Category Archives for Airlines.
Delta Air Lines is a fierce competitor. They play hard ball, whether it’s with politicians, with airlines they’d like to partner with, or with customers. I’ve said before that in a 50-50 deal, Delta takes the hyphen.
At this month’s American Airlines employee question and answer session with senior executives, the airline’s downward spiral in New York came up. The response to this was “We do love New York, I know it doesn’t seem like that with what we’ve done.”
By reducing flying out of New York, American becomes less relevant to New Yorkers and has fewer customers to support the flying that’s left.
The SimplyMiles program actually lets you add any Mastercard and not just AAdvantage co-brand Mastercards as annonced. And that lets you stack additional offers.
There was a medical emergency on board ten hours into China Southern’s Guangzhou – New York JFK flight on Tuesday.
An elderly passenger on board “had a swollen belly and had previously been diagnosed with an enlarged prostate” and a doctor who responded to the crew’s calls for assistance reports that he “was already showing signs of shock and they estimated that there was about a litre of urine trapped in his bladder.”
Yesterday’s Philippine Airlines Los Angeles – Manila flight declared a mayday and returned to the airport with its right engine releasing bursts of flames. The Boeing 777-300 was carrying 342 passengers and 18 crew. It was in its initial climb out when the right engine began surging. It returned to the same runway it had departed from 12 minutes earlier.
American is testing what happens when they eliminate the biggest remaining restriction on Basic Economy fares, the inability to select seats at time of booking.
If American does this they’ll pick up more seat selection revenue, fewer customers will be chased away, but much of the encouragement to buy a more expensive coach fare will be lost. Presumably this test allows American to see which factors are greatest – to see whether Basic Economy is really costing them money as currently conceived.
One of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten over the past couple of months is from American AAdvantage members with tickets for travel on LATAM, wondering whether they’ll be able to credit the flights to their AAdvantage accounts and earn miles. It looks like the ability to do so will continue through September 2020, based on new information about when LATAM will leave the oneworld alliance.
Having a variety of unique questions with free form answers is one solution. In fact, I applaud JetBlue for taking this approach. One of the questions, though, is stirring controversy on social media.
Travelers hate airline fees, whether it’s checked bag fees or change fees, so it’s a great issue for politicians to grandstand on. The FAIR Fees Act is not a serious proposal.
American viewed the Chilean portion of a LATAM joint venture as ‘not a huge piece’ and they wanted to get the agreement done with the carrier across the rest of South America – not matter what story they’re telling now, with Delta poaching the LATAM partnership.
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 »
