from Milan, Italy. A few days after the flight he showed symptoms of coronavirus. Other passengers on board aren’t being informed.
Airline lobbyists are trying to curtail the power of the Department of Transportation to engage in consumer protection. They want to be regulated just like other industries, with definitions employed by the Federal Trade Commission. But this ignores how other industries are regulated by the states and consumers through the courts, which the airlines are frequently excused from by the Airline Deregulation Act.
Instead of replacing all of their domestic first class meals at once, as they’ve had in the past, American Airlines has been replacing a few items at a time on a rolling basis.
The airline has introduced four new entrees and two salads.
Samoa is requiring all passengers entering the country or transiting through it to undergo medical screening three days prior to travel to the country. The government is also enforcing reductions in international air service.
Meanwhile Micronesia banned travelers from any country where there was a confirmed coronavirus case.
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 »
