Category Archives for Airlines.
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 isn’t known for making business class award seats available on their own flights, so this is notable. And since awards on their primary transatlantic British Airways incur huge fuel surcharges, the ability to fly at the saver level in business class and no fuel surcharges with American AAdvantage miles is notable. You can also use Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles for these flights, of course.
I recently shared the strange story of how Baltimore’s Friendship Airport (“BAL”) became BWI even though that code was already taken by Bewani, Papua New Guinea.
A lot of aviation codes have unique histories. Southwest Airlines couldn’t have SW — that belonged to Seaborn World at the time (it’s now Air Namibia). So they took WN which approximates Western and ultimately works nicely because it can be said to stand for We’re Nuts! Although sadly Southwest no longer serves peanuts.
I’d have been happy to have this meal for dinner at home, constraints of an aircraft galley aside. I cannot remember the last time I said that about a meal on a domestic flight.
It’s a shame that Alaska is scaling back on the quality of its first class hard product as it standardizes its fleet after the the Virgin America merger. However on board catering they’re doing right — more so than my experiences in the past year with American, United, and Delta.
Cho Hyun-ah, Korean Air’s Vice President for inflight services and daughter of the airline’s Chairman, flew New York JFK – Seoul four years ago and had an altercation with a crew member. She was flying first class, and a flight attendant presented her with an unopened bag of macadamia nuts, rather than serving them on a plate.
Ms. Cho scolded the flight attendant, and dressed down the purser. She apparently hit the flight attendant. She ordered the purser off the plane. The aircraft, then 56 feet toward the runway at this point, returned to the gate to offload the purser. The incident delayed departure by 20 minutes. And the world went ‘nuts’. Now she’s back in court on new charges.
Southwest Airlines doesn’t pre-assign seats. Instead it’s “first come, first served” so how early you board the aircraft determines what’s available for you to pick from.
A reader who found themselves with boarding order C11 asked how this is possible — and wondered if they stumbled onto Southwest giving this to them because they’re likely to ‘buy up’ at the gate to A1 – 15 boarding.
One of my most frequent and best uses of American AAdvantage miles over the past 7 years has been booking first class awards on Etihad. I’ve used them to fly to the Maldives four times, to India, to the Gulf region and from the Mideast to Australia to name just a few.
Etihad awards have just become bookable on the American Airlines website. There’s no need to search the space on Etihad’s site if you’re using American Airlines miles, or call to book. That’s brand new.
American Airlines rolled out new uniforms but was met with employee complaints about toxicity and physical effects. Testing couldn’t confirm this, but complaints mounted.
It’s something that’s happened at other airlines before, with large numbers of employees some have reactions to what they’re assigned to wear. However the number of complaints were large, and so American first offered alternatives for employees who believed they were having medical issues with their uniforms, and then began another redesign.
Ever since removing their award charts from public view, Delta has seemed to go out of their way to find more and more ways to stick it to their SkyMiles members like imposing basic economy restrictions on the least expensive awards and eliminating high value upgrade awards.
Now they have a new trick to charge you more miles — and since they don’t tell you how their pricing works you might never even know it and wind up spending more miles than you have to for the same itinerary! Delta now charges more than 50% the roundtrip cost of an award for many international redemptions.
Last week American’s Vice President Planning Vasu Raja told an employee forum, “We chose our way out of Tel Aviv. Arguably we did it too prematurely. We’re not going to be out of Tel Aviv forever.”
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 »
