Category Archives for Airlines.
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.
Last year American Airlines CEO Doug Parker explained in detail why his airline would never provide the flexibility that Southwest does. He called Southwest “the cattle car” and said Southwest doesn’t “have a lot of business customers on their airplanes.”
That certainly hasn’t been my experience.
At this morning’s American Airlines shareholders meeting CEO Doug Parker claimed “there’s no doubt our customers have noticed the improvement that’s been made to the inflight product.”
American Airlines is reportedly spending $1 billion on their new corporate campus and that’s apparently up from a previously-reported $350 million. It’s possible that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. American has been tight-lipped about the project’s costs. However it fairly clearly represents a project that’s grown substantially more expensive.
Just keep that number in mind for a moment as we walk through the economics of American’s decision not to offer seat back entertainment for domestic passengers, instead streaming content to passenger phones.
In the movie Up in the Air Sam Elliott plays the chief pilot at American Airlines. He appears in their advertising, and meets customers on board when they hit ten million frequent flyer miles. My own lifetime counter at AAdvantage is only rounding towards 4 million, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t really happen in real life. One way to see the chief pilot, though, is to retire after a career flying for American.
On May 26, Captain Fred Swaffer flew his last flight for American after 33 years with the airline.
There are several amazing fares for coach roundtrip travel between the US and Europe starting at just $224.
American airlines has cut back on their special meals. Three of the meal choices – asian vegetarian, hindu, and muslim – are actually the same thing, diabetic meals now get chicken instead of beef, and five of their special meals now “receive standardized and frozen pre-prepared” entrees with a “one year frozen shelf life.” Yum!
But if one year shelf life is supposed to be the cutoff, how come a reader was served a vegetarian meal made in February 2018?
Flight cancellations happen and are unfortunate. The story here is Delta subtweeting American by taking care of the another airline’s passengers, outside of the interline arrangement that lets one airline put their distressed passengers on the other carrier.
This past Saturday, Air Italy’s flight IG938 from San Francisco to Milan went mechanical. American Airlines had the part Air Italy needed, but they wouldn’t sell it. The scheduled 7:10 p.m. flight didn’t actually depart until early Monday morning,
American says they needed the part themselves, and an airline has to be “an approved carrier and have a partnership with us to borrow parts, and we don’t have a partnership with Air Italy.” In other words precisely because American is in a spat with Air Italy they won’t list the airline as an approved partner, and won’t lend parts.
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 »
