Category Archives for Airlines.
ANA has offered the best award availability during winter. Tokyo Narita is a great place to connect onward in Asia, but winter time is low season for Japan travel. As a result they’ve tended to make first class awards available January through March.
Southwest Airlines flight WN478 from Sacramento to Los Angeles last Wednesday was in the midst of a three and a half hour delay. First a maintenance light forced the aircraft to return to the gate, and later the airline determined they needed to refuel the aircraft.
Flight attendants passed out water to passengers. A passenger “said something [like], ‘They should be passing out vodka because we’ve been waiting so long.'” And that led to an even further delay.
United MileagePlus has had issues booking awards on several Star Alliance partners this year, some of which have been resolved.
A new one that’s arisen is an inability to book Lufthansa first class awards.
United Airlines has launched a marketing partnership with the new Spider-Man: Far From Home movie being released July 2. The airline has a new Spider-Man safety video, will let you redeem miles for movie tickets, and has a new Spider-Man business class amenity kit.
The airline sent me one of their new amenity kits. If you’re really into Spider-Man or the broader Marvel universe you’re going to want one.
Back in September United threatened to pull out of Newark over $20 million in fuel taxes targeted at its operations. They were never going to leave, but made their (perfectly reasonable) point about New Jersey trying to extract revenue from just them.
United has also complained that Newark airport is overcharging them, and the FAA agrees. This past fall the FAA found that the Port Authority of New York New Jersey which manages the airport “routinely diverted airport revenue to non-airport activities.” There’s a law that lets them do this, but the airport appears to be going well beyond it.
Due to mechanical problems with her plane, German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew Iberia business class to the G20 Summit in Argentina in December.
It seems, though, that this wasn’t a one-off and the German government is unable to keep their fleet of military executive planes in the air.
Two months ago American AAdvantage and World of Hyatt announced a new partnership. Registration is now live so that elites in each program can double dip with the other, and fast track elite status is offered too.
In 1984 a California man was tossing his toddler up and down in his living room. The kid loved it, and the father went higher and higher. Until the kid’s head hit the ceiling fan. Which was on. And the man sued the ceiling fan manufacturer for failing to warn him that walking with a child underneath a ceiling fan could be dangerous.
In that vein a Qantas flight attendant is now suing the airline after slipping on air stairs, saying the Australian carrier should have provided training on how to use stairs.
Last summer I found that the worst airline in America, Via Air had an F-rating from the Better Business Bureau and 71% of their TripAdvisor reviews were poor or terrible, compared to 27% for Allegiant, 26% for United and 6% for Southwest.
Now, though, they aren’t just stranding customers. Their cutting flights. And they haven’t even shown up at one airport — and is ducking the airport’s calls and emails trying to find out why.
Qantas needs to position an Airbus A380 to Tokyo for a charter flight and so it’s making at A380 available to frequent flyers for redemption. All seats on the aircraft will be available for saver redemption.
This flight is an interesting frequent flyer concept — and one that’s been done by other airlines before and which will be done by others again.
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 »
