Category Archives for Airlines.
United Airlines President Scott Kirby believes airfares should be 100% higher. He hasn’t been able to get there, but thinks there must be room in the prices they charge to access United Clubs.
Three years ago after raising lounge membership price, United said they hadn’t increased prices enough. Since people were “still buying” at the $550 general member price point, the airline believed it hadn’t “hit the sweet spot yet.”
On Sunday, June 16 an ALK Airlines flight VBB-7205 from Pristina in Kosovo to Basel Mulhouse near the shared border point of France, Germany, and Switzerland provided even greater flight than promised when passengers booked their itinerary.
Video filmed by a passenger shows a flight attendant “flying up toward the ceiling of the aircraft, along with the drink cart, which spills over several passengers. One of the soaked travelers can also be seen praying immediately after the cart comes crashing down.”
I’ve had several readers as me about the disappearance of all international saver award availability from American Airlines flights. This happened sometime between Friday evening and Saturday morning.
This appears to be across all routes, at least every single route that I’ve tried. It isn’t my usual complaint about lack of premium cabin inventory through end of schedule. Here I’m talking about even coach.
Online travel agency websites complain that Google is delivering travel results directly to customers instead of sending people to their websites where they can collect a toll (commission) on the transaction. And they want the government to step in and force Google to deliver customers to them.
I say that online travel agency websites should be better, should add value to customers, so that customers will want and prefer the service that they’re providing.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
American Airlines is running all of its Europe and deep South America flights from New York JFK with Boeing 777s. That’s too much capacity even for a joint venture partner’s hub like Madrid (Iberia). They really ought to be basing some smaller aircraft, like Boeing 787s, out of New York and serving more destinations profitably.
During peak summer months and during fall and winter holidays there’s often fare compression, business class tickets go down in price (especially for restricted fares that leisure flyers can buy) while coach gets more expensive. We’re certainly seeing that on American’s New York JFK – Madrid route, where they’re discounting business class. For about the same money you can also fly their partner Iberia’s business class non-stop as well.
A little over a month ago we learned that Korean Air would be dropping first class from many of its routes.
While Korean Air’s first class lags in quality behind many other Asian carriers, I’ve especially liked that I could fly to Asia in first class and connect onward in first class as well because much of their intra-Asia route network offered a first class cabin.
The viral video of an American Airlines employee yelling at one of their mechanics turns out to be from back in November.
This not safe for work video is a snippet of a supervisor yelling at a mechanic over writing up items on an aircraft and then not fixing them, because the mechanic’s shift was apparently over. I didn’t cover the video when it was making the rounds at the beginning of the week because there just wasn’t enough context around it. Now we know the story.
On Monday I wrote about an incident of American Airlines serving 16 month old food on a Dallas Fort-Worth – London flight. That’s, apparently, within the industry norm. United says they’ll serve food up to 6 months after it’s been frozen. Delta says they don’t usually have food sitting this long but it can be up to 12 months.
A simple set of recommendations, all within reach and none unprecedented, could make American Airlines not just the largest in the U.S. but also the best: improve the operation, improve the domestic premium product, offer reasonable award availability to sustain the driver of the airline’s profitability and compete in the most important markets.
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 »
